[35904] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Multiple Roots are "a good thing" - Karl Auerbach
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven M. Bellovin)
Sun Mar 18 16:18:58 2001
From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu (North America Network Operators Group Mailing List)
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Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2001 15:10:15 -0600
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In message <20010318204704.40B8D8C@proven.weird.com>, Greg A. Woods writes:
>
>[ On Sunday, March 18, 2001 at 14:23:26 (-0500), Miles Fidelman wrote: ]
>> Subject: Re: Multiple Roots are "a good thing" - Karl Auerbach
>>
>> I would suggest that telephone books/directories are not an appropriate
>> analogy. Rather, DNS is a lot closer to the internal plumbing of the net -
>> more akin to Signalling System #7. I'd guess that for 95% or more of phone
>> calls, the caller already knows the numeric phone number in question -
>> while for the Internet, very few people give their email addresses as
>> mfidelman@207.226.172.79 or http://207.226.172.79. Telephone directories
>> are optional in most cases, DNS is not.
>
>You are absolutely correct. :-)
>
>Telephone directories are most definitely *not* like the DNS. A domain
>name is more like a telephone number itself, and as you say the IP
>numbers are more like the underlying circuit routing glue in something
>like SS#7. We really do not have a "telephone directory" for the
>Internet (unless you count WHOIS/RWHOIS).
Right. And even for phone numbers, there's a single authority
controlling the space. Internationally, it's the ITU; within the U.S./
Candadian zone, it's the North American Number Plan Administrator.
And its problem has been too little supervision -- see
http://www.bergen.com/biz/codes18200103181.htm
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb
