--On Wednesday, July 05, 2017 1:39 AM +0000 John Levine
<johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:
In article <7DCA3DAF1993A2E66915D0DD(_at_)JcK-HP5(_dot_)jck(_dot_)com> you
write:
Having enough of the world get aggravated enough at ICANN (or
some other entity of one's choice) to make general adoption of
an alternate root plausible is another matter and I don't
think we are there, at least yet.
Here in the IETF we are so close to ICANN that we suffer from
sample bias. To the extent the outside world is even aware of
ICANN, they see that .com, .org, .net, and the large ccTLDs
all work, registering in them is straightforward and not too
expensive, and everything else is noise. One advantage of
ICANN's turgid bureaucratic processes is that it makes it
unlikely that they will do anything seriously destructive
because it would be too hard.
Were ICANN be the source of a serious problem (see below), I
think it would be far more likely to be the result of a "can't
say 'no'" failure of those processes that allows something
seriously destructive to occur than the result of an affirmative
decision to do something. I think we've had some near-misses in
that regard, YMMD. Beyond that, I could quibble, but, in the
interest of brevity, won't.
We all know how to run our own roots if that's what we want to
do, but I continue to observe approximately none of us doing
it.
Completely consistent with my earlier comment. I think. or at
least hope, that we all understand the advantages of a single
and unique root (those who don't might want to review RFC 2826).
An alternate root is a tipping-point problem. For one to be
plausible, there would have to be a rather large number of
committed adopters (my guess is that it would take a collection
of significant state actors, but there are other scenarios).
Your making the switch, my making the switch, even every
participant in the IETF making the switch wouldn't amount to
anything.
If one asks the question of what it would take for a collection
of significant state actors to make the move, my guess it that
it would take a crisis event that would either be very
disruptive or get a lot of bad publicity. "Aggravated enough at
ICANN" was shorthand for the most likely collection of sources
of (or blame for) such an event I could think of quickly. I do
not consider that likely. Indeed, I think it is more likely
that assorted IETF work to expand DNS capabilities beyond their
rational limits are more likely to cause serious problems. But
that doesn't seem to be the topic of this thread.
john