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Re: [ga] is ICANN or is ICANN not? - "CS" fate
- To: Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, Roberto Gaetano <roberto@xxxxxxxxx>
- Subject: Re: [ga] is ICANN or is ICANN not? - "CS" fate
- From: Hugh Dierker <hdierker2204@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:39:55 -0800 (PST)
- Cc: "'Elisabeth Porteneuve'" <Elisabeth.Porteneuve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Domainkey-signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com; h=Message-ID:X-YMail-OSG:Received:Date:From:Subject:To:Cc:In-Reply-To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding; b=VuceFhrYyh6NnH3RMdA/RdoR29QKWKJ+mRUJq6QZJOCo4MHqJGD9bnlpsdBiqnZkQk0NkM+X5EzMuyTFfV0nIMzwiZFbNrhOXeR1Z/maWBQuyWTUgVxVYRrQKNZrOuQRUKVY5Nigyb13y0+hz0i4zENjlvsb7oC3zBvTh1W/JrQ= ;
- In-reply-to: <45BE78BE.6090902@cavebear.com>
- Sender: owner-ga@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Karl,
This does help clear things up a bit, and thank you for putting it in such affable language.
Your third to last par. 1 ln. "carred" was meant to be carried and not some term I am unfamiliar with or "carded" like olden days?
Eric
Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Roberto Gaetano wrote:
> Elisabeth Porteneuve wrote:
>
>> When all national networks put country of origin component at
>> the right end of the domain, JANET reversed the order,
>> starting with the country of origin on the left, for example:
>> kirstein@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Is there any connection between putting items left-to-right vs.
> right-to-left with driving on the left vs. the right side of the road?
This is one of those situations that Lessig wrote about, how running code
coerces choices.
Domain names, at the protocol level, do not have dots. And are composed of a
sequence of length/value pairs. In the protocol the root comes at the end of
the sequence, the TLD would be the penultimate item in the sequence, etc. Thus
in www.cavebear.com, the labels would be, in sequence, 3/www, 8/cavebear,
3/com, 0/(root)
What we see as "www.cavebear.com" is largely a textual convention for human
consumption. It is a convention that, however, is embedded into zone files and
URLs/URI's and has thus become effectively immutable.
Nearly all software resolves names by calling a function called
"gethostbyname". (There are variations, but for our purposes we need not be
concerned with those variations.)
That code encloses and encapsulates the interpretation of the human-visible
sequence of domain name labels.
There is no context information, no locale, that is carred along with domain
names to indicate whether the textual sequence of labels is the normal
...TLD.root format or the root.TLD... format. There is no way for
gethostbyname() to be smart, the best it could do would be a heuristic
reordering in case a primary lookup fails.
When the UK deviate format was live there was a great deal of confusion both by
people and in software. Those were the days before DNS and thus the cure was
largely to do name lookups in the local hostname file using the entire textual
string, and populating the hostname file with both variants for the UK deviant
names or having software try to reverse the name if the normal scan failed.
It was a downright ugly situation and to some extent did cause an impedance
mismatch when sending email to/from the UK.
--karl--
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