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

Tue Jul 5 17:55:11 UTC 2005

On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 10:01:22AM -0700, Steve Gibbard wrote:
> 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.

Catch on in the consumer sense?  No, probably not -- though the
question is "will IAP's switch their resolver servers to an
alt-root".... which leads directly to:

> 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?

Two points: 1) this speaks to the same issue as my comments the other
day on the IPv6 killer app, though it's admittedly even harder to posit
a site which would do this.  2) Based on the events earlier in the
week, I believe that's a "US Department of Commerce" approved TLD...
which changes the game a little bit. 

> 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.

Certainly.  But there weren't geopolitical implications there, merely
commercial ones.  I think the stakes may be a bit higher here,
particularly in the case we were using as an example: China.

> 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),

Yup.  Killer apps are great.  Hard to predict; *really* hard to invent.

>                                                                     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.

But again, you're positing that someone would create a root zone that
*purposefully* conflicted with the current one, which doesn't seem
supported by history, much less common sense.  Am I wrong that you mean
that?

> 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.

Maybe. 

China's *really* big.  America's *really* unpopular, in some places.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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