On Tue, 27 Sep 2005, Peter Dambier wrote:

Evren Demirkan wrote:

...

Ok So what,

I am located in Turkiye..Can Any one simplify the whole stuff in plain English?

Evren Demirkan

Hi Evren Demirkan,

there has been for about one year a turkish root-server:

l.public-root.com

That server did not resolve the ICANN root but The Public-Root.

Until some ISPs in Turkey started selling turkish language toplevel domains nobody noticed because in the legacy domains ICANN and Public-Root are compatible.

So the basic story here is not really "Turkey is using a new DNS root," but rather, "users of alternate root servers notice alternate root inconsistency," which is exactly what those opposed to alternate roots have been predicting. There's also a real root server in Turkey. According to www.root-servers.org, there's an anycast copy of i.root-servers.net in Ankara. -Steve

christopher.morrow@mci.com ("Christopher L. Morrow") writes:

So... Why is it again that folks want to balkanize the Internet like this?

the dreams fulfilled and/or still promised by the internet mostly involve some kind of disintermediation, increases in freedom or autonomy, that kind of thing. in that context, centralized control over things like address assignments and TLD creation is like fingernails on a chalkboard. a lot of folks feel that "if it has to be centrally controlled, then $me should be in charge" or at best "if it has to be centrally controlled, then $me want a voice." this desire is more powerful than any appreciation or understanding of the benefits of naming universality or address uniqueness. human nature, especially when individuals interact with herds, is predictable but not necessarily rational.

I'm confused by the reasoning behind this public-root (alternate root) problem... It seems to me ... that there is no way for it to work, ever. So why keep trying to push it and break other things along the way?

i think it's because of what margaret mead wrote: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." the internet is supernational. control over it is held by the ruling political party, and their backers, in one country. thus there's plenty of money and power ready to back the next hair-brained scheme to break the lock, even if (as i expect) lack of naming universality would be worse than lack of naming autonomy. -- Paul Vixie

Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

I'm confused by the reasoning behind this public-root (alternate root) problem... It seems to me (minus crazy-pills of course) that there is no way for it to work, ever. So why keep trying to push it and break other things along the way?

Paul Vixie has given very good arguments. Let me add a design fault: As more than 80% of all names are registered under '.com' there is no need for any other domain. Ok, let us get rid of all those domains and put them under '.com. Now there is no more need for '.com' either. Let us get rid of it and we have finally got more than 3000 toplevel domains. That is all we want. Let me compare Public-Root and ICANNs root: # IASON ZoneCompiler version 0.0.4 # SOA(".","2005092401","A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.","NSTLD.VERISIGN-GRS.COM.","1800","900","604800","86400"). # lines: 2334, NS: 1380, A: 878, AAAA: 65, SOA: 2, domains: 263 servers: 64 # IASON ZoneCompiler version 0.0.4 # SOA(".","2005092512","a.public-root.net.","hostmaster.public-root.net.","43200","3600","1209600","14400"). # lines: 11640, NS: 10479, A: 1085, AAAA: 66, SOA: 2, domains: 3043 servers: 65 The Public-Root has got 3043 domains. ICANNs root has got only 263. There is a political design problem with ICANNs root. It has not got enough toplevel domains. DNS was designed as a tree. It was designed decentralised. DNS today has degenerated to a flat file like /etc/hosts was. It is no longer decentralised but stored mostly in a single registry. No wonder that some people try a Public-Root that is independent but compatible to ICANNs root. They do it since about 1995. They never stopped. The name changed. The players mostly did not. With every new version of this Public-Root compared to the Monopoly-Root, the number of players gets more. The number of customers gets more. Kind regards, Peter and Karin Dambier -- Peter and Karin Dambier Public-Root Graeffstrasse 14 D-64646 Heppenheim +49-6252-671788 (Telekom) +49-179-108-3978 (O2 Genion) mail: peter@peter-dambier.de http://iason.site.voila.fr http://www.kokoom.com/iason

Peter, I must have missed something here. Are there not individual root domains for each ISO-registered country, not just the US? And, if there are individual root domains for each ISO-registered country, are they all controlled by the US? Please explain this in simple words. Thank you. Cutler t 9/27/2005 10:07 PM +0200, Peter Dambier wrote: Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

I'm confused by the reasoning behind this public-root (alternate root) problem... It seems to me (minus crazy-pills of course) that there is no way for it to work, ever. So why keep trying to push it and break other things along the way?

