Myth 1: "Tweaking NSI is the goal"
Reality:
NSI doesn't give a hoot about maintaining the root zone. NSI's root
server operators participated in the root zone operator meetings, and
basically agreed with everything.
The only thing that NSI cares about is that it's .com zone is
pointed to by the root, and it knows very well that it is a
practical impossibility to remove .com from the root. Therefore,
maintaining the root zone is just an extra operational headache for
NSI, with no concrete gain.
NSI doesn't make any decisions about names that go in the root, in
any case -- it is NTIA, in particular Becky Burr, who makes those
decisions.
Gordon Cook perpetuated this myth, and apparently took in a lot of
gullible people, in one of his disinformation-grams recently. In
it he, through ignorance or deceit, confuses the root zone with the
.com zone (and implicitly .net/.org)
> Try: "Lets get the A root shifted over here where we can have ultimate
> control before that the spanner that damn senator dropped in the machine
> falls between those two big cogs down there and grinds our master plan to a
> halt."
Myth 2: This move gives ICANN "ultimate control" over anything at all.
Reality:
NTIA retains administrative control over the contents of the root
zone.
The root zone is tiny -- 240 some entries -- and could be maintained
on a laptop as a simple text file, to be emailed to the root zone
servers, and they, of course, all have current copies. It really
doesn't matter at all where the original is maintained. It can be
reproduced instantly. What matters is who the root server operators
agree to take updates from.
>
> >And I would think that the DNSO, and thus the IDNO via its future DNSO
> >membership, ought to have had a voice in this.
>
> Nothing should be done until ICANN has a democratically elected board
> instead of these "ring-in's".
You've heard the saying "time waits for no man"?
ICANN has a charter to ensure the stability of the root server
system, and the first thing on their agenda in that regard has been
the Y2K problem -- everybody in a position to say anything about it
agrees that it would be prudent to be sure that the root server
system doesn't go belly up Jan 1, regardless of whether ICANN has a
membership...or whether has got its act together... or whether an
IDNO exists...
-- Kent Crispin "Do good, and you'll be kent@songbird.com lonesome." -- Mark Twain