[ga] Re: alternative root DNS systems which resolve ICANN domains as well?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@xxxxxx>]

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 12:16:08AM -0500,
 Simon Schuster <significants@xxxxxxxxx> wrote 
 a message of 16 lines which said:

> I'm relatively uninformed about these things, but isn't it possible
> to use an "alternative" root DNS system such as OpenNIC to resolve
> "alternate" TLDs as well as "standard" ones,

It cannot work because you need a way to resolve collisions like
".biz" or ".home" (which appear in several namespaces).

If you want uniformity (every name leads to the same resource
everywhere), you need an unique root (see RFC 2826). Period. (But may
be you don't want uniformity, may be you prefer a world where an email
to significants@xxxxxxxxx might arrive to different persons, depending
on where it was sent?)

> thereby curing the problem of ICANN's monopoly, by using a system
> which includes and surpasses ICANN's dominion?

The problem is that there is no "Yalta" to separate "dominions". If
ICANN sweared to never create a new TLD, it might work. Otherwise,
what will happen when ICANN will create ".berlin" and you already have
a ".berlin" in MyOwnPersonalToyRoot?

There was a vague project to make such a "Yalta" between ITU and
ICANN, with an obvious rule: everything with two letters (the ccTLDs)
will be managed by ITU, the rest by ICANN. Creating the root zone file
would "simply" (warning: there are traps) be a concatenation of
both. AFAIK, it was never seriously studied.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

This article explains well the collision problem.