[81974] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: The whole alternate-root ${STATE}horse (was Re: Enable BIND cache server to resolve chinese domain name?)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jay R. Ashworth)
Fri Jul 8 15:27:31 2005
Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2005 13:55:11 -0400
From: "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <20050705093636.L87893@sprockets.gibbard.org>; from Steve Gibbard <scg@gibbard.org> on Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 10:01:22AM -0700
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
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 jra@baylink.com
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