Paul Vixie has given very good arguments. Let me add a design fault: As more than 80% of all names are registered under '.com' there is no need for any other domain. Ok, let us get rid of all those domains and put them under '.com. Now there is no more need for '.com' either. Let us get rid of it and we have finally got more than 3000 toplevel domains. That is all we want. Let me compare Public-Root and ICANNs root: # IASON ZoneCompiler version 0.0.4 # SOA(".","2005092401","A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.","NSTLD.VERISIGN-GRS.COM.","1800","900","604800","86400"). # lines: 2334, NS: 1380, A: 878, AAAA: 65, SOA: 2, domains: 263 servers: 64 # IASON ZoneCompiler version 0.0.4 # SOA(".","2005092512","a.public-root.net.","hostmaster.public-root.net.","43200","3600","1209600","14400"). # lines: 11640, NS: 10479, A: 1085, AAAA: 66, SOA: 2, domains: 3043 servers: 65 The Public-Root has got 3043 domains. ICANNs root has got only 263. There is a political design problem with ICANNs root. It has not got enough toplevel domains. DNS was designed as a tree. It was designed decentralised. DNS today has degenerated to a flat file like /etc/hosts was. It is no longer decentralised but stored mostly in a single registry. No wonder that some people try a Public-Root that is independent but compatible to ICANNs root. They do it since about 1995. They never stopped. The name changed. The players mostly did not. With every new version of this Public-Root compared to the Monopoly-Root, the number of players gets more. The number of customers gets more. Kind regards, Peter and Karin Dambier -- Peter and Karin Dambier Public-Root Graeffstrasse 14 D-64646 Heppenheim +49-6252-671788 (Telekom) +49-179-108-3978 (O2 Genion) mail: peter@peter-dambier.de http://iason.site.voila.fr http://www.kokoom.com/iason - James R. Cutler james.cutler@consultant.com

On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 09:42:22PM +0000, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005, James R. Cutler wrote:

...

Peter,

I must have missed something here.

Are there not individual root domains for each ISO-registered country, not just the US? And, if there are individual root domains for each ISO-registered country, are they all controlled by the US?

I'm not up on this exactly, but my reading of the NRIC report says that some ISO document has all the 'official' (for ISO I suppose atleast) 2 letter abbreviations for country codes. These end up in the ccTLD list, and then in the root servers delegated to the proper ccTLD auth servers for that 2 letter code.

The ISO list isn't a US owned thing at last I recall...

ISO 3166 is what you want. http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/lis... -- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.

On Sep 27, 2005, at 2:50 PM, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

...

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code- lists/list-en1-semic.txt hey look, that's in switzerland! :) So, not US controlled. (tinfoil hat off....)

It is an ISO list, but isn't the ISO-3166 list still maintained by DIN in Germany? Rgds, -drc

Hi James, James R. Cutler wrote:

Peter,

I must have missed something here.

Are there not individual root domains for each ISO-registered country, not just the US? And, if there are individual root domains for each ISO-registered country, are they all controlled by the US?

Please explain this in simple words.

The country domains obviously were not the right place. That is why you find organisations, companies and whatever in ".com", ".net" and ".org" I have a ".de" domain but I probably will lose it as soon as I move to france. I cannot get a ".eu" domain because of bureaucratic reasons. Anyhow I will lose it as soon as I move to Panama. So some 250 domains are of no use to me. Sooner or later I will end up in ".com", ".net" or ".org". Right now I dont have the money to bye me a ".com", ".net" or ".org" domain. That is why I join with people like me building our own root and selling toplevel domains to people who cannot afford bying ICANN for monetarian or religious reasons :) Kind regards, Peter and Karin

Thank you.

Cutler

t 9/27/2005 10:07 PM +0200, Peter Dambier wrote:

Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

...

I'm confused by the reasoning behind this public-root (alternate root) problem... It seems to me (minus crazy-pills of course) that there is no way for it to work, ever. So why keep trying to push it and break other things along the way?

Paul Vixie has given very good arguments.

Let me add a design fault:

As more than 80% of all names are registered under '.com' there is no need for any other domain.

Ok, let us get rid of all those domains and put them under '.com.

Now there is no more need for '.com' either. Let us get rid of it and we have finally got more than 3000 toplevel domains. That is all we want.

Let me compare Public-Root and ICANNs root:

# IASON ZoneCompiler version 0.0.4 # SOA(".","2005092401","A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.","NSTLD.VERISIGN-GRS.COM.","1800","900","604800","86400"). # lines: 2334, NS: 1380, A: 878, AAAA: 65, SOA: 2, domains: 263 servers: 64

# IASON ZoneCompiler version 0.0.4 # SOA(".","2005092512","a.public-root.net.","hostmaster.public-root.net.","43200","3600","1209600","14400"). # lines: 11640, NS: 10479, A: 1085, AAAA: 66, SOA: 2, domains: 3043 servers: 65

The Public-Root has got 3043 domains. ICANNs root has got only 263.

There is a political design problem with ICANNs root. It has not got enough toplevel domains.

DNS was designed as a tree. It was designed decentralised.

DNS today has degenerated to a flat file like /etc/hosts was.

It is no longer decentralised but stored mostly in a single registry.

No wonder that some people try a Public-Root that is independent but compatible to ICANNs root. They do it since about 1995. They never stopped. The name changed. The players mostly did not. With every new version of this Public-Root compared to the Monopoly-Root, the number of players gets more. The number of customers gets more.

Kind regards, Peter and Karin Dambier

- James R. Cutler james.cutler@consultant.com

-- Peter and Karin Dambier Public-Root Graeffstrasse 14 D-64646 Heppenheim +49-6252-671788 (Telekom) +49-179-108-3978 (O2 Genion) mail: peter@peter-dambier.de http://iason.site.voila.fr http://www.kokoom.com/iason

Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

uhm, you can run distributed root nameservers in several remote countries, but you can't afford a 12 USD/11EU .com domain registration fee??? (what about .name or .info or....)

I am not The Public-Root. I am only one of the volonteers. :) -- Peter and Karin Dambier Public-Root Graeffstrasse 14 D-64646 Heppenheim +49-6252-671788 (Telekom) +49-179-108-3978 (O2 Genion) +49-6252-750308 (VoIP: sipgate.de) +1-360-448-1275 (VoIP: freeworldialup.com) mail: peter@peter-dambier.de http://iason.site.voila.fr http://www.kokoom.com/iason

Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, Peter Dambier wrote:

...

Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

...

uhm, you can run distributed root nameservers in several remote countries, but you can't afford a 12 USD/11EU .com domain registration fee??? (what about .name or .info or....)

I am not The Public-Root. I am only one of the volonteers. :)

fine, save 12 USD/11EU/year by not drinking 1 coke each week. My point was it's a little nutty that you can afford a .de domain at 10USD/9EU/year and you can't afford (supposedly) .com/net/org.

Anyway, I should have learned my lesson a while ago and not started this landslide of food.

Thank you for the food. When I got my homepage for free, I did not care about the domain. It was part of the contract for my mailer. I did not know I would ever need a homepage. I did not know I would ever leave this country. I know I will have to think of ".com" or ".net" soon. But I did not yet look for the prices. When this mess is cleaned up: =========================================================== the public-root representative is providng full disclosure. http://www.cynikal.net/~baptista/P-R/ =========================================================== I might come back to your offer. Kind regards Peter and Karin Oh, yes, Karin is reading this too. I have to translate it. But she knows what it is about. She is the BOSS. -- Peter and Karin Dambier Public-Root Graeffstrasse 14 D-64646 Heppenheim +49-6252-671788 (Telekom) +49-179-108-3978 (O2 Genion) +49-6252-750308 (VoIP: sipgate.de) +1-360-448-1275 (VoIP: freeworldialup.com) mail: peter@peter-dambier.de http://iason.site.voila.fr http://www.kokoom.com/iason

Peter, OK, now I understand. It is not the DNS hierarchy which is the problem. Or, even the rDNS oot or the various DNS server sets. Yours is a personal difference with the assignment process which causes operational issues for you when you migrate. Thank you for your clarification. Perhaps you should approach ICANN with alternate proposals. Regards. Cutler At 9/27/2005 11:46 PM +0200, Peter Dambier wrote: Hi James, James R. Cutler wrote:

Peter, I must have missed something here. Are there not individual root domains for each ISO-registered country, not just the US? And, if there are individual root domains for each ISO-registered country, are they all controlled by the US? Please explain this in simple words.

The country domains obviously were not the right place. That is why you find organisations, companies and whatever in ".com", ".net" and ".org" I have a ".de" domain but I probably will lose it as soon as I move to france. I cannot get a ".eu" domain because of bureaucratic reasons. Anyhow I will lose it as soon as I move to Panama. So some 250 domains are of no use to me. Sooner or later I will end up in ".com", ".net" or ".org". Right now I dont have the money to bye me a ".com", ".net" or ".org" domain. That is why I join with people like me building our own root and selling toplevel domains to people who cannot afford bying ICANN for monetarian or religious reasons :) Kind regards, Peter and Karin

Thank you. Cutler

t 9/27/2005 10:07 PM +0200, Peter Dambier wrote: Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

...

I'm confused by the reasoning behind this public-root (alternate root) problem... It seems to me (minus crazy-pills of course) that there is no way for it to work, ever. So why keep trying to push it and break other things along the way?

Paul Vixie has given very good arguments. Let me add a design fault: As more than 80% of all names are registered under '.com' there is no need for any other domain. Ok, let us get rid of all those domains and put them under '.com. Now there is no more need for '.com' either. Let us get rid of it and we have finally got more than 3000 toplevel domains. That is all we want. Let me compare Public-Root and ICANNs root: # IASON ZoneCompiler version 0.0.4 # SOA(".","2005092401","A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.","NSTLD.VERISIGN-GRS.COM.","1800","900","604800","86400"). # lines: 2334, NS: 1380, A: 878, AAAA: 65, SOA: 2, domains: 263 servers: 64 # IASON ZoneCompiler version 0.0.4 # SOA(".","2005092512","a.public-root.net.","hostmaster.public-root.net.","43200","3600","1209600","14400"). # lines: 11640, NS: 10479, A: 1085, AAAA: 66, SOA: 2, domains: 3043 servers: 65 The Public-Root has got 3043 domains. ICANNs root has got only 263. There is a political design problem with ICANNs root. It has not got enough toplevel domains. DNS was designed as a tree. It was designed decentralised. DNS today has degenerated to a flat file like /etc/hosts was. It is no longer decentralised but stored mostly in a single registry. No wonder that some people try a Public-Root that is independent but compatible to ICANNs root. They do it since about 1995. They never stopped. The name changed. The players mostly did not. With every new version of this Public-Root compared to the Monopoly-Root, the number of players gets more. The number of customers gets more.

Kind regards, Peter and Karin Dambier

- James R. Cutler james.cutler@consultant.com

-- Peter and Karin Dambier Public-Root Graeffstrasse 14 D-64646 Heppenheim +49-6252-671788 (Telekom) +49-179-108-3978 (O2 Genion) mail: peter@peter-dambier.de http://iason.site.voila.fr http://www.kokoom.com/iason - James R. Cutler james.cutler@consultant.com

At 05:46 PM 9/27/2005, Peter Dambier wrote: ....

I have a ".de" domain but I probably will lose it as soon as I move to france. I cannot get a ".eu" domain because of bureaucratic reasons. Anyhow I will lose it as soon as I move to Panama. So some 250 domains are of no use to me.

A significant number of country registrars have NO residency requirements. I would guess almost half of the 2-letter country codes will sell their domains to anyone in the world with a credit card. Explore some registrars via http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm For example, alldomains.com alone is a re-seller of 16 country domains (.us, ca, cc, tv, DE, md, bz, ws, it, at, nu, nl, fr, ch, be, cn) _______________________________________________________________ Russ Haynal - Internet Instructor, Speaker and Paradigm Shaker "Helping organizations gain the most benefit from the Internet" russ@navigators.com http://navigators.com 703-729-1757

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005, Peter Dambier wrote:

Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

...

I'm confused by the reasoning behind this public-root (alternate root) problem... It seems to me (minus crazy-pills of course) that there is no way for it to work, ever. So why keep trying to push it and break other things along the way?

Paul Vixie has given very good arguments.

paul often does, yes.

Let me add a design fault:

...

The Public-Root has got 3043 domains. ICANNs root has got only 263.

There is a political design problem with ICANNs root. It has not got enough toplevel domains.

'not enough'... how much is 'enough'? by your calculations or mine or pauls or G.W. Bush's? Is your problem that it takes X months/years to get a new TLD put into the normal ICANN Root system? Or is it that you don't like their choice of .com and want .common (or some other .com replacement?). There is a process defined to handle adding new TLD's, I think it's even documented in an RFC? (I'm a little behind in my NRIC reading about this actually, sorry) Circumventing a process simply because it's not 'fast enough' isn't really an answer (in my opinion atleast) especially when it effectivly breaks the complete system.

