Statements against new.net?

Wed Mar 14 07:13:14 UTC 2001

On Tue, Mar 13, 2001 at 08:47:05PM -0800, Patrick Greenwell had this to say:
> > 
> > Unfortunately, "the market" tends to consist in large majority of 1) users, 
> > and 2) management. And we all know how bright those two particular
> > segments of the population tend to be.
> 
> Well, those are the people defining your paycheck, sure you want to write
> them off so quickly? 

the very reason they pay my (all our) paycheck is for technical expertise -
if Joe Q. User had technical expertise sufficient to make informed decisions
on this type of matter, why would he need to hire a network operator?
I'm not saying that users, clients and management don't have their place -
but I _AM_ saying that place is _not_ in making critical _technical_ decisions
that will have a significant, possibly severely detrimental, effect on the
future of the networks they have hired _us_ to operate for them.

> You might want to take a long, careful, hard look at who has been doing
> the sanctioning and how they've been making those decisions before jumping
> on the bandwagon. Just a friendly suggestion.

This whole matter boils down to one question - that being, what way is the
Right Way to operate DNS or its equivalent? It seems to me (and a few others)
that, logically, any hierarchical system _must_ have an ultimate authority -
not 2 or 3 or 27, which is essentially what new.net is trying to do: create
an alternate ultimate authority. How exactly will a user know which site
foo.com takes them to, if new.net's response and the rest of the Internet's
response a la *.root-servers.net don't jibe? The concept of unique and separate
domains breaks down when you have conflicting responses to the question, "Where
does this domain actually point?"

What some of us are saying is the new.net concept in its current forms is
_guaranteed_ to create exactly that kind of confusion, all arguments about
politics or alternate addressing possibilities aside.

-- 
Scott Francis           scott@   [work:] v i r t u a l i s . c o m
Systems Analyst     darkuncle@   [home:] d a r k u n c l e . n e t
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