Root Server Operators (Re: What are they smoking?)

Tue Sep 16 19:54:38 UTC 2003

Thus spake Eric Gauthier (eric at roxanne.org) [16/09/03 13:49]:
> I'm sure that 5, 10, or 50 phone calls from Nanog-ers to the FTC, Congress,
> Dept of Commerce, ICANN, the US Post Office, or any other large organization 
> will be completely ignored in the likely wash of everyday phone calls.  We can 
> talk about violations of RFCs and ask them to cease this stupidity, but I 
> doubt that will work because there doesn't appear to be any consequences.

I think this goes for /anything/.

If five, ten, or fifty of any of us do any one thing, it's not going to have
an impact.  So a handful of ISP's null route the IP address.  And a few
others hack their recursor code to return NXDOMAIN if a response returns
with a given IP address, or even if it matches a wildcard gTLD lookup.  And
maybe a few more of us call ICANN, and some more call the FTC.  It may solve
it for you, but it doesn't necessarily fix the source of the problem.

(And these hacks really should make it back into the CVS tree if they're
going to be effective.)

> On the other hand, a headline of "Internet Providers Worldwide block access
> to Verisign in Effort to Protect the Public" is very easily understood.  

How about, 'Internet Operators Across North America Struggle to Deal with
Impact of Business Decision: Internet Functionality Worldwide
Tampered With by Verisign'?  There doesn't really appear to be a unified
decision to do one thing, there's a lot of bandying ideas around, and
'wouldn't-it-be-cool-if's being thrown out.

At this point, there isn't a concerted enough effort to warrant a title like
the one you suggest.  But any journalists snooping around sure could help out
a bit, at least by indicating that there /is/ a problem with this decision,
and that Operators are still trying to figure out a) *why* it happened, and
b) the best way to 'fix' it.

My $0.02.

Root Server Operators (Re: What *are* they smoking?)

Root Server Operators (Re: What are they smoking?)