Ad Hoc, eDNS, AlterNIC and the bunch

Thu Apr 10 21:43:09 UTC 1997

On Thu, 10 Apr 1997, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> 
> I believe you have your facts incorrect here....
> 
> Jordan Mendelson writes:
> > Over the past 10 months, there has been escalating talk about the new self
> > appointed registries out there. Major news papers, magazines and other
> > periodicals have been publishing that "the change is coming". Ultimately,
>
> You are referring to the IAHC, not the "Internet Ad Hoc Society",
> which doesn't exist.

I'm sorry, its really the Internet Ad Hoc Committee, not Society. [psst,
go to their web site and look under the really big logo that says IAHC].

Stop nit picking at my statements.

> The IAHC was a committee composed of representatives from the
> International Telecommunication Union, WIPO, the Internet Society, the
> IAB, the IANA, INTA and the Federal Networking Council. We were
> chartered to advise the IANA on an update to the mechanisms for
> management and operations of the generic TLD space.

Ok, so the IAHC job is to advise the IANA. Strangely enough, the IANA's
own domain guidelines states, "It is extremely unlikely that any other TLDs
will be created.". This was written in March of 1994, which wasn't too
long ago. 

It almost seems as if the IAHC is doing the IANA's job. I mean, the IANA's
job is the oversee changes in the Internet's protocols. So far, the only
things I've seen the IANA do is setup guidelines for domains and setup
private ip address space. So now what? The IAHC is going to split the
IANA's job in half? Why bother with IANA at all, lets move everything to
IAHC! Or better yet, lets get rid of bot the IANA and IAHC and give all
the responsibility to the ISOC.

Lets see:

The ISOC and FNC chartered the IANA to act as a clearinghouse to assign
and coordinate the use of numerous Internet protocol parameters. The IANA
charted the IAHC to recommend new parameters to domain name space. Now,
the IAHC is going to large companies such as DEC which really have NOTHING
to do with the Internet's underlying structure trying to get support for
something they aren't supposed to be doing, but in fact are only supposed
to recommend the IANA do.

Sounds to me like these groups all need to re-evaluate who has control
over what.

> > I'm curious as to how many other network providers are even thinking about
> > changing their root server caches just because some self appointed society
> > tells them to.
> 
> As I've noted, you have the situation reversed -- MCI, UUNet and the
> rest are supporting pointing at the current name servers. The IAHC was
> also not self appointed -- we were appointed by the major internet
> governance organizations and several interested international bodies.

I'm sorry about how I came across. Yes, IAHC's plan actually changes the
current nameservers instead of implementing new ones, which is the smart
thing to do. Of course, since a lot of the nameservers out there are
funded in part or whole by NSI, I don't think they will be changed without
a fight.

Like it or not, NSI is a company who I don't believe wants to share the
job of being a registrar with anyone.

--
Jordan Mendelson     : www.wserv.com/~jordy
Web Services, Inc.   : www.wserv.com