North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Domain fees to rise...

  • From: Derek Balling
  • Date: Tue Sep 08 14:23:15 1998

>Must be irritating for a foreign entity to be forced to pay a US tax for
>an international resource. Wasn't there something like this that created
>an uproar in Boston Harbor?

This brings up something which has essentially been talked about around our
office a couple times. What is to stop all of the foreign-placed
root-servers from telling the US Government to go take some salt and pound
it hard because they're not going to listen to NSI's servers any longer?

I mean, there are a lot of foreign entities (and domestic ones too, but
let's leave that aside for the moment) who are unhappy with the way the US
Government is handling the domain registration process. What is to stop
people in other countries saying "Oh, by the way, our root server doesn't
listen to NSI any more, we get our updates from 'here'", creating an almost
civil-war attitude between root servers.

What I'm thinking of is something similiar to the whole AlterNIC concept,
but with a little better organization, with "real" root-servers joining up
and telling the US Government to pound salt.

I think that the majority of internet operators would probably side with
the foreign (perhaps independent would be a better word) root-server
operators simply because the majority of us are unhappy with NSI's position
on a number of things. Heck, I suspect that you could even convince the
BIND guys to distribute a "current independent" root-server list with the
BIND distribution as a default for future versions.

The Feds may CLAIM an "exclusive right" to the COM/EDU/NET/ORG heirarchies,
but what legal status does that claim hold outside of the confines of the
US? What other country REALLY has to listen to them? 

Not looking to start a politcal war here, but I'm just curious as to WHY
this hasn't happened, and/or what could cause it to happen in the future?

D