[81970] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: The whole alternate-root ${STATE}horse (was Re: Enable BIND
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steve Gibbard)
Fri Jul 8 15:27:06 2005
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2005 10:01:22 -0700 (PDT)
From: Steve Gibbard <scg@gibbard.org>
To: "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <20050705094039.A20852@cgi.jachomes.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
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.
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?
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.
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), 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.
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.
-Steve
