Ad Hoc, eDNS, AlterNIC and the bunch

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

I believe you have your facts incorrect here....

Jordan Mendelson writes:

Over the past 10 months, there has been escalating talk about the new self
appointed registries out there. Major news papers, magazines and other
periodicals have been publishing that "the change is coming". Ultimately,
the actual change rests at the hands of every user who runs a nameserver,
for they are the ones who actually have the root server cache. A recent
article in the Star Tribune, I believe stated that MCI is siding with the
Internet Ad Hoc society

You are referring to the IAHC, not the "Internet Ad Hoc Society",
which doesn't exist.

The IAHC was a committee composed of representatives from the
International Telecommunication Union, WIPO, the Internet Society, the
IAB, the IANA, INTA and the Federal Networking Council. We were
chartered to advise the IANA on an update to the mechanisms for
management and operations of the generic TLD space.

and is going to support these new registries. Now,
MCI is a major player in the US and if they actually DO start adding new
root servers to their cache, there might be a major change in the
Internet.

MCI's support for the IAHC proposal implies just the opposite -- that
they are supporting pointing at the current IANA authority based root
name servers.

I'm curious as to how many other network providers are even thinking about
changing their root server caches just because some self appointed society
tells them to.

As I've noted, you have the situation reversed -- MCI, UUNet and the
rest are supporting pointing at the current name servers. The IAHC was
also not self appointed -- we were appointed by the major internet
governance organizations and several interested international bodies.

You seem to have the IAHC confused with the "eDNS", which is indeed a
self appointed group. So far as I know, however, they have virtually
no real support.

Perry
Speaking purely for myself and not in an official capacity

2

I believe you have your facts incorrect here....

Jordan Mendelson writes:
> Over the past 10 months, there has been escalating talk about the new self
> appointed registries out there. Major news papers, magazines and other
> periodicals have been publishing that "the change is coming". Ultimately,

You are referring to the IAHC, not the "Internet Ad Hoc Society",
which doesn't exist.

I'm sorry, its really the Internet Ad Hoc Committee, not Society. [psst,
go to their web site and look under the really big logo that says IAHC].

Stop nit picking at my statements.

The IAHC was a committee composed of representatives from the
International Telecommunication Union, WIPO, the Internet Society, the
IAB, the IANA, INTA and the Federal Networking Council. We were
chartered to advise the IANA on an update to the mechanisms for
management and operations of the generic TLD space.

Ok, so the IAHC job is to advise the IANA. Strangely enough, the IANA's
own domain guidelines states, "It is extremely unlikely that any other TLDs
will be created.". This was written in March of 1994, which wasn't too
long ago.

It almost seems as if the IAHC is doing the IANA's job. I mean, the IANA's
job is the oversee changes in the Internet's protocols. So far, the only
things I've seen the IANA do is setup guidelines for domains and setup
private ip address space. So now what? The IAHC is going to split the
IANA's job in half? Why bother with IANA at all, lets move everything to
IAHC! Or better yet, lets get rid of bot the IANA and IAHC and give all
the responsibility to the ISOC.

Lets see:

The ISOC and FNC chartered the IANA to act as a clearinghouse to assign
and coordinate the use of numerous Internet protocol parameters. The IANA
charted the IAHC to recommend new parameters to domain name space. Now,
the IAHC is going to large companies such as DEC which really have NOTHING
to do with the Internet's underlying structure trying to get support for
something they aren't supposed to be doing, but in fact are only supposed
to recommend the IANA do.

Sounds to me like these groups all need to re-evaluate who has control
over what.

> I'm curious as to how many other network providers are even thinking about
> changing their root server caches just because some self appointed society
> tells them to.

As I've noted, you have the situation reversed -- MCI, UUNet and the
rest are supporting pointing at the current name servers. The IAHC was
also not self appointed -- we were appointed by the major internet
governance organizations and several interested international bodies.

I'm sorry about how I came across. Yes, IAHC's plan actually changes the
current nameservers instead of implementing new ones, which is the smart
thing to do. Of course, since a lot of the nameservers out there are
funded in part or whole by NSI, I don't think they will be changed without
a fight.

Like it or not, NSI is a company who I don't believe wants to share the
job of being a registrar with anyone.

3

Like it or not, NSI is a company who I don't believe wants to share the
job of being a registrar with anyone.

Let's see.. According to their site, over 1 MILLION domaines
registered.... times, oh, $50/year... $50M/yr with no competition,
customers with no alternatives and no need for customer support or
accountability.

I can see why the NSI doesn't want to share.

I can also why they must be made to share.

Isn't April 1997 the end of their contract anyway?

-Deepak.

4

The official end is April 1998. However, the NSF had arranged to end the
contract early on March 31st of this year until the politicians stepped
in and the NSF Office of the Inspector General released a report
suggesting that the NSF should run the Internic in order to make money for
the government. But it was the Whitehouse, in the form of Ira Magaziner's
committee that actually put a stop to the ending of that contract.

Some collateral damage that occurred was that the contract deal included
rolling out the IP allocation functions to ARIN with seed money from NSI
but that also got stopped. And now there are people in the Pentagon and
the National Security Agency that believe ARIN is an important national
security issue and needs to be stopped. It appears that since IP
technology played an important role in the Gulf War they want to ensure
that the U.S. military has all the IP addresses they need in future.
Somebody should tell them it's not smart to run a military command and
control system over the public data networks. If they would only build
their own private satellite network, maybe call it MILNET, then they could
use their own set of private IP addresses without worrying about what the
public is doing.

It will be very interesting to see what happens at the April 14th-15th
meeting of the NSF's Federal Networking Council Advisory Council meeting
in Washington where both domain names and ARIN are on the agenda.

Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com