Re: Trees have one root

Hey John,

John C Klensin wrote:


Peter,

IMO, a good summary of some of the real issues.   Let me add one
more piece of the story, which I'm surprised you didn't comment
on....


Well, I *was* trying to keep it short, since I've an
undeserved reputation for *long* postings... ;-)

...  Several of us have made, and are making, significant
efforts to get directory-like "above DNS" services in place to
address the clear user need for more and better naming.  Those
efforts have gotten good responses from some parts of the
community.


Hmm, do you have a pointer for this?

But, from others, including (apparently) most of the "alternate
root", "multiple root", and "superroot", crowds, the response is
"more TLDs" or "more root choices, but ICANN is expected to
cooperate and accept whatever names we come up with first", or
things that are semantically indistinguishable from "the only
problem with a single root is that I should be in charge, not
ICANN".  And that leads some of us to start wondering what
species of snake is being used to produce all of that fragrant,
multipurpose, oil.


I was actually making a conscious effort not to get into
this aspect of the debate, since I believe that it's been
too emotionally charged and in such an atmosphere it's too
easy to paint everyone with the same brush. There are
certainly a few folks in the alternative root movement that
I would not want to share a cabin with on a long sea voyage,
but I also like and respect a number of folks who happen to
think multiple roots are an eminently fine idea. Frankly, I
don't have any problem with the concept myself, but I can
justify this to myself now I've concluded that it's an
"apples and hand grenades" issue. I don't want to break the
legacy DNS, I just happen to want to do stuff that the
legacy DNS folks don't want in their root.

I know this idea makes a lot of folks spit coffee all over
their keyboards, but all it really means is that the
fundamentals of DNS are more useful than the basic service
people are using it for right now. So maybe we need to be
talking about extending the protocol, maybe even asking for
a new port number, but in any event I believe it's time the
IETF recognizes that it's time to move beyond what are
really the politics of ICANN and focus on the technical
issues surrounding extending the current technologies to
make them more useful. If we do that without touching the
legacy systems for now, fine but this would imply the need
to set up some alternative roots for experimentation and
proof of concept. Pity that such a notion has become *so*
overloaded with political implications but it's time to look
beyond that, or sit back and tell our users that Google is
as good as it's going to get....  ;-)

                                - peterd


regards,
     john

--On Monday, 29 July, 2002 19:15 -0700 Peter Deutsch
<pdeutsch(_at_)earthlink(_dot_)net> wrote:

g'day,

Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu wrote:


On Mon, 29 Jul 2002 02:11:57 PDT, Einar Stefferud
<Stef(_at_)thor(_dot_)nma(_dot_)com>  said:

ORSC was highly successful in this effort, until ICANN
chose to collide with one of our ORSC pre-existing TLDs,
and the refusal of ICANN (and others such as IETF, IAB and
ISOC) to recognize this


So what you're saying is that if there's no coordination,
there's a problem.
...

Works? Yeah, maybe for some definition of "works", in that
people can give money to more than one entity to get a
string into .COM, but is that really solving the problem
ordinary users actually want solved? Last time I went to get
a new domain name, I was down to either choosing words from
an Old English dictionary (I went with "gydig", which means
I think I'm either "insane, or touched by the Gods" :-) or
explaining to folks "No, that really is a domain name, even
if it doesn't end in .COM". When I read "works" it sort of
reminds me of that old saw about "the operation was a
success, but the patient died".
...
Maybe there really *are* two different debates here. We seem
to be guilty of simultaneously complaining about the threat
inherent in attempts at building multiple roots, while
telling folks to keep their mits off the current root. Now,
this position makes sense only if there's really a single
possible outcome here (keep the current DNS name resolution
functionality with no extensions), but what if what those
other folks are doing really doesn't belong in the current
DNS tree anyways, but is useful to some folks? Shouldn't we
be *encouraging* them to take their work off out of the DNS
tree?

If we agree that the DNS works eminently fine for its
intended purpose, but would be threatened by instability if
we were to allow the sort of
innovation/experimentation/fooling around that some folks
would like to see, then let's pack 'em off to "directory
service land", where people operate additional services to
serve communities of size n, for n less than the whole
Internet. Now, if they did that couldn't we even let them
talk about what hooks might be useful to allow communication
from such services back on planet Internet? This would seem
to bring this debate back to something like "how do we tie
together multiple, sometimes disparate services using a
single communications system"? Hopefully, we can agree that
such a question is in scope for this community, whereas
"when do we get more TLDs" is clearly so far out that it
just makes us tired yelling about it....


-- 

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    Peter Deutsch                       pdeutsch(_at_)gydig(_dot_)com
    Gydig Software


   That's it for now. Remember to read chapter 11 on the
   implications of quantum mechanic theory for time travel
   and be prepared to have been here last week to discuss.

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