On Tue, 13 Mar 2001 11:29:23 PST, Patrick Greenwell said:
To be clear I am not arguing the merits of any of these particular efforts, but simply that they exist, are operational, and as of yet the "Internet" has not come crashing down upon anyones head.
Yes, and I can run an SMTP server that requires all input to be ROT13 encrypted, and it won't bring down the Internet. If 2-3% of the sites ran such SMTP servers, it wouldn't bring down the internet. If however, half the servers were ROT13 and half weren't, and the two did not interoperate, things WOULD start failing. Think this through - a foobar.com address is useful and desirable precisely because everybody agrees what it means. If your ISP uses a different root DNS than mine does, and as a result foobar.tvshow goes to one site for you, and someplace else for me, what have we won? Are we going to have to go back to %hacking domain names, such as: foobar.tvshow%ORSC, foobar.tvshow%MSN, foobar.tvshow%AOL, foobar.tvshow%ICANN, foobar.tvshow%pacificroot, foobar.tvshow%new.net, foobar.tvshow%name.space and so on?
Were you not aware of the existence of one or more such organizations when the IAB formulated this document?
I am *not* privy to IAB deliberations, but I'm fairly sure that they were painfully aware of their existence - the IAB doesn't issue documents in a vacuum. RFC2826 was issued because the IAB was aware if their existence. I fail to see how RFC2826 is in any way "political". Upon careful re-reading it boils down to: If you use one root, everybody agrees what things look like. If you use multiple roots, what people will see depends on which root they ask. How is this political? -- Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech