Michael, Thursday, October 31, 2002, 6:28:08 PM, you wrote: Michael> http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/icann-body.htm#B170 Michael> tells the story as best I could reconstruct it. There are footnotes to Michael> the documents I could find. Notice that Professor Froomkin's "To his detractors" text does not attempt any balance by offering any other explanation. As even Prof. Froomkin notes, things were fragile back then. That included concern over the possibility that NSI would go rogue. NSI controlled the master root. The one that all others took their data from. Jon needed to test the ability to switch to a different master DNS root, to make sure that there were ways to "route around" this concern over NSI. That's all the test was. Jon was clear about the need for this, weeks before the test. All anyone needed to do was ask him, rather than engage in unfounded, inflammatory speculation. The other point that folks keep forgetting is that Jon had been issuing operation directives for the root servers since the inception of the DNS. How can one "take over" something that one has been responsible for over its entire existence? All of the storm and fury has been from people who have had nothing to do with the running of the DNS, but instead have focused strictly on the politics of it. (In fact, it was quite interesting to see that a year of federal inter-agency task force meetings -- including Magaziner's participation -- took place with most participants having almost no understanding of DNS technical basics. We had to arrange a tutorial for them.) d/ -- Dave Crocker <mailto:dave@tribalwise.com> TribalWise <http://www.tribalwise.com> t +1.408.246.8253; f +1.408.850.1850