ISP network design of non-authoritative caches

Mon Nov 19 03:23:37 UTC 2001

> F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET is a "value subtraction service". It misses published 
> portions of the name space - so if you use it, it is of limited value. I 
> can reach twice as many TLDs elsewhere. Oh yeah. It's "stable". I forgot.

F publishes whatever the zone's owner has edited into it.  Never more or less.

> What ticks me off is the zero-sum game being played. Anyone saying "there 
> can only be one root zone" and supporting a closed and non-inclusive root 
> is playing a zero sum game. "We win, you lose" is not the spirit of the 
> internet, running code and rough-consensus.

I'm making no arguments (at this time and in this place, at least) for one
single-owner versus another.  However, there's only one real root zone at any
given moment, according to DNS's specification and at least one implementation.

One expects that an argument as to who that single owner ought to be is
welcome somewhere (other than nanog, that is), but any argument about how
many different actual root zones there can be would not be welcome at all
(except, I guess, if you're IPv8-connected.)

"What ticks me off" is the folks who want the owner/contents of the root zone
to be different than they are, and who therefore offer up completely bizarre 
misinterpretations of hard technical fact in order to support a de-facto
ownership change (by changing one to many rather than arguing about the one.)

If you don't like ICANN, fine, there's a mailing list somewhere and you ought
to go make yourself heard on it.  But don't pervert DNS, fragile and perverse
as it already is, in order to make or avoid various political realities.