Re: [ga] A Windfall for VeriSign?

[Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ross Rader wrote:

> I'll leave the rest for others to comment on, but I will flatly state 
> that the DNS and the registration is a public resource and it needs to 
> be managed as such. This isn't an analogy, its a statement of fact.
I take a rather different point of view.

I perceive DNS as an application that is layered onto the internet.

It is a useful and important application, but it is just an application 
that users may chose to use, chose to ignore, deploy their own, or 
invent something else.
Most people do not like surprises and would not invite inconsistency 
into their lives, so most people chose to ride on the main deployment of 
DNS.
And it is appropriate for that main deployment to manage itself.

But it is not appropriate for that main deployment to eject the choices 
and innovations of others who, to usurp a phrase, think different.
That right to think and do differently is the heart and soul of the 
concept of innovation at the edge, the end-to-end principle, and the 
first law of the internet 
(http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000059.html)
I don't see DNS deployments as "resources" in the sense that they are 
some sort of exhaustible pool - As I mentioned elsewhere the number of 
possible TLDs is a number rather larger than this:
11,144,421,984,854,529,111,291,814,965,840,121,701,917,784,688,171,700,627,654,810,062,931,821,453,496,825,690,394,892,284,041,625 

In other words, we could assign a trillion trillion TLDs to every 
electron in the universe and still have mountains of TLDs to spare.
And inside *each* TLD we can have that same number of second level 
names.  And inside each second level name we can have that many third 
level names, and so forth until we hit the maximum size of a DNS name.
And if that isn't enough we can have as many different DNS systems on 
the net as we chose to construct; in fact each user of the net could 
have his/her own private DNS system - I've tried it, it does work.
The issue is not "resource" or "public resource".  Rather it is consistency.

There is little incentive for people to create clashing DNS systems; 
there is much incentive to create DNS systems that mesh without 
inconsistencies.
In other words, the idea that we need a system to coerce consistency is 
an idea that is duplicative with, redundant to, and repetitive of a 
natural self interest towards consistency.
Do we have a regulatory body to ensure that objects fall in response to 
gravity?  No, that would be silly even though quantum physics says that 
there is a very small chance that a thing could fall upwards.  Yet we 
have an ICANN that tries to mandate that there will be no DNS but 
ICANN's DNS as an equally strange means to prevent DNS inconsistencies 
that will, through the natural course of events and the drive of human 
self interest, rarely arise.
Had ICANN never occurred it is my belief that we would have had, by now, 
a viable internet with a multiplicity of DNS systems, nearly all being 
consistent with one another.  (Some groups would chose to be 
intentionally different, but that would be their choice and their burden 
to bear.)  On such an internet we would not have the singular point of 
failure and attack that today's DNS represents, and it would have 
eliminated the vast internet tax - over $500,000,000 every year as 
measured in excessive domain name fees - that ICANN imposes on the net.
What is "consistency"?  Is it perfect alignment of name spaces?  No, not 
even ICANN's singular DNS can provide that - DNS is always shifting as 
servers update information asynchronously from one another, as caches 
fill and time out, and as resolvers make random choices of the order in 
which they package resource records into responses.  (And DNS names are 
terribly unreliable as stable names over even short periods of time.)
Consistency is a mode in which, if a TLD exists at all, its contents are 
the same, modulo updates and caching, no matter where a name in that TLD 
is uttered and no matter by whom that name is uttered.  And we have a 
time honored means to enforce this - the trade and service mark law of 
individual nations and the associated inter-national mechanisms.
But consistency does not require that every TLD exist everywhere any 
more than every supermarket is obligated to carry exactly the same 
brands of products - as long as those who consume names are satisfied or 
have the ability (directly or via ISPs acting as their agents) to chose 
a DNS provider more in keeping with their expectations.
Had we had such a mechanism, a mechanism that is precluded by ICANN, we 
would not have the tremendous TLD selection issue.
Rather, new aspiring TLDs could try to make their way into the inventory 
of DNS providers, much as new TV stations try to find their way into the 
offerings of cable and satellite TV providers, much as new brands of 
laundry soap fight for space on the shelves of supermarket chains.
ICANN represents a deep lack of faith in the workings of the marketplace 
and, instead, harkens back to the ideas of centrally planned economies 
such as espoused in the Five Year Plans of the now defunct Soviet Union.
So, at the bottom of things, I find the words "public resource", and 
"trust", and even "property" to be conclusory terms that keep us from 
getting down to the level where we can find answers that give us the 
kind of internet that we want.
                --karl--