North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: The whole alternate-root ${STATE}horse (was Re: Enable BIND cache server to resolve chinese domain name?)
On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 10:01:22AM -0700, Steve Gibbard wrote: > On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: > > But Steve appeared to be suggesting that there was no reasonable way to > > *avoid* problems -- and that's clearly not the case. If I misinterpreted > > Steve, no doubt he'll correct me. But there are two fairly prominent, > > I don't think that was what I said. What I was attempting to say is that > the issue of alternate roots probably isn't something that's worth > worrying about. I see no reason why they'll catch on, other than perhaps > in limited cases where they'll work ok. Catch on in the consumer sense? No, probably not -- though the question is "will IAP's switch their resolver servers to an alt-root".... which leads directly to: > In the general case, with alternate roots, there's a chicken and egg > problem. Right now, if you're an end user doing your DNS lookups via the > ICANN root, you can get to just about everything. If you're something > that end users want to connect to, using an ICANN-recognized domain will > mean almost everybody can get to you, while an "alternative" TLD would > mean only a tiny fraction of the Internet would be able to get to you. > So, if you're a content provider, why would you use anything other than a > real ICANN-recognized domain? And, if the content providers aren't using > real domain names, why would an end user care about whether they can get > to the TLDs that nobody is using? Two points: 1) this speaks to the same issue as my comments the other day on the IPv6 killer app, though it's admittedly even harder to posit a site which would do this. 2) Based on the events earlier in the week, I believe that's a "US Department of Commerce" approved TLD... which changes the game a little bit. > This is the same phonomenon we saw ten years ago, as the various "online > services," GENIE, Prodigy, MCIMail, Compuserve, AOL, etc. either > interconnected their e-mail systems with the Internet or faded away and > died. As the Internet got more and more critical mass, there was less and > less incentive to be using something else. It's been a long time since > I've seen a business card with several different, incompatible, e-mail > addresses printed on it, and that's because something simpler worked, not > because people screamed loudly about the falling sky. Certainly. But there weren't geopolitical implications there, merely commercial ones. I think the stakes may be a bit higher here, particularly in the case we were using as an example: China. > The exceptions to this that I see would be either when somebody comes out > with something that is so much better that it's useful in spite of a lack > of an installed userbase (Skype may be doing this to phone calls), Yup. Killer apps are great. Hard to predict; *really* hard to invent. > or when > something is rolled out to a large enough self-contained user community > that the lack of ability to communicate outside that region won't be a > significant barrier. If a few large countries were to roll out alternate > root zones nation-wide, in such a way that they worked well for domestic > communication, but couldn't be used for international stuff, *maybe* that > would be good enough to catch on. But still, anybody wanting to > communicate outside that region or userbase would probably find they were > much happier using addresses that met global standards. But again, you're positing that someone would create a root zone that *purposefully* conflicted with the current one, which doesn't seem supported by history, much less common sense. Am I wrong that you mean that? > So anyhow, that's a long way of saying that, just as this hasn't gone > anywhere any of the many other times it's been raised over the last > several years, it's unlikely to go anywhere, or cause problems, this time. Maybe. China's *really* big. America's *really* unpopular, in some places. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth [email protected] Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 If you can read this... thank a system administrator. Or two. --me
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