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.)
A defacto checkmate, as it were.
This would be more like NSI deciding to take its own king off the board.
Since they stand to make truckloads of money as an IAHC shared registry,
this seems like it would be a really stupid thing for them to do, Tom
Newell's recent idiotic comments notwithstanding.
Or, if NSI, tomorrow, defined a process and actually executed it, whatever
it might be, that new TLDs would go into the so-called "IANA" roots, and
those might include a very different view of the world than the IAHCs, or
yours for that matter.
Once again this would be up to the IANA.
The truth is, they're NSI's roots. In fact, the truth is, you've admitted
that NSI has actually paid for at least part of the server which you host.
The current InterNIC contractor doesn't control the content of my server, but
they do tend to act as a coordinating resource. I guarantee that if the owner
of the MIL, GOV, EDU, or "." zones sent mail to the root name server operators
asking that these zones be pulled from a new source, it would be done by the
next maintainance interval. The IANA is a special case -- while they have
delegated COM, ORG and NET to the current InterNIC contractor, IANA has the
right to redelegate them to someone else. So the fact is, *all* TLD's come
from the IANA. It's just that some of them come from the IETF (RFC1591 et al)
and some come from the UN (ISO 3166) and some will apparently be coming from
the IAHC (WEB, REC, et al).
The current InterNIC contractor did send me some hardware, it's true. But,
since you keep harping on it, I'm going to send it all back and use my own.
I consider buying a 1GB alpha to be inconvenient but it won't kill me.
The further truth is, NSI has asserted that it *OWNS* COM. And since it is
the one in charge of the root file, what odds would you care to lay on it
ever making an edit (so long as it continues to assert that it owns COM)
that removes COM from its control?
Odds: 1 in 1. There is no contest here.
Finally, where do you get the idea that you can tell someone else what to do
with their money, when that "someone else" is a private corporation?
My directions to the industry aren't about money. It turns out that everyone
who has followed my directions over the years has made more money because of
that -- but it's measured in dollars per decade rather than dollars per month.
I'm not particularly concerned about my directions' reputation for quality.