[IP] more on worth reading A REPLY FROM Vixie on Neustar to create their own DNS root and own universe to rule
Begin forwarded message:
From: Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 2, 2005 3:08:16 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] worth reading A REPLY FROM Vixie on Neustar to
create their own DNS root and own universe to rule
Reply-To: Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
I read Paul Vixie's note and although I find his goal of universal
free speech laudable I believe that his method, although valid, is
not the best way to achieve the desired goal nor in the best interest
of the community of internet users.
During the last few years we have seen the rise of what I call
internet techno-paternalism: where a few claim that they know what is
best for the many and require that the many forego their own choices
and goals and follow only the path set down by the few.
Have we seen this before? Certainly. On an international level we
are still feeling the repurcussions of an imperial form of
paternalism as practiced during the era of Queen Victora and King
Leopold. And at the technical level we observed the telephone
companies making outragous claims to overrule public choice as
exemplified in the 1954 Hush-A-Phone case.
People naturally form communities. Many times those communities
adopt their own modes of communication, words, and names, even to the
extent of creating new languages - for example Boontling, a language
created specifically to separate "us" (people living in Boonville,
California) from "them". And even among those who speak nominally
the same language, the same word often has very different meanings.
Yet despite the existance of diverse languages and dialects, there
are few who claim that we must have one universal language that we
are all required to use, in order to have the right of free speech.
But the techno-paternalists are making that demand of us on the
internet.
Ideas propagate first through small groups and then through larger
groups. It is possible, even likely, that an internet that allows
communities of users to create their own landscape of internet names
may prove more fertile for the growth and dissemination of ideas than
a sterile, nearly immutable, static single name space.
People do want to communicate - but from where I sit the better
method is to provide the means, the end-to-end principle of the
internet, and let the users make the choice or means either directly
or via their agents (ISPs).
It is my belief that over time the enlightened self interest of
people and groups to reach wider audiences will drive a usable
coherence and consistency among name spaces.
There will be residual inconsistencies, but those that persist will
do so only because the inconvience of the gap won't be significant
enough to drive people to remedy it. In other words, by definition,
it will be a gap of little interest to most users.
That tension between those who demand universality and those who
desire community choice is not to be underestimated - in another
context it was a major element that caused the Catholic church to
split during the Protestant revolution of the 16th century.
But there are other reasons that have not been well considered.
One aspect is that the internet's domain name system is not the grand
unified name space that it has been touted to be. Domain names do
not have temporal stability. The records represented by a domain
name change over time, often very short times as exemplified by
the .gprs proposal in which the meaning of a domain name will change
minute by minute as a mobile phone is moved.
But even in the web and VOIP based worlds, a world in which users
confuse URLs and URI's with domain names, the "target" that a user
reaches when uttering a URL/URI that contains a domain name will
often vary very rapidly.
For example, if you put "http://www.google.com/"; into a web browser
what shows up on the screen is dependent upon the geographic context
of the IP address you are using. Other URL's, such as to blogs and
newspapers, show different content over time and are perhaps affected
by cookies and other ancillary information.
And in the case of SIP/VOIP - what particular phone (or phones) rings
when you "dial" a SIP URI can depend on what target phones registered
with what presence server.
In other words, two people who utter the same domain name at
different times or from different places may, and often do, receive
entirely different results.
Another aspect that has not been well considered is that of the
distinction between multiple roots - which are increasingly being
accepted as benign (although questions such as Steve Bellovin's are
important) as long as there is no more than a trivial degree of
inconsistency.
In other words, it is being increasingly accepted that for DNS the
goal is consistency, not singularity.
However, that does not answer the question of who gets to pick and
chose what top level domains should exist.
To my mind that question is much like the question of what kinds of
products should be on the shelves of supermarkets - it's a choice for
the supermarket owner to make. But if that owner puts too few
choices on his/her shelves then the buying public will go elsewhere.
Consider DNS roots to be supermarkets of names - and consider TLDs to
be brands of products. Because of consumer pressure every viable
root system will carry the same core suite of TLDs, just as every
supermarket sells the same core suite of products. Every store sells
Cambell's tomato soup; every root system will carry .com.
If we consider TLDs as "brands" we begin to see an answer to the
concern that the same TLD name might have different contents:
trademark/servicemark law.
Trade/service mark law exists to provide the consumer of goods and
services with a means to know how to identify and distinguish one
offering from another. Under those laws we give the mark holder the
right to police the mark, to use the force of law to remove goods and
services from the marketplace that do not conform with the
requirements set forth by the mark holder.
In the top level domain name space, if we consider TLDs as brands,
then those who "own" those brands would be able to use the force of
trade/service mark law to take down those who try to establish TLDs
using those same names. I.e. with .com as a brand, Verisign (or
whoever we decide is the "owner") could take down any purported .com
clone.
Trade/service mark helps consumers know that the Tide soap box they
buy from any supermarket is a legitimate instance of that product.
New brands will have to fight for shelf space - new TLDs (like my
own .ewe) might grow into strong brands found in every root or might
remain boutique products found only in few roots (and like many
boutique products, they may disappear due to lack of customers.)
Isn't this kind of choice by consumer selection and expertise of
marketing better than the arbitrary, capricious, slow, and expensive
beauty contests practiced ICANN?
The same well established and broadly honored mechanisms that assure
the identity of goods and services can also serve to assure the
identity (and thus content) of top level domains.
Consequently there is no need to encumber the internet with
technological restrictions and rules that constrain users from the
full exercise of the end-to-end principle - including the
establishment of DNS roots and TLDs.
And there is no need to burden the internet with expensive bodies
that purport to manage internet DNS by smothering exactly that
competition they are tasked to encourage.
--karl--
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