Re: .COM Clusters are Not RSCs

[Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu>]

> > > > That addresses only one of several concerns.  It presumes that someone
> > > > has the right to "own" a particular gTLD, if he can sign up some
> > > > number of users.  I disagree with that presumption.
> > > 
> > > Then go argue with every TLD operator currently in existence, 
> > > including .US.
> > 
> > Read my statement again.  (hint: you missed the 'g'.)
> 
> You misLED people by insisting on claiming that there is a difference.
> 
> THERE IS NOT.  Several so-called country-code TLDs are being farmed out and
> registrations sold to any and all comers, REGARDLESS of the nationality of
> the registrant.

Sure.  It's up to each domain owner to decide how their sub-domains
can be used.  That's no different for a TLD than for any other domain.

> A TLD is a TLD.  Deal with reality Keith, or shut down .TO and others which
> have turned into completely-commercial havens.

So just because IANA decided to delegate some TLDs to nation-states,
that somehow gives individuals the right to claim a chunk of TLD space
as their own?

You have a strange definition of reality.

> > > There is not ONE current TLD that has this policy in the root.  
> > 
> > That's because the folks who were paid to administer those TLDs have
> > been acting like they own them.  That's the root of this whole mess.
> 
> Gee, and the people who were given them for free (ie: xxxx.IL.US from .US)?  
> They aren't doing the same thing?  They certainly are.

While I don't particularly like the way that some US subdomains are
being handled, neither do I pretend that this has implications for the
global Internet on the same scale as splitting the DNS root.

> > Your mind is truly twisted.  Somehow the root of this whole problem
> > becomes a 'precedent' that is used to justify perpetuation of the
> > problem.
> 
> Again, there are ~200 precedents and ALL OF THEM speak to the same point -
> that TLDs are, in fact, owned.

And we also know that this doesn't work well.  
We can either repeat the past, or we can learn from it.


> You're trying to paint NSI as the "bad guy".  

It's a big swamp, and there are lots of alligators trying to rule it. 
NSI is by no means innocent, but neither is it the only bad guy.

> Unfortunately, the REAL problem lies squarely within the IANA and
> Postel's cranium, in that he thinks he can play tin-pot dictator and
> God in handing out monopolies ONLY TO A SELECT FEW PEOPLE, and in
> fact he HAS been doing this since he got that responsibility.

I could as easily state that the REAL problem is the crackpots who
think they understand large-scale distributed systems, intellectual
property law, and/or politics well enough to insist that they can
singlehandedly dictate the solution to this problem ...  but who in
attempting to do so only succeed in disrupting any chance that the
IETF might have in providing a technical component to a solution.


> The entire REASON that COM is valuable is that there are few other choices!
> Destroy THAT, and the profit motive disappears.

Sure enough, but then you get other problems.  Wishful thinking won't
make them go away.  Any alleged lack of foresight in past decisions
doesn't justify willful blindness in future ones.

> Now which would you prefer to pay:
> 
> 1)	$15/year
> 2)	$95/year
> 
> For the SAME SERVICE.

Depends.  If the $15/year service is run by crackpots who don't know a
damn thing about what they're doing, and the $95/year service is run
by professionals, I'd pay $95/year without the slightest hesitation.
A single failure on the part of the crackpots would cost me far more
than the difference in cost.

> I note for your edification that CORE is going to charge, according to the
> last mail from their list that I saw, $15/year/domain FOR THE BACK END
> DATABASE SERVICES *ALONE*.

I don't see any problem with CORE's requirements for registrars nor
their costs.  If you separate the registrar and registry functions
you're going to get slightly higher costs.  That's a given.  But
competition by the registrars will keep prices from going too high,
and the extra cost is worth it to prevent monopoly control over TLDs.

(The real problem with the NSI deal wasn't the $50/year cost, even
though that cost was excessive.  The problem was giving them exclusive
control over the TLDs and the database of Internet domain holders
without either competition or a significant amount of oversight.)

> I believe we can do *THE WHOLE THING*, including the front office functions,
> for that price - and not take a loss - even though I'm doing to do SEVERAL
> times as much work as CORE is for the same amount of money.

Sure, you may believe this, but you've already demonstrated your
naivete in such matters.

> > > This means that the funnel function is FLAT; there is ZERO cache
> > > coherency, since the roots take ALL the hits for the names in 
> > > the zone (since they hold the zone) and then refer the hits out 
> > > to the server with the "A" record (or MX, or whatever).
> > 
> > That's not true for all the roots.  Some of the roots currently also
> > serve some of the gTLDS, but not all of them.  And this is a
> > configuration issue, not an inherent limitation or feature of the
> > current protocols or software.
> 
> But the argument you're making is that the root will BREAK if we load a
> bunch of TLDs.  

Nope, that's not the argument I'm making.


> The issue you're concerned about ends up being a 90%+ net *DECREASE* in 
> traffic to the root servers, not an increase.

I don't know where you get this idea.

More TLDs means more traffic to the root servers, because each DNS
server does a separate query for each TLD to get it into the cache.
It pretty much adds up to one NS query per TLD per DNS server per DNS
server restart.  Do the math.

A split root means more traffic to the root servers, because then each
DNS server will search each of several root servers until it finds an
NS record for a TLD.  Each query to a root server that doesn't return
a valid NS record is one more than is happening now.

> You are arguing that the root systems will break if we allow 15,000 TLDs in
> them tomorrow. 

Nope, that's not what I'm arguing.  The root servers could handle 15K
TLDs under present conditions.  

However, integration of DNS signatures are another thing entirely.
With 15K root domains, changes to the root would be more frequent, the
root zone would have to be signed more often, and the effective TTL
for the root zone would be lower.

But this is beside the point.  15K exclusively-owned TLDs is
undesirable for lots of other reasons than the technical problems with
the root.  If the only problems were technical, we'd solve them.

> Since you continue to propound that it will break, I conclude one of two
> things:
> 
> 1)	You don't know what you're talking about.
> 2)	You DO know what you're talking about, and you are DELIBERATELY
> 	MISLEADING PEOPLE.  The next question is "why?"

When did you stop beating your wife, Karl?

Keith