[IP] more on Worth reading Wall Street Journal on fragmentation of the Internet
-----Original Message-----
From: Robert.Shaw@xxxxxxx [mailto:Robert.Shaw@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2006 3:51 AM
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Worth reading Wall Street Journal on fragmentation
of the Internet
Dave,
Fred Baker makes some good points. In that context, it might be
worth recalling how the naming and addressing issue is handled in
what remains the world's largest pervasive global addressing scheme,
the telephone number space (with some 3.4 billion fixed plus mobile
"lines" and still growing rapidly).
There is no centralized, machine-readable, authoritative, top-level
root that is used as a source for all lower-level switching and
routing. Instead, ITU publishes on its web site a list, freely
accessible to anybody, that lists the correspondence between country
names and country code, e.g., Switzerland corresponds to 41. We also
publish a list for global codes (e.g., satellite) which are
equivalent to "generic TLDs" in the DNS. National authorities publish
corresponding information at the national level.
Each individual telephone operator is responsible for either coding
that information (together with routing information) into their switches
or (more commonly) outsourcing that activity to somebody else.
Consistency of the worldwide telephone addressing scheme is ensured by
market forces: competition is such that operators strive to make sure
that their databases are globally consistent, so that anybody can call
anybody anywhere in the world. There is no need for either regulatory
or technical constraints or central control points to force this
consistency.
This lack of forced consistency favors innovation (as internet folks
would say "at the edges"). For example, when 1-800 numbers were
first introduced in the USA, they didn't exist elsewhere, and there was
no international agreement regarding the concept of toll-free lines.
The US introduced the numbers anyway. For many years, they could not be
dialed from outside the USA, because operators had not worked out how to
do international billing for such numbers. So one could say that the
"namespace" was fragmented and there was a inconsistency in the global
dialing plan - e.g., the US 800 space could not be reached from outside
the USA.
However, market pressures eventually solved this problem: operators have
reached agreements regarding billing issues and now, when you dial US 800
numbers (at least from Switzerland), you are informed that the call will
not be toll free, and it is then completed.
So I'd agree fundamentally with Karl Auerbach that many confuse
*consistency*
with *singularity*.
cheers,
RS
--
Robert Shaw <robert.shaw@xxxxxxx>
ITU Internet Strategy and Policy Advisor
Strategy and Policy Unit <http://www.itu.int/spu/>
Google Earth: 46°13'16.78"N 6°8'20.62"E
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