On Sun, 4 May 1997, Paul A Vixie wrote:
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.
I guess that would be up to the IANA. If NSI ignored the IANA's wishes (recall that the IAHC is the result of an IANA plan) and started editing IANA's "." zone without authorization, I would expect the IANA to send mail to the root name server operators saying "please fetch the root zone from somewhere else". This is pretty unlikely -- the current InterNIC contractor knows full well that ".", MIL, GOV, and EDU are owned by others. (I believe that this was the sense of their answer to PGPMedia, too.)
You know, all this talk about the Internet and DNS zones and who owns them has lead me to believe that really, the US government should stay the hell out of it. The US government originally "owned" what used to be ARPAnet... the days of ARPAnet are long gone and I don't see what right the US government has to meddle in any of this. Yes, the NSF funded at one point a lot of things, but that doesn't mean that they somehow have the right to take it back. Heck, the NSF funds a lot of things, but it doesn't mean they own it. Just because the government funds say the FDIC, doesn't mean they own all banks, the same is true with InterNIC. How many people out there really want a government regulated Internet? First it's root zones, then it's dark fiber, pretty soon its the bits and bytes flowing through routers and before you know it, Uncle Sam says you can't swear while on IRC because a minor may be listening. What I'm trying to convey here is that the US government doesn't own the Internet any longer, nor does any other goverment on this planet. The people run it. Now, I agree that if InterNIC was doing a bad job, they should be replaced... but they aren't. Sure, they have their rough weeks, and sometimes it is hard to get ahold of them. Now, 15 years ago, the IANA might have been in the position to delgate such power, but today... the Internet is radically different, and the contract between InterNIC & IANA should be void because the IANA doesn't *OWN* DNS any more. The US government doesn't *OWN* the Internet therefore control over the root zone shouldn't be relinquished to them. So what should happen? We all agree that COM zone is so full that its hard to manage all the disputes over domains and what not. Personally, I believe that InterNIC should still do all registrations and handle all aspects of updating and maintaining databases, but I believe that InterNIC should be regulated by some sort of committee to oversee changes in policy. This committee would be elected or appointed, whatever is in the best interest of the people. I guess my idea differs from most as it doesn't involve much change. The committee would be in power to change what TLDs there were, but not to actually implement them. InterNIC would be the people who implement these new policies, and take care of maintaining them. This sounds like the perfect plan to me. Everyone is happy. InterNIC still has it's business in tact, and the people have their method of deciding what new TLD's, etc should go into effect. Ah well, just an idea. Jordan -- Jordan Mendelson : www.wserv.com/~jordy/ Web Services, Inc. : www.wserv.com