DNS was designed as a tree. It was designed decentralised.

DNS today has degenerated to a flat file like /etc/hosts was.

uhm, how so? certainly the tree and decentralized functions still exist.

It is no longer decentralised but stored mostly in a single registry.

huh? how so? Because 25M of the 35M 2nd level domains are in .com? isn't that more a function of 'everyone knows www.company.com' than anything else? I can't get people inside my company to realize (well, couldn't when it mattered to me) remeber that my email address was chris@uu.NET ... they always wanted to send to chris@uu.net.COM. .COM got more registrations simply, it seems to me, via marketting.

No wonder that some people try a Public-Root that is independent but compatible to ICANNs root. They do it since about 1995. They never stopped. The name changed. The players mostly did not. With every new version of this Public-Root compared to the Monopoly-Root, the number of players gets more. The number of customers gets more.

people love crack, it's still not a good idea to smoke it.

On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 10:33:43PM -0500, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote: ...

to operate our businesses. We have a right to operate our TLDs and ...

Why? "I say so" is not a response. Use of the word "deserve" in a response will get it deleted without a response. I am violently sick every time I hear or read the term "right" misused and thereby denigrated and devalued in this way. This is the first time I have seen it here, I fear not the last. -- Joe Yao ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This message is not an official statement of OSIS Center policies.

Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005 22:07:19 +0200, Peter Dambier said:

...

As more than 80% of all names are registered under '.com' there is no need for any other domain.

Remember this fact for a moment..

...

The Public-Root has got 3043 domains. ICANNs root has got only 263.

OK. So yours is bigger than mine. Now keep in mind this:

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050821&mode=classic

(Yes, it's totally relevant)

How about this one: http://www.cynikal.net/~baptista/P-R/ Seems to be growing more files every day. Kind regards, Peter and Karin -- Peter and Karin Dambier Public-Root Graeffstrasse 14 D-64646 Heppenheim +49-6252-671788 (Telekom) +49-179-108-3978 (O2 Genion) +49-6252-750308 (VoIP: sipgate.de) +1-360-448-1275 (VoIP: freeworldialup.com) mail: peter@peter-dambier.de http://iason.site.voila.fr http://www.kokoom.com/iason

PS. Is there some sort of secret net.kook cabal which I was not aware of?

i thought this (nanog) was it. maybe i'm not in the loop, though. -- Paul Vixie

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 10:39:24 PDT, Matt Ghali said:

PS. Is there some sort of secret net.kook cabal which I was not aware of?

Actually, there's 2 cabals, with overlapping memberships, and any given net.kook can be a member of -2 to 3 cabals (negative cabals being those that have publicly disavowed your membership. I'd explain the 3 to you, but you haven't shown that you know either of the secret handshakes :) ObNanog: The above has been shown to do a better job of explaining the actual weirdness of how the Net actually operates in practice than any competing theory. You don't believe me, map out all the kooks on all sides of the perennial root debate.....

Thus spake "Peter Dambier" <peter@peter-dambier.de>

Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

...

I'm confused by the reasoning behind this public-root (alternate root) problem... It seems to me (minus crazy-pills of course) that there is no way for it to work, ever. So why keep trying to push it and break other things along the way?

Paul Vixie has given very good arguments.

Let me add a design fault:

As more than 80% of all names are registered under '.com' there is no need for any other domain.

Ok, let us get rid of all those domains and put them under '.com.

Now there is no more need for '.com' either. Let us get rid of it and we have finally got more than 3000 toplevel domains. That is all we want.

No, what you'd get is 25M top-level domains and virtually no hierarchy. That is _not_ what we want. .com is an abomination, as are the other gTLDs to a lesser extent. .gov, .mil, .edu, .info, and .biz need to be shifted under .us immediately, and everyone under .com, .net, and .org needs to be gradually moved under the appropriate part of the real DNS tree. I can live with .int continuing on, but only because no better solution immediately comes to mind.

Let me compare Public-Root and ICANNs root: ... The Public-Root has got 3043 domains. ICANNs root has got only 263.

There is a political design problem with ICANNs root. It has not got enough toplevel domains.

