Re: [wg-c] reposted for Harald Tveit Alvestrand

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Sun, Dec 19, 1999 at 10:37:54PM -0500, Paul Garrin wrote:
> > Or, rather, the coordination authority is really the root.
> 
> A coordination authority would be applicable in the administrative
> sense, but not necessarily in the technical sense.  Administrative
> coordination is important for quality control and accreditation of
> operators and in the setting of and enforcement of standards.  This
> could be done by ICANN, or it could be the IETF or the IAB.
> The most important criteria rather than who does it is that is is
> done with competence and understanding of the underlying technical
> issues, and with fairness.

If you have the "trusted administrative coordinating body" (TACB) you
describe, then the technical developments you talk of are a pointless
waste of time.  The TACB will define the root zone, and good technical 
means for distributing a root zone already exist.  

Furthermore, there are well-established fora for the development of new
technical means for distributing a root zone -- the IETF fields about 
5000 extremely competent network engineers, and, while I'm sure your 
staff has competent people on it, they simply cannot provide the depth 
of expertise and peer review that the IETF does.

Even more, the next generation technical means for distributing a root
zone (DNSSEC) are being developed and deployed as we speak.  The issues
are complex, and have involved hundreds of real experts in the area. 

[...]
> Decentralized sharing of TLD zones is technically
> more difficult and demanding to reduce the number of collisons,
> or conflicting applications for the same sld strings, but it is
> not an impossible task to achieve.

However, it is a waste of time without trusted coordination, and if you
have trusted coordination, it is still a waste of time, because in that
case current methods for handling shared registries work fine.  To
rephrase, the "shared TLD zones" you describe do not diminish the need
for trusted coordination, and if you have trusted coordination, you 
don't need shared zones.

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Do good, and you'll be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain