RE: RFC 2010

[Jim Fleming <JimFleming at doorstep.unety.net>]

On Friday, March 20, 1998 7:22 AM, Harald Tveit Alvestrand[SMTP:Harald.Alvestrand at maxware.no] wrote:
<snip>
@
@Moving root servers out of the US makes *excellent* engineering sense,
@IMHO, AND conforms to RFC 2010.
@

Establishing Root Name Server CLUSTERS in various places
in the world makes engineering sense.

Moving (or adding) individual servers from (to) the U.S.-centric
legacy CLUSTER makes no sense.

Why should politically motivated moves produce engineering
results whereby an unsuspecting ISP sitting in the middle of
the U.S. finds their "hints" coming from Root Servers located
half way around the world ? This increases traffic on expensive
links and impacts overall performance.

One of the results of this political "move" was that educated
ISPs now run their own form of Root Name Servers. Some
now follow Phil Howard's Grass Roots Server approach. In
summary, the larger ISPs have decoupled themselves from
the legacy RSC. They find the new TLDs and point directly to
them. They have software to do this automatically.

Now the world has seen that the U.S. Government is not
going to allow their legacy Root Name Server Cluster to be
manipulated by Jon Postel. Jon added 4 additional servers
over the course of a year in hopes of having enough critical
mass that he could move the legacy RSC off shore. Apparently
the U.S. Government was not amused with his "experiment".

You folks preach stability yet you endorse the continued
support for a fragile and unstructured "root". In the IPv8 Plan,
we start with a structured root. It is very simple, there are
2,048 slots for TLDs. Each slot has a G:S number. With that
number a TLD registry can locate where they "sit" at a world
round table of other TLD administrations. This approach brings
2000+ stakeholders into a loosely structured decision-making
forum, where they are all peers.

People in the various I* organizations do not want a structured
root. Instead, they want to keep all of the power and control
in the hands of a few. Now that the U.S. Government has seen
their approach, the U.S. Government has pointed out that they
will gladly be that single point of control. In the IPv8 Plan, this
places the U.S. Government in all of the "seats" for the TLDs
they control. That is fine, it is not very many and more TLDs
are being created every day.

...back to work...creating TLDs...;-)

-
Jim Fleming
Unir Corporation
IBC, Tortola, BVI