[ga] Re: [IFWP] What I would have said...

[Jeff Williams <jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com>]

Jim and all,

  Well said Jim.  And for the most part you are correct.  It is just that
poor old Roberto just can't grasp these concepts very well.  He needs
guidance allot of it.  Hence like many of his type will gravitate towards
any group or person that will tell him what do do and when to do it.
Roberto recently graphically demonstrated that when he left ETSI
and went to another organization.  In that relatively simple migration,
he improperly neglected to unsubscribe himself from several mailing
lists.  A relatively simple planning task, but Roberto didn't seem
to even grasp this simple responsibility.   <Sigh>

Jim Dixon wrote:

> On Fri, 23 Jul 1999 R.Gaetano@iaea.org wrote:
>
> > I have nothing in principle against multiple roots, I just fail to
> > understand how this could be a better system than a common root under public
> > trust.
>
> While it may have been obvious to other people sooner, it has only fairly
> recently become clear to me that "a common root under public trust" is
> also a choke point, control of which permits control of the entire
> Internet.  The DNS wars of the last few years are the result: most of the
> various people, organisations, and governments involved in this dispute
> are there because they want control of the Internet.   The single root
> draws them like rotting meat draws flies.
>
> If the twentieth century has any lessons to teach, one of the most
> obvious must be that control by any single party is bad.
>
> ICANN is simply an illustration of just how bad it can be.  Charitably,
> this is a harmless group of gormless dilettantes dabbling in matters that
> they don't understand.  To the more suspicious of us, it looks a lot like
> a conspiracy cooked up between a hodge-podge of certain large
> corporations; middle-ranking bureaucrats in Washington, Brussels, and
> Geneva; and various unpleasant control freaks.
>
> ICANN was selected by hidden forces, lacks any support from the Internet
> community, is trusted by precious few -- but ISOC, the ITU, the IAB, CORE,
> and certain elements of the US government and the European Commission have
> lined up to support it.
>
> Why?  Certainly not because of ICANN's intrinsic worth.  It's because all
> are convinced that they can control ICANN and through ICANN the Internet.
> They see ICANN's lack of legitimacy, its weakness, the ICANN board's
> incompetence as positive features: they make ICANN easier to control.
>
> What we, the Internet community, need is a distributed DNS with no
> single choke point.  We need a formula that moves power away from the
> center and towards the edges.
>
> The most powerful factor driving the growth of the Internet has been
> the fact that no one central authority has been able to legislate
> what is best.  In the end, that decision has been made by no one and
> everyone.
>
> The nanny forces decided that OSI was better than TCP/IP.  They
> decided that X400 was the way to go for email.  They mandated one
> silly thing after another.  The Internet community junked these
> centrally mandated solutions: the Internet's guiding principle has
> always been that what matters is what works.
>
> Esther Dyson's $1 tax on .com domain names may seem harmless.  It
> isn't.  If accepted, it establishes a principle: taxes can be imposed
> on the entire Internet and on any particular part of the Internet.  Once
> this is agreed, we will find that we have created a monster that has the
> power to destroy anyone that disagrees with the ICANN board and the
> shadowy forces behind it.
>
> The Dyson tax, if accepted, also establishes another principle: we must
> bow to the center.  It doesn't matter if it works, it doesn't matter if
> it makes sense.  What matters is what our superiors tell us to do.
>
> We don't need this.
>
> We don't need rule from above: we need an IANA that facilitates
> cooperation, not an ICANN that tells us what to do.
>
> We don't need control from the center: we need a recognition that
> hundreds of thousands of people working in loose cooperation are
> much more intelligent than any small committee.
>
> > I find the analogy with the phone system (as you present it) not fully
> > applicable, as the phone number is a "key" in the system, and therefore
> > unique due to the way that the system is built, while the domain name is an
> > "attribute" of the unique key (the IP address), and therefore could be
> > duplicated.
>
> I don't want to dwell on pseudo-technical side-issues but:
>
> You are simply wrong.  You have domain names that map into multiple IP
> addresses (round-robin DNS) and Web servers with many domain names mapping
> into one IP address.   The DNS is not 1:1 and it's not 1:N.  It is N:N.
>
> The telephone directory system and the DNS are two very different things;
> a telco background does not qualify you to pontificate on Internet issues.
>
> --
> Jim Dixon                                                 Managing Director
> VBCnet GB Ltd                http://www.vbc.net        tel +44 117 929 1316
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Member of Council                               Telecommunications Director
> Internet Services Providers Association                       EuroISPA EEIG
> http://www.ispa.org.uk                              http://www.euroispa.org
> tel +44 171 976 0679                                    tel +32 2 503 22 65

Regards,

--
Jeffrey A. Williams
Spokesman INEGroup (Over 95k members strong!)
CEO/DIR. Internet Network Eng/SR. Java/CORBA Development Eng.
Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC.
E-Mail jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com
Contact Number:  972-447-1894
Address: 5 East Kirkwood Blvd. Grapevine Texas 75208