Re: Hyperbole Fervor Distorts Serious Reporting and Discussion

[John Charles Broomfield <jbroom@manta.outremer.com>]

Jay Fenello said:
> Dave,
> 
> For many months, IAHC supporters have been making statements like:
> 
> At 05:12 PM 4/12/97 -0700, Dave Crocker wrote:
> >	IANA dictates the contents of the root servers.  The operators of
> >the root servers follow IANA dictates and have stated they will follow IANA
> >in this matter.
> 
> You have just admitted in a private posting (forgive me, *NOT*
> private ;-) that the U.S. Government and Network Solutions have
> the ability to prevent your seven new gTLDs from being entered
> in the root. 
(snip)
> Regards,
> Jay Fenello
> President, Iperdome, Inc.
> 404-250-3242  http://www.iperdome.com

I don't think it is like that at all. NSI & the U.S. Government have the
ability to make IANA root updates all the more painful, which by no means
contradicts the statement of where the root content comes from. Just look at
its whole history. When new (ISO) TLDs are to come into existance, who do
the future admin contacts address themselves to? If you hadn't by now found
out, they DON'T send a message to NSI or the U.S. gov, they send a message
to IANA. If they want any substancial modifications to their entry, again it
gets sent to IANA. What's more, if they send these modifications to the
standard "hostmaster@internic.net" it gets sent on to IANA. So, IANA is
making the decision on what goes in or not the roots. After they have made
this decision, they just comunicate it to NSI so that NSI *PROPAGATES* this
information.
The (IANA sanctioned) root server operators have ALWAYS stated that they
will follow IANA directives, and I challenge you to produce any eveidence to
the contrary.
Up to now, they have always been taking this information through NSI, who
have up to now continued to cleanly serve the information that IANA hands
it.
This could somehow be seen as a hierarchical structure, where IANA
creates/modifies and NSI distributes.
Obviously should NSI decide NOT to distribute, it would mess things up
(let's imagine NSI going on strike for example...). This does not mean that
NSI controls, rather that it has SOME power (until or unless it decides to
exercise that power). In this event, there are many different possible
courses of action. From my point of view the most obvious would be to find
an alternative channel of distribution and cut NSI out of the loop.
DNS and most of internet in general works on the basis of cooperation. When
someone decides to *force* something into being, if the rest of the internet
is not happy with that, the "forcer" just gets cut out of the loop or
ignored. So, just as a practical experiment, once the new gTLDs get rolling,
if they stay visible, I would presume that to be a good enough proof of
general approval. On the other hand, try measuring how much global approval
the alternatives have at this point (eDNS, uDNS, alternic an the rest of the
bunch).

Yours, John Broomfield.