Re: The formerly controversial sentence in the "Statement of Principl

[Phil Howard <phil@charon.ipal.net>]

Roberto Gaetano writes:

> I guess that, in light of the White Paper, the following sentence of the
> Statement of Principles is no longer controversial:
> 
> >    STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES CONCERNING GENERIC TOP LEVEL DOMAINS
> >
>         ......
> >
> >   II.  IANA currently has control over all TLDs in the global DNS,

IANA currently has no such control, and never has.  They have control over
a set of decisions they can make, and there is recognition of their decisions.
But there simply is no control of root servers they do not actually operate.


> Purpose
> The new corporation should ultimately have the authority to manage and
> perform a specific set of functions related to coordination of the domain
> name system, including the authority to:
> 
> 2) oversee operation of the authoritative Internet root server system
> 3) oversee policy for determining the circumstances under which new TLDs are
> added to the root system;

Authority can only be granted from those who have it in the first place.
The USG has never had such authority, and so, cannot grant it.  The Green
Paper always has been moot.

Because root servers are delegated via the root zone hints (formerly known
as cache) file in each of the DNS servers all over the world, the real
control exists in a distributed way all over the Internet.  Alternate root
servers and Grass Roots Servers show this to be the case.


> This statement should close the discussion on these lists on this subject:
> it looks that the US Government and the "Statement of Principles" agree, at
> least on this point.

Not all of those who do really have the control realize the power that
is in their keyboards.  With a few keystrokes, the world of name server
administrators can "take the ball and go home" leaving all those who are
trying to assert control with nothing to play with but some big idle
boxes.

One can decide to recognize IANA's root server "space", or anyone else's.
Or they can make their own.  The only truly free (as in freedom) decision
can be made when one knows all the facts, choices, and implications.  And
the choices are certainly not limited to recognizing the traditional central
root name servers as the authority for the TLD space.  Anyone who wants to
recognize that authority can, and should.  But they should at least realize
that they make that choice because they trust and believe in those who will
make the decisions in that space for them.

If you want to do otherwise, see:  http://grs.milepost.com/

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