In message <20010318204704.40B8D8C@proven.weird.com>, Greg A. Woods writes:

[ On Sunday, March 18, 2001 at 14:23:26 (-0500), Miles Fidelman wrote: ]

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Subject: Re: Multiple Roots are "a good thing" - Karl Auerbach

I would suggest that telephone books/directories are not an appropriate analogy. Rather, DNS is a lot closer to the internal plumbing of the net - more akin to Signalling System #7. I'd guess that for 95% or more of phone calls, the caller already knows the numeric phone number in question - while for the Internet, very few people give their email addresses as mfidelman@207.226.172.79 or http://207.226.172.79. Telephone directories are optional in most cases, DNS is not.

You are absolutely correct. :-)

Telephone directories are most definitely *not* like the DNS. A domain name is more like a telephone number itself, and as you say the IP numbers are more like the underlying circuit routing glue in something like SS#7. We really do not have a "telephone directory" for the Internet (unless you count WHOIS/RWHOIS).

Right. And even for phone numbers, there's a single authority controlling the space. Internationally, it's the ITU; within the U.S./ Candadian zone, it's the North American Number Plan Administrator. And its problem has been too little supervision -- see http://www.bergen.com/biz/codes18200103181.htm --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb