choice - Re: [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: Rusty Hodge <rusty@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 3, 2005 1:54:17 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: choice - Re: [IP] more on worth reading A REPLY FROM Vixie
on Neustar to create their own DNS root and own universe to rule
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.
The problem with this statement is that in many places there aren't
adequate choices. When the 2 dominate supermarket chains replace the
"national brands" with their own house brands, everyone suffers.
Suddenly, I have to go to several stores to buy what I previously
could buy at one. My shopping takes significantly longer, and I end
up paying much more for the same things I used to be able to get at
Safeway.
Take this to the ISP level - the customer can't change easily.
Customers are largely at the whim of their ISP of which root DNS to
use. And even if they select a different DNS server locally, most
ISPs won't let customers run their own mail servers, so your mail
will be handled by the DNS that your ISP chooses.
And worse yet- what happens when alternative roots start serving
different versions of the .com zone?! Will you have to register your
domain with all the approved zone operators of all the root operators?
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.
Do we have time to let the law decide these things? Why make an
opportunity for these kinds of disputes to happen at all?
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