DNS was designed as a tree. It was designed decentralised.

DNS today has degenerated to a flat file like /etc/hosts was.

What you're proposing is eliminating what little tree-like elements are left and making a totally flat system. Can't you see that you're arguing against your own position here? S Stephen Sprunk "Stupid people surround themselves with smart CCIE #3723 people. Smart people surround themselves with K5SSS smart people who disagree with them." --Aaron Sorkin

At 10:39 PM 9/27/2005, you wrote:

Actually, I think you've got it backwards. .us and all of the other country-specific TLDs are the last vestiges of nationalism. The Internet is only the second piece of truly global infrastructure. As a key component in the ongoing trend towards a unified global administration, we should do what we can to encourage cooperation and equality across borders, not intensify their differences.

Well said! Other than government entities, I never understood why anyone would want a country specific name. Tellurian Networks provides the same services to our clients in AU as we do to those in DE and PK and those in the US of course (where we are located.) I don't want 200+ domain names and I don't think Cisco, Sun, Microsoft, or any other companies do either. When I look for a company, I don't care or need to know where they are located most of the time - unless I am ordering a pizza, but that is a different story... Communities of interest - such as my personal favorite 356registry.org are global in scope and by their very nature! My $0.02 and contribution to the non operational noise on nanog today. -Robert Tellurian Networks - The Ultimate Internet Connection http://www.tellurian.com | 888-TELLURIAN | 973-300-9211 "Well done is better than well said." - Benjamin Franklin

Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine wrote:

wearing my worked-on-p3p-for-years hat, jurisdiction matters.

how this translates into operational issues is: whois nonsense sld namespaces deresolution (upon local rule) process pricing and non-cash predicate and post-conditions moronic (or not) primary geolocs encodings and equivalancies (actually an interesting issue, the ietf not withstanding) safe harbor and data protection scope and semantics

enjoy, eric

Eric, you name it. Here is the details: http://www.cynikal.net/~baptista/P-R/ Kind regards, Peter and Karin -- Peter and Karin Dambier Public-Root Graeffstrasse 14 D-64646 Heppenheim +49-6252-671788 (Telekom) +49-179-108-3978 (O2 Genion) +49-6252-750308 (VoIP: sipgate.de) +1-360-448-1275 (VoIP: freeworldialup.com) mail: peter@peter-dambier.de http://iason.site.voila.fr http://www.kokoom.com/iason

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005, Robert Boyle wrote:

At 10:39 PM 9/27/2005, you wrote:

...

Actually, I think you've got it backwards. .us and all of the other country-specific TLDs are the last vestiges of nationalism. The Internet is only the second piece of truly global infrastructure. As a key component in the ongoing trend towards a unified global administration, we should do what we can to encourage cooperation and equality across borders, not intensify their differences.

Well said! Other than government entities, I never understood why anyone would want a country specific name. Tellurian Networks provides the same services to our clients in AU as we do to those in DE and PK and those in the US of course (where we are located.) I don't want 200+ domain names and I don't think Cisco, Sun, Microsoft, or any other companies do either. When I look for a company, I don't care or need to know where they are located most of the time - unless I am ordering a pizza, but that is a different story... Communities of interest - such as my personal favorite 356registry.org are global in scope and by their very nature! My $0.02 and contribution to the non operational noise on nanog today.

A few issues: There are a lot of parts of the world that don't have very good external connectivity. ccTLDs often have local servers in the locations they're supposed to serve. .Com's footprint is somewhat limited [1]. If you're on one end of a flaky satellite link, and those you are trying to communicate with are on the same end of that flaky satellite link, but you're trying to use a DNS zone that's served from something on the other end of the satellite link, that's not going to work all that reliably. ccTLDs often allow people to get their domains from a local organization which speaks the local language, accepts the local currency, and charges a locally affordable amount. $15 per year sounds cheap in the US (or in Germany, for that matter), but there are places where that's a lot of money. Location-based domains can also separate out the trademark space. Businesses with the same name in completely different markets generally don't conflict, but do if they're both trying to share the .com namespace. [1]: .Com is served from three locations in DC/Northern Virginia, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle, the SF Bay Area, Atlanta, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and London. -Steve

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005 22:56:50 EDT, Robert Boyle said:

I don't think Cisco, Sun, Microsoft, or any other companies do either. When I look for a company, I don't care or need to know where they are located most of the time - unless I am ordering a pizza, but that is a different story...

