On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 9:44 AM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 07:02:34AM +0100, Eliot Lear wrote:I have to disagree with this. The uniqueness of the root is not a
> That there is a single root is both a technical AND a
> political decision.
political decision. It's a fact of mathematics. DNS is a tree.
There's one root.
It didn't have to be a tree, it could have been something else, we could still change it.
You might think that there is no other possible technical solution but that is a failure of imagination rather than a fact. It might even be the best technical solution but the definition of 'best' is with respect to requirements.
A lot of the 'technical' arguments that are made against demands made by Russia, China, etc. are actually technical choices and it undermines our position when people falsely claim that there is no alternative.
I am currently at a conference where Fadi Chehadé just talked about Russia asking to host a root server and he led the audience to believe that there could only be 13 servers. So I had to correct him and point out that Russia already has a DNS server due to anycast and what we are actually arguing about is a root service, an abstract construct.
There is of course no technical reason that the number of services is limited to 13. We can have as many as there are institutions willing to run them at an acceptable level of reliability.
Putin's technical advisor is probably telling Putin that the westerner's claims of technical limitations are bogus and he would be right.
The argument against more root servers is political, not technical and the politics are rather more complex than just 'should Russia have one'.
At the moment the root is small and the load relatively light. In fact the legitimate load is essentially zero. The root zone could probably be distributed as a flat file, it isn't large, it doesn't change very much. Certainly it is nothing like .com. The only real issue in root server management is dealing with the load from the DoS attacks which are awesome in scale.
The main consequence of expanding the root zone is that the root zone operators would constrain future development of the DNS. The root zone is going to grow with the new TLDs. When the number of TLDs reaches a certain point there will be a tipping point and there will be pressure to open up.
Having a hundred root operators would greatly constrain those changes, But that might in part be why Russia and China want a seat at that table
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.
Uniformity of the name space is the essential criteria. The Web can't work on UUCP bang path addressing.
Describing this as having a single root conflates a large number of issues and essentially commits to a particular conclusion. A uniform namespace is a requirement, a single 'root' is not.
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