Re: [wg-c] Why not seek peace? Why the ruckus?

[John Charles Broomfield <jbroom@manta.outremer.com>]

> What I meant, about Chris, is that IOD made a seriously good faith
> effort to be pro forma compliant with the IANA.

That is *YOUR* opinion. It is a very subjective opinion. On the same line of
subjective opinions, I believe (note that I indicate that mine is an opinion
instead of trying to throw it across as a fact) that Chris saw a great
oportunity to Get Rich Quick, and while everyone was "thinking out loud", he
decided that he might be able to force the issue into making it look as an
accepted decision, so he tried to subrepticiously (sp?) get a $US1K check
through the mess, and say "I've got '.web'". Dollar signs rolled very fast
in his eyes clouding out any other line of reasoning. One thing most of us
have learnt on the internet is that the "Get Rich Quick" are either fake,
illegal, don't work, or a good combination of all three.
Now, onto some FACTS...

> The bottom-line is
> that IANA was never even a legal entity and never did have any sort of
> legal backing in meat-space. Its only authority came from the
> co-operation of the internet community. IANA could never coerce
> anything, directly. It may sound sacrilegious to say this, but it is
> true.

It is not sacrilegious in the least. It is 100% correct. Now, what people
are quick to dismiss is that the respectability that IANA had was precisely
BECAUSE it was(is) acknowledged by the 'net community.
As far as maintaining a set of root-servers, there is very little difference
(technically) between what IANA was doing, in comparison to what AlterNic,
eDNS, uDNS ORSC or whatever all the other alternative RSCs tried to do.
After all, each of them were(are?) running a set of root-servers with a set
of TLDs in them. Now, some 4 years after Alternic started messing around,
which is the RSC that (virtually) everyone is pointing at? It's still the
IANA legacy RSC, despite all the noise that all the other RSCs have made
(and anyone who thinks they HAVEN'T made noise has been living under a rock.
No Jay, it's not a cue for your blackout conspiracy theory).

> The IANA is somewhat better off, now that it is part of the ICANN,
> but even the ICANN is ONLY a California non-profit corp. It has no more
> legal/governance authority than MHSC. ICANN can not send the police in
> to shut down MHSC name servers, for example. For ICANN to try it, would
> open them up to some serious anti-trust charges.

Nobody wants to shut down ANYONES name servers. The way DNS works is
hierachical top-down (no matter how politically incorrect that may sound, it
IS how it works. To pretend otherwise is foolish).
IANA will only be better off within ICANN, because there will be a legal
entity which can be referred to and held accountable (hmmm, if you look at
it hypocritically you could say that it is worse off because it becomes
liable, whereas before it was rather difficult).
The respectability or not that ICANN will have will only be if it manages to
provide a continuity to the respectability of IANA. If it is NOT
respectable, it will be ignored. If it is ignored, it is irrelevant.
There is no difference technically between the IANA root servers and the
MHSC root servers. In reality, the MHSC are (for nearly all purposes)
irrelevant, whereas thos of IANA are very much relevant. It is clear that
IANA has world respectability, and MHSC does not. (No, I'm not insulting, I
am stating fact. Don't read that last sentence on its own, or it is out of
context).

> What this WG is working  on, and the reason I am here, is to seek some
> sort of compromise position that would let us co-exist and to continue
> the co-operation. This is my personal good-faith effort, as with Chris
> and the IANA. I am all for mutual existance and harmony. However, there
> are some some serious "I and ONLY I" folks in this forum. I obliquely
> refered to this earlier when I pointed out that one side of this debate
> is perfectly willing to acknowlege the existance of the other side. But,
> that other side only seeks the total extinction of the former. As long
> as that sort of attitude exists then we will never reach consensus.

I agree very much that this forum has a bunch of "I and ONLY I" folks, who
actually try to disguise themselves as being willing to reach compromise, by
trying to project that uncompromise image on the others. What am I talking
about? Very simple; a bunch of people who say "hey, we're running whatever
we want on our servers" (which is perfectly ok) "and we want to force down
your throats and oblige you to carry our data on YOUR servers, and we won't
have it any other way". This is NOT ok.
If their system was so great, and the way they wanted to do everything was
so good, then 4 years down the line, there would be quite a large PROPORTION
of the 'net listening to them (after all, they keep saying that all they do
is EXPAND IANA, and not break it, but that's another matter to discuss).
However, they stay irrelevant. They know this better than anyone (basically
it's easy to see, because NSI is overflowing with earnings while they are
not), so as it doesn't work by giving everyone a choice to look at things
there way, they want to oblige everyone to swallow their data.

> I am perfectly willing to argue points and seek ways and means towards a
> compromise position. Chris is here for the same reason, I presume.

"...as long as we can ram down the IANA servers our data and oblige those
servers to point at our data, because so far by letting everyone know how to
do it without going through IANA, nobody has paid any attention to us and
ignores us".


> But,
> the reality is that neither of us will co-operate with our own
> extinction. We don't have to. As Karl just pointed out, we have other
> alternatives. We have technology on our side, not theology. Our
> solutions only take a little time and money to perfect. MHSC is a
> software development house, after all, with additional ties to the
> open-source community. The same community that built Linux.

You're 4 years down the line and haven't gotten anywhere. There is no
software to perfect to implement what you want. BIND has been working for
ages. You can develop whatever you want, but you are NOT proposing
developing new things, just ramming down IANA servers your data. Nothing
more, nothing less. Any attempt to disguise this as a compromise position is
false.

Yours, John Broomfield.