You have it totally backwards. The problem is that with a single flat .com space, you have *NO WAY* of knowing where a company is located most of the time, and a lot more things resemble pizzas than they resemble cookie-cutter computer hardware sold to us by cookie-cutter salesdroids... Consider smartway.com and smartways.com and smartwaybus.com. Only one of them has the bus schedule I needed. And I'm pretty sure that neither shelor.com nor glo-dot.com doesn't need to be taking a slot in the *global* address space. In fact, they have a number of things in common - neither is a global concern in any realistic sense, I've done business with both of them, in both cases the business was entirely due to geographic location, and in neither case did their presence in the .com domain make *any* difference in the slightest. And in both cases, their name precludes the usage by *anybody* *else* *anywhere* in *any* field. I've bought a *lot* of music gear at Rocket Music. But rocketmusic.com isn't them. It isn't rocket-music.com either. They're actually at rocketmusic.net. More trademark collision at its finest. Let's face it - 40 million things dumped into one .com without a yellow pages is a stupid way to run a network. But it's what we're stuck with.

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 10:04:36 +0200, Stephane Bortzmeyer said:

So he can call upon the law of his country, rather than the law of the state of California or Virginia?

Quite likely irrelevant. Some entity with a foobar.nu domain-of-convenience is quite likely going to find a hard time getting onto a court calendar in Niue unless they have a bit more than a domain name to establish jurisdiction. Similarly for most other countries - the French court system isn't going to want cases dropped on it just because there's a foobar.fr domain involved, unless there's a French citizen or corporation involved - and at that point, the fact that a French citizen or corporation involved will be the biggest point for establishing jurisdiction. Is there *any* court that will actually accept "But alldomains.com sold me a domain name" as sufficient grounds *by itself* for establishing jurisdiction?

...

Actually, I think you've got it backwards. .us and all of the other country-specific TLDs are the last vestiges of nationalism.

The problem is that all gTLD are controlled only in the US (even more than the root is). So, they are international only in name.

Obviously, I feel that that needs to change. Tony

--On den 28 september 2005 10.03.47 +0200 Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr> wrote:

The problem is that all gTLD are controlled only in the US (even more than the root is). So, they are international only in name.

.museum is operated from Sweden. -- Måns Nilsson Systems Specialist +46 70 681 7204 cell KTHNOC +46 8 790 6518 office MN1334-RIPE

Ehehe..Thats really good answer.. On 10/6/05, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr> wrote:

On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 09:19:07AM +0200, Måns Nilsson <mansaxel@sunet.se> wrote a message of 34 lines which said:

...

.museum is operated from Sweden.

Correct, Europeans will stop using ".com" and switch to ".museum", its main competitor :-)

In general I agree with you. The primary exception being that if national political interests want to press for local rules about specific strings (like XXX) then those national interests belong in their designated part of the name space. Polluting the global space with nationally inconsistent rules about use will not help.

Are there national exceptions to international law? Seems to me that if no exceptions are permitted, then everyone is treated equally. Tony

From: Peter Dambier <peter@peter-dambier.de> To: 'North American Noise and Off-topic Gripes' <nanog@merit.edu>

*plonk* I have hardly ever seen someone post so much ... in so short a time, even though it is a fellow German citizen. In a sad way it was good reading until this post. Save the root zone from him someone, and accuse the world, yeah... Alexander, thinking of the german word 'Depp' here

Joseph S D Yao wrote:

On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 09:28:03AM +0200, Peter Dambier wrote: ...

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E.g. NAZI sites and propaganda are prohibited in germany. They are welcome in the u.s. That delivers a pseudo excuse for corrupt german politician to

...

Without comment on the rest of this, I feel I must note that to most people in the USA [including both corrupt and uncorrupt (if any) politicians ;-)], such sites are definitely NOT welcome. They are tolerated because of the principle of free speech. Please note the immense difference, ye who believe in principles! ... However, if they cross the line into promoting criminal activity, that is NOT tolerated.

