On Mon, 8 Dec 2003, Bill Manning wrote: > % Or more simply, may be kill the real time root servers concept and review > % the DNS as a non God centralized system? If there was nothing to protect > % because there would be nothing, we would risk far less from there. > > Been there, done that. The TBDS project (circa 1999/2000) > eliminated the requirement for an always on, fully connected > mesh, with access to any external authoritative servers, be > they root, tld, or anywhere else in the heirarchy. > > The upshot was that the DNS is -fully- placed in the hands of > the endusers. We did not replace one centralized service with > another or even a collection of centralized services, e.g. > no ICANN, no IANA, no nation state, no private industry, no > NGO or multinational treaty organization. It was -COMPLETELY- > up to the endusers. The answer "DNS is in the hands of the endusers" is a trivial answer. It is literally true, in the same sense that a democracy is in the hands of the voters. Sure, the end users (end nameserver operators) put a list of root servers in their DNS cache configuration, and thereby fully choose the set of root servers they are going to use. But the fact is that there is a root zone whose contents are not chosen by the end users, and that there is a set of root servers made available to service this zone. And the contents of this zone has in the past been put together by a consenus, and the same is true of the operation of the root servers. The main criticism is that the "consenus" doesn't include the developing world. Can we just arbitrarilly decide to create our own root servers? Sure. But this isn't what people looking to do. They are looking for international cooperation, and they are looking to get away from unilateralism. If we leave the international community no choice, they could create their root servers, TLDs, and their own address registries and begin interconnecting themselves with their own internet. If they really wanted to get fancy, they might include some NATs, web proxies, and email gateways for connection to our internet. But I think this path is something that should be avoided. It would be a major mistake to leave the international community, and in particular the developing world, with this as their only option. They could very well take it. --Dean
