Re: The end of DNS as we know it

[pb@fasterix.freenix.fr (Pierre Beyssac)]

According to Jean-Noel Frydman:
> 1. We have pushed the trademark issue entirely to the side. By creating 150
> new iTLD's within the next five years, we will create a whole new industry
> of Domain Name Chasers, money-grabbing opportunists, and untold lawsuits
> around the world from companies filing suit to retain/create their
> trademark on the new iTLD's. Those who do not see that as an obvious

That industry already exists. It began even before the Internic
started to bill for domain names. I'm even under the impression that
billing made all this only worse... Or is it simply the mad growth
of the Internet, that's difficult to tell.

> outcome of this decision, are fools. So the question is: is that what we
> want to accomplish?

As I see it, we're trying to stop the system from physically exploding.
I'll come back to this below.

> I believe that only by creating unlimited numbers of iTLDS can we by-pass
> the trademark issue by rendering it completely moot. Am I wrong? 

Difficult to say. That's probably partly true. I don't know.
Maybe it will only move the trademark problem from ".COM" to ".".

I think the trademark problem as it is currently stated has _no_
solution in the context of the DNS. This is a human problem,
not a technical or an internal policy problem. The more trademark
owners (and users) will think of the DNS as public signs in front of
stores, the harder it will be to get a replacement solution
(like the whois draft proposal, or the many others directory systems
currently in development).

I consider myself unable to discuss trademark issues related to
the DNS. I sure wish I could solve it and make the DNS the quiet
place it used to be a few years ago. I prefer to mind my own
business, trying to make sure that attempts to solve trademark
issues won't harm my freedom to use the Internet.

> 2. This comittee has the mission to oversee the possibility of the creation
...
> seems obvious also that whatever the decisions of the iach, there are
> "underground" " and alternate registries and they will continue to exist
> with or without its' consent. Right?

Not quite. "parallel" registries like the Alternic are nothing more than
a demonstration that having a "monopoly" on a naming service like
the IANA does is just a question of _consensus_. If the IANA decides
who does what in TLDs, that's because they both created and handled
the system satisfactorily for years, in a relatively open way.
They are a "de-facto" standard, in a sense. Nobody will be able to
reverse this any time soon unless the IANA does really awful things,
and the Alternic knows this quite well.

Now if completely parallel registries were to succeed, we would be
stuck with several, almost separate Internets: parallels don't cross.

> Let the ISP's and the market decide which registry (mine or Internic) runs
> the best .com TLD... Fair? Let each registry decide who "their"
> microsoft.com is... Only content will prevail. Each registry will have it's
> own flavor. each one becomes a value-added service to the community, a Web
> guide of sorts. This breaks the monopoly of the Internic (it only gives

No. Certainly not. That's partly what we're trying to avoid!
A consistent naming service is _essential_ to the Internet.
There should be a unambiguous way to refer to a resource.
Destroying this would be destroying the Internet.

> Of course this probably requires a change to the DNS as we know it. My
> e-mail adress would become something like jnf@france.com@internic but then

You intuitively realize you need a universal naming service anyway :-)
Now x@y@z wouldn't be really easy to implement given the installed base
of mail systems.

Why not x@y.z, then. See? Back to square one with iTLDs :-)

> Crazy?
> 
> I don't think so.

I obviously agree with your general idea of letting anyone run his
own NIC, and letting everyone mostly do what they want with the
DNS, and, why not after all, play with trademarks if they feel like
it. Freedom, fine. Let's just make sure that nobody keeps the whole
toy for himself, or breaks it down in so many pieces you can't even
remember what it looked like when it worked...
-- 
Pierre Beyssac      pb@fasterix.frmug.fr.net pb@fasterix.freenix.fr
{Free,Net,Open}BSD, Linux : il y a moins bien, mais c'est plus cher    
    Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager@EU.org