Please dont take me too very litteral on this. 1.) I have slept bad, because of problems with The Public-Root. 2.) I cannot think of anybody welcoming those sites. But I am afraid those sites do give a pseudo excuse for censoring gouvernments. It is a pseudo excuse. In fact it does the opposite. They are hiding the information that those sites exist. So they are helping those sites to flurrish in foraign contries. Censoring is bad. Worse than those sites in the first place. What can be used will be misused. Censoring was ment good but it was missused to censor Dr. med Julius Hellenthal. There was no reason and no right to censor him. Afterwards nobody has been it and nobody tries to find out who was it or why. Collateral damage. With censoring there is always collateral damage. Telling everybody - look at those guys - and explaining, is much better. With a single root there will be a single point of failure. With more that one root it is a lot more difficult to make censoring work. Look at ICANN. A lot of people say it smells like corruption. Look at The Public-Root it is not much better. http://www.cynikal.net/~baptista/P-R/ There will always be people trying to make bad use of things meant good. We can never hinder them. We can only make their live difficult by preventing a single point of failure. Thank you for watching this. But please watch too: http://www.icannwatch.org/ Kind regards, Peter and Karin Dambier -- Peter and Karin Dambier Public-Root Graeffstrasse 14 D-64646 Heppenheim +49-6252-671788 (Telekom) +49-179-108-3978 (O2 Genion) +49-6252-750308 (VoIP: sipgate.de) +1-360-448-1275 (VoIP: freeworldialup.com) mail: peter@peter-dambier.de http://iason.site.voila.fr http://www.kokoom.com/iason

Saudi Arabia, Iran, Northern Nigeria, and China are not likely to have the same liberal views as, say, the Netherlands or Denmark. Saudi Arabia and China, like some other nations, extensively filter their Internet connection and have created government agencies to protect their society from web sites that officials view as immoral.

and in the united states, we're madly hiring new fbi agents to protect our society from web sites our officials view as immoral. randy

I should have made my comment more specific: what is the problem with single namespace without ccTLDs and without per-country exceptions?

Thank you for asking. Harald Alvestrand and I had just this conversation during the IETF IDN WG lifetime, about the point where the Chinese (CN, TW, MO, SG), the Koreans (SK), and to a lesser extent, the Japanese (JP) in the Chinese Domain Name Consoritum (CDNC) and/or the Joint Engineering Taskforce (JET) found IETF consensus process inalterably for an ASCII encoding of a naive transformation of a glyph repetoire (Unicode). The CDNC et al were unable to get an intermediate mapping of the code point repitoire, and proposed an alternative, scoped semantics for code point equivalency classes. That was your question right, what use is there for scoped semantics? Perhaps none, but the CDNC/JET technical people I knew, and the policy people I knew at the time were quite willing to accept all the flagday issues for domain names characters in infrastructure that were outside of the current repitoire. I think everyone here knows what those issues are, and how great a cost their resolution represents.

Per-country exceptions just creates more Balkanization of the Internet, which hardly seems beneficial.

That was Harald's arguement, and as IETF Chair, it carried much more weight than that of any other person I've ever known, in China or outside of China. The "principle of least surprise" ment that a zone file operator (in China) could not create an equivalency class a user (in Norway) would be unlikely to predict. I suppose I should mention that in mainland China, a simplified (modern) form of Han characters are used, in the province of Taiwan, traditional Han characters are used, in Korean some archaic Han characters are used, and in Japan, in the Kanji writing system, some (other) archaic Han characters are used, and in Vietnamese, still another set of Han characters are used -- and there are scads of semantic equivalencies between these different glyphs, all of which are in Unicode, without an equivalency class mechanism. And so we (or rather "they" since this is a North American list) do not have domain names composed of end-user recognizable characters. Oh. While in hospital in Beijing I asked all the medical staff (nurses, doctors, etc.) if they were "OK with ASCII". Not one English speaker was. Limited sample set, your milage may vary, season for taste, etc. It is fellicitous, but the ICANN Registrar's Constituency list just a day ago carried a request, nominally from ICANN President Paul Twomey, for a Registrar with some interest and experience in the problem area to join a President's mumble. I wrote he and Vint to see what they had in mind, and I may as well use this note to prod them again. They may simply mean that RACE needs to be re-euphamized and a few more printer glyphs in Unicode need to be made less accessible to phishers. Eric

In message <g3d5mtomtz.fsf@sa.vix.com>, Paul Vixie writes:

do you still think that "Paul Vixie has given very good arguments?", peter?

I think so -- but I'm not Peter.... Thanks -- you said it very well. --Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

...

do you still think that "Paul Vixie has given very good arguments?", peter? I think so -- but I'm not Peter....

<aol>me too</aol>