I'll see if I can add some more light to your concerns.
> Ok, here's where my fears come out. If we are to fractionalize and
> commercialize the roots in this manner, I can all too easily envision the
> following:
>
> Instead of laissez-faire competition and selection of the "best"
> root(s) in a meritocratic manner, we'll see corporate
> middle-management buying into one root vs. others based on completely
> unrelated political or financial reasons. Furthermore, we'll begin to
> see what's currently happening with the baby bells: They'll start
> swallowing everyone. Before you know it, all the roots will be Verio,
> or ATT, or ICANN, or whathaveyou. And then, we're back where we
> started, except that now, one corporation owns all of the legitimate
> roots.
I don't see this happening. Here's why. (And I admit, that I could well
be very wrong in my assessment of things.)
It is cheap (relatively) and easy to start a system of root servers. (The
hard part is convincing people to point to your root server group.)
So, yes, there is a risk of "the big guys" establishing their own root
systems -- in fact, I have heard that they have done so already in order
to firewall themselves away from NSI-induced errors but are merely
slavishly mirroring the "legacy root" system.
So, I'm trying to recognize a fact-of-life that we can't prevent anyway.
By having such a recognition, we make it easier for the smaller guys to go
into the business and offer an alternative without having to endure the
calumny of being told that they are risking and damaging internet
connectivity.
It's important to recognize that I'm only talking about multiple root
systems, not split TLDs. I think that it would be bad if
"freds-barber-shop.tld-x" gives inconsistent results depending on which
root system you enter through.
(It's the same thing -- if I look up "freds barber shop" in my telephone
directory, it had better give me a useable number to Fred's no matter
whether I use the AT&t phone book, my local telco's, a CD-ROM, or
switchboard.com's directory service. Whoever gives me "wrong" answers
will be crossed my list of acceptable directory service offerings.)
Yes, I see you fear that big guys will buy lucrative DNS root services
("lucrative" still feels strange to me when linked to "root services". ;-)
But the alternative is to establish a strong Internet Governance body. I
actually could be persuaded that that is "a good thing". However, given
the reluctance of so many people to even admit that ICANN is governance at
all, I doubt that we would see ICANN ever become both strong enough to be
a strong governor. And we certainly see signs that it isn't willing to be
anything less than a despotic one (albeit one that sees itself as a
beneficient democracy in its dreams.)
> San Jose, CA
Hmm, I know that city. (I work in San Jose, Calif.)
--karl--
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