Andrew, I think I will have to disagree with you in your over simplification. There can be/ have been multiple roots in the DNS - HOWEVER, there is a always a single root _per class_. One root for IN, one root for CH, one for HS, etc… These days, every class but IN is vestigial, so it is easy to conflate the IN class with the DNS as a whole. /bill -picking nits- Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet. On 7January2014Tuesday, at 6:44, Andrew Sullivan <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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