At 06:56 04 05 97 -0500, Karl Denninger wrote:
On Sat, May 03, 1997 at 08:58:39PM -0700, Paul A Vixie wrote:
Then, Karl made the following (intentionally?) misleading public
statements:
Balderdash. They are not misleading Paul. They are completely factual. That you don't LIKE them is irrelavent.
Mislead \Mis*lead"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Misled; p. pr. & vb. n. Misleading.] [AS. misl?dan. See Mis-, and Lead to conduct.] To lead into a wrong way or path; to lead astray; to guide into error; to cause to mistake; to deceive. Notice that nowhere in that definition does it mention the use of anything but facts. Misleading, in fact, is generally interpreted to be using facts to lead someone into thinking something that is not a fact. Which is what you seem to spend most of your time doing, Karl.
That Mr. Vixie's server loads from a.root-servers.net, which is controlled by NSI.
This is true.
Yep.
If NSI makes changes in that zone, Mr. Vixie's server will reflect them.
This is true. What Karl neglected to mention is that if pigs had wings
No argument. It's pretty simple to look at an SOA and figure out where the . zone comes from. they
could fly, and that furthermore, pigs don't have wings, so they don't fly. But if they did have wings they would fly REALLY HIGH.
Karl's entire argument is based on the premise that these pigs _might_ have wings and _might_ fly if they had them. There are laws against pigs sprouting wings in this country, and if said pigs did indeed sprout wings and attempt to fly, the US Government would shoot them out of the sky and make pork chops. Hmm.. I'm hungry now..
What Paul has neglected to mention is that if NSI, tomorrow, decided to honor Image Online Design's .WEB (say, because perhaps they sued NSI to do exactly that, and NSI folded rather than fight) you'd publish Mr. Ambler's .WEB and not the IAHCs.
And the IANA (and/or NSF) would promptly ask the root server operators to change where they retreived the root zone from. Once that was done, they would sue NSI for every penny they had. You see, NSI has a contract with the NSF that explicitly states that NSI gets its orders from the NSF and IANA. If they do something without the NSF's permission, they are in breach of contract (look it up if you don't know the term). I won't even mention what would happen if the NSA or the MILnet decided that US national security would be affected by NSI changing something that is vital to the proper functioning of DNS inside and outside of the military.
A defacto checkmate, as it were.
Yes, the US Government would certainly checkmate NSI. Good point.
Or, if NSI, tomorrow, defined a process and actually executed it, whatever it might be, that new TLDs would go into the so-called "IANA" roots, and those might include a very different view of the world than the IAHCs, or yours for that matter.
NSI can offer whatever zone it wants. The root servers, on the other hand, will always offer what the IANA decides.
The truth is, they're NSI's roots. In fact, the truth is, you've admitted that NSI has actually paid for at least part of the server which you host.
NSI may or may not own the servers. That is totally unrelated to whether or not they own the data contained in those servers, or if it even matters who owns it. If NSI changed the root zone and demanded Mr. Vixie take the changes since they owned the hardware, I'm confident Mr. Vixie would give them the machine back and find another machine to run his root server on.
The further truth is, NSI has asserted that it *OWNS* COM. And since it is the one in charge of the root file, what odds would you care to lay on it ever making an edit (so long as it continues to assert that it owns COM) that removes COM from its control?
Again, if NSI doesn't fulfill its part of the contract, there will be a lot of financial, legal, and other problems for NSI. The rest of the world, however, will see things the IANA's way.
Finally, where do you get the idea that you can tell someone else what to do with their money, when that "someone else" is a private corporation?
It's called a court. If you are unaware of what breach of contract is, perhaps you need to take a few law classes. Stephen