[ga] Re: is ICANN or is ICANN not?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@xxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 05:07:27PM -0800,
 Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote 
 a message of 81 lines which said:

> There is an assumption within ICANN that DNS names are globally
> unique identifiers,

This is widely accepted, even far away from ICANN. See for instance
AFNIC's statement at
http://forum.icann.org/lists/cctld-sunset-comments/msg00061.html or
Nominet's one at
http://forum.icann.org/lists/cctld-sunset-comments/msg00063.html.

> DNS names suffer from many forms of variability, particularly in the
> temporal sense, that make them undesirable as long-term global
> identifiers.

This is not something we should accept. We need long-term global
identifiers and the DNS is one of the few contenders in that respect
(there are long-term global identifiers which do not require DNS
stability, the tags of RFC 4151 are a good example, but they are not
resolvable, which is certainly a problem for some applications).

> The idea here is that there are a lot of us stuck in .com are here
> from the days when there was no choice as to TLD (not that today the
> choices are really very different from one another.)  We are locked
> in

That's very strange. You say that Internet users should not rely on
long-term stability of names and then you say that, because you
registered in ".com" a long time ago, you are stuck in? Why don't you
register cavebear.ch (our swiss colleagues do not require an address
in Switzerland) and use it?