From: Brian E Carpenter
Since the DNS is a hierarchical namespace, and since trees have one
root, if you add "alternate roots", you then discover that you have
to uniquely name them, i.e. insert a new unique root "above"
the various
"alternate roots".
Or to put it another way, if we need several naming
authorities, one for
each "alternate root", we're going to need a naming authority
to uniquely
name those naming authorities.
that's true, but this is not the complete truth.
For example, even if IANA were this "meta-naming autorithy",
they could just issue names "a00001" "a00002" ... in a first-come,
first-served base. Since those labels do not carry any semantic
meaning, this should not be much of an issue. And if people object,
they could just assign "names" in a random order.
The second thing to notice is that at this point every user
could in principle decide *in which order set the search default*
if he does not want to add the meta-root: something like dialing
a national number without the international prefix.
This said, I still think that having multiple roots is a
Bad Thing, because it gives much more hassles than advantages: but
I don't think it is fair to give an answer hiding workable
solutions.
ciao, .mau.