The whole alternate-root ${STATE}horse (was Re: Enable BIND cache server to resolve chinese domain name?)

Tue Jul 5 17:01:22 UTC 2005

On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:

> But Steve appeared to be suggesting that there was no reasonable way to
> *avoid* problems -- and that's clearly not the case. If I misinterpreted
> Steve, no doubt he'll correct me.  But there are two fairly prominent,

I don't think that was what I said.  What I was attempting to say is that 
the issue of alternate roots probably isn't something that's worth 
worrying about.  I see no reason why they'll catch on, other than perhaps 
in limited cases where they'll work ok.

In the general case, with alternate roots, there's a chicken and egg 
problem.  Right now, if you're an end user doing your DNS lookups via the 
ICANN root, you can get to just about everything.  If you're something 
that end users want to connect to, using an ICANN-recognized domain will 
mean almost everybody can get to you, while an "alternative" TLD would 
mean only a tiny fraction of the Internet would be able to get to you. 
So, if you're a content provider, why would you use anything other than a 
real ICANN-recognized domain?  And, if the content providers aren't using 
real domain names, why would an end user care about whether they can get 
to the TLDs that nobody is using?

This is the same phonomenon we saw ten years ago, as the various "online 
services," GENIE, Prodigy, MCIMail, Compuserve, AOL, etc. either 
interconnected their e-mail systems with the Internet or faded away and 
died.  As the Internet got more and more critical mass, there was less and 
less incentive to be using something else.  It's been a long time since 
I've seen a business card with several different, incompatible, e-mail 
addresses printed on it, and that's because something simpler worked, not 
because people screamed loudly about the falling sky.

The exceptions to this that I see would be either when somebody comes out 
with something that is so much better that it's useful in spite of a lack 
of an installed userbase (Skype may be doing this to phone calls), or when 
something is rolled out to a large enough self-contained user community 
that the lack of ability to communicate outside that region won't be a 
significant barrier.  If a few large countries were to roll out alternate 
root zones nation-wide, in such a way that they worked well for domestic 
communication, but couldn't be used for international stuff, *maybe* that 
would be good enough to catch on.  But still, anybody wanting to 
communicate outside that region or userbase would probably find they were 
much happier using addresses that met global standards.

So anyhow, that's a long way of saying that, just as this hasn't gone 
anywhere any of the many other times it's been raised over the last 
several years, it's unlikely to go anywhere, or cause problems, this time.

-Steve