From: Miles Fidelman [mailto:mfidelman@civicnet.org] Sent: Friday, March 16, 2001 5:38 AM
On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Patrick Greenwell wrote:
On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, Miles Fidelman wrote:
At some point cooperation has to yield to due process - at least that's the history of society to date. Unless there's a major change to the Internet infrastructure, we need DNS to function reliably, and that requires that the root nameservers behave the way they're supposed to.
I don't see any problem with anything you have said. I think the difficulty comes when I tell you that the root servers I choose to use are operating fine, and you attempt to tell me that I have to use yours.
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.
Two problems; Who does the authorization? ... and US Constitution. There is also the not-so-small problem of global enforcement, of such a draconian measure. I'm not unsympathetic to folks paying for heldesks. But, you're gonna get those calls anyway. You may even be getting them now. Is this any different than lusers asking why their machine doesn't work ... during a blackout? You've been living in the regulated side of the telco business far too long.