At 08:37 AM 3/16/01 -0500, you wrote:
For the Internet to work, at least with currently accepted DNS standards, everyone has to use the same root servers. Otherwise things can rapidly degenerate into chaos. The whole point of law and due process is that a duly authorized somebody has to have the authority to insist that everyone use the same root servers.
That is a nice fantasy statement. Could you cite chapter and verse for this please? The exact references where this "authority" and "due process" actually exists? There are a large number of folk (including ICANN board members) who would like to see it and take part in the "due process". The Internet was designed to work in a chaotic environment and route packets around points of failure. There is no-one who has authority to intervene along a packet's path to it's destination. In fact, it's a federal crime to intervene in that process (US vs. Kashpureff). Even legal wire taps do not interfere with the packet's route. So who has the right to intercept my DNS query and send it to a set of root servers I didn't specify? The only real authority for any root system is the holder of the root password for the master server, and whomever that root password-holder is prepared to trust for authorative information. Each member of the Internet community may make up their own on which root to use. That is confirmed in RFC 2826. So I ask you, again, where is this fictional authority that absolutely mandates your compliance to a non-voluntary root server? Because whoever it is, by your blind acceptance, also has absolute control of your rights to language and speech within the DNS, and you totally forfeit your First Amendment rights (in the US anyway) to that authority. Best Regards, Simon Higgs -- It's a feature not a bug...