North American Network Operators Group

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Re: The whole alternate-root ${STATE}horse

  • From: Michael.Dillon
  • Date: Wed Jul 06 04:52:14 2005

>    The reverse problem is more difficult to deal with -- that of 
> people wanting to access Chinese (or whatever) sites that can only be 
> found in the Chinese-owned alternative root.

There was a time when email service was almost universally
bundled with Internet access service. Nowadays it is 
quite common for people to get their email service from 
a different supplier than their access. There is no reason
why DNS resolution could not similarly be unbundled from access.
Yes, there would be some latency issues to deal with, but they
are not insurmountable.

And as I mentioned before, one easy way around all this is
for people who want to access content in a specific foreign
language to sign up for access with an ISP which provides
specific support for that foreign language. If you want to
get to sites in China using alternate domain names then you
simply buy your DSL line from an ISP who uses the alternate
roots. And as a bonus, you will probably also be able to get
technical support in Chinese as well.

All these people complaining about how this divides the 
Internet and makes it harder for them to talk to someone
in China seem to have missed the fact that there is already
a divide caused by different languages. If the Internet is
to become a global universal network then, by definition, 
it must become balkanized.

--Michael Dillon