On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 07:02:34AM +0100, Eliot Lear wrote: > That there is a single root is both a technical AND a > political decision. I have to disagree with this. The uniqueness of the root is not a political decision. It's a fact of mathematics. DNS is a tree. There's one root. Now, one might argue that choosing this kind of name space was a political decision. I might buy that argument (I don't know). There's good reason to suppose that there was at least some organizational principle behind the decision in favour of a hierarchical namespace. There were technical constraints too, I think: I don't believe a fully peer to peer system was practical in the network environment of the 1980s. But if we wanted to call anything that had non-technical elements in it "political", then the selection of the DNS (hierarchical) name space was in that sense political. This is not to say that the single root doesn't have additional political implications. But I will not concede that this is some contingent fact of the DNS that could be otherwise. The particular root we have could be different. That there is a single root could not. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx