Re: [ga] Names Policy Development Process

[William X Walsh <william@wxsoft.com>]

He needs to be educated, Jefsey, not confused with circular and flawed
logic by alt.root advocates.

Saturday, July 27, 2002, 2:40:19 PM, J-F C. (Jefsey)  Morfin wrote:

> Dear Todd,
> You rise an important issue. It has however a long legal, technical and 
> political roots and experience we are trying to build upon right now. You 
> might be interested to join as some other serious people about the 
> international stability, security and development of the network (see below).

> On 17:28 27/07/02, todd glassey said:
>>I still think that ICANN's biggest political and technical hurdle to leap 
>>is really what to do about other ROOT's.This may seem like a simple 
>>business question but it has far reaching ramifications that stretch 
>>throughout the entirety of what we know as the Internet.
>>
>>Further - it needs to be noted that ICANN can develop whatever it wants 
>>internally but if its processes are too oppressive and too painful to deal 
>>with, then these other ROOTS will certainly gain significant numbers of 
>>ICANN's existing customers and that is a serious issue to deal with.
>>
>>ICANN's trying to stop the operations of these other ROOTS is equally 
>>problematic since it ***will*** result in law suits and like restraining 
>>orders against ICANN, its officers and its agents (the Registrars and the 
>>ASO members) from prohibiting these other roots from functioning. 
>>Restraint of Trade is a pretty easy claim to prove here under today's 
>>circumstances.


> A root is the plug of a sub namespace into the global namespace. So .arpa 
> is the ARPANET plug into the global namespace. The plug of the global 
> namespace into itself (the inclusive root) is the "." alone.

> This notation comes from the fact that the DNS to support the Internet 
> current practice and parallel internal access and public service access had 
> to reverse the current global namespace semantic (ucla.arpa standing for 
> ARPAUCLA). This is the same as in ENUM. It created a confusion between IP 
> and X.121 naming schemes: the IP 12.34.56.78 could be confused with X121 
> 78563412. Hence the global root sign at the end of the names. It meant the 
> string (even numeric) was part of the namespace and not from the IP 
> addressing. This way 90077.3106 from Internet was 301690077 (Dialog on 
> Tymnet). That reversing method at a "." has become quite universal in the 
> DNS (look at ENUM support). You will find echoes of this in the initial 
> RFCs using "root" (general) and "roots" (TLDs) wording.

> The "." or global namespace was initially coordinated by Tymnet under FCC 
> valued added network services license through its IRC agreements with the 
> foreign monopoly services. All of them together formed the International 
> data network services system ("Intlnet"). This Intlnet delegated the 
> ".arpa" sub namespace to the Internet team, the same it delegated many 
> other root names to others countries and organizations (this was only 
> providing a password to that name into the Tymnet validation system,  under 
> standard FCC approved Tymcom or Tymnet/Tymnet rated services). Further on 
> it became also regulated by the ITU through the X.121 and E.164 standards.

> Tymnet (Telenet and Uninet, the other public system Arpa connected) also 
> accepted the transit/access of calls from/to other sub namespaces, as per 
> the normal practice of open subnetworks. This is where com (Tymnet), net 
> (Telenet) come from.

> All this was under rates, licenses, public interconnect agreements subject 
> to ITU and to international laws and rules and FCC licences for the US 
> parts. The constraints on the Internet and the possibilities for the 
> Internet community have been globally summarized in the RFC 920 by Jon 
> Postel in Oct 1984. This RFC has been strictly respected (in a restrictive 
> way) by the IANA up to now, so even if all this is 18 years old, it is the 
> current rule and the basis of the DNS: ICP-3 is wrong on many points, but 
> it is absolutely legitimate because it intends to describe the permanent 
> IANA policy. If it was not sticking to the 1984 agreement, it would have 
> needed a review by the DNSO, what the BoD denied. When Kent, Roberto oppose 
> the "alternative roots" they are right: there cannot be other roots within 
> he ".arpa" sub-namespace.

> But there can be as many other non".arpa" roots in use (and the agreement 
> was that they would be respected) in the ".arpa" IP address system. To 
> understand that you have to recall that ARPA were the machines associated 
> into the US ARPA project. Yet among the identified users groups there were 
> the foreign Local Internet communities (ccTLDs) as /customers of the local 
> monopoly services.

> These people were by no means local operators, but local customers of their 
> telecom services and connected registrants communities. They therefore were 
> only subject to the local association or university laws, with the task of 
> validating usernames with the local PTT (physical connections) and 
> registering names into the global naming system though the .arpa 
> sub-namespace. This means that if I wanted in France to access "inria.fr", 
> I had to connect Transpac, go into an Internet US gateway, and through an 
> Internet channel (may be using Transpac) to reach the INRIA system. Many 
> suffered from that limitations!

> The ccTLD names were accepted as the ISO 3166 2 letters code because usage 
> on the namespace was to root local monopolies either/both in ISO 3166 3 
> letters codes and 4 numerics (DNIC) from the X.121 list. The RTC 920 
> mentions that ccTLDs and multiorganization TLDs (.arpa groups of 
> registrants wanting to form their own TLDs) were only registered and not 
> administered. This because their names had to be included into the global 
> TLD list (root names on the Tymnet supervisor or in the X.121 ITU list) and 
> because they could maintain relations outside of the control of Jon 
> Postel's team..

> You have to realize that all this had much to do with rights, but with 
> billing. Root names were introduced to make sure we could easily bill the 
> issuer (registry) of the name in sorting the statistics. Anyway, this means 
> that ICANN is perfectly entitled to manage its root the way it does, to 
> support its own naming system except that it should include the roots into 
> the other sub namespaces - that was the deal - instead of refusing the 
> interconnects.

> A part from being in an old forgotten deal, the reason why is that the 
> reasons of the deal are still here. And in not taking care, it leads to a 
> conflict with the ITU, NGO, Govs, Business communities it will lose.

> The situation we face comes from changes in the situation:

> 1. the public systems deregulated, so national authority is no more with 
> PTT but with States. Mike and Stuart were technically correct in calling on 
> States but wrong in asking them to do what they should have imposed on them.

> 2. the ARPANET is no more, and there is now an IP system infrastructure 
> never paid by the ARPA or the USG, IANA still consider as its own - 
> creating an usurpation feeling.

> 3. the Tymnet supervisor is no more acting as the global root ".", the 
> ".arpa", "gbr", ".fra" etc.. could plug into.

> 4. the national root names have been using their DNIC as a name (".fra" is 
> currently ".2080" +++) but due to the success of TCP/IP the ITU members are 
> interested in reusing them with most of their legitimate holders ignoring 
> their rights (borne from stability), creating confusion, uncertainty. 
> Example: obviously the EEC has nothing to do ask the ICANN about ".eu". 
> Just to inform it.

> 5. the telephone access which was included in the initial deal (Out-Dial 
> service) was not supported by the DNS until the ENUM project.

> This calls for a lot adaptations. During the last 18 years the respect of 
> the RFC 920 created the "status quo" which benefits to the main Internet 
> providers. But the system is a 18 years old system shaped to serve 100 
> times less users, and expanding. Either its administrators get real and 
> reform the system accordingly or the system (which is a distributed 
> consensus) will reform itself (as China started doing).

> IMHO the only way to do it in good order is to rebuild the Supervisor (the 
> global root system) so there is a stable and secure namespace reference 
> again (the "dot"). And the ".arpa" root may keep going the way it does 
> now.  We have several good technical, operational, political, commercial 
> reasons to do that now. The ccTLDs, China, EEC, Govs, etc. have major 
> interests in it being done. Or already have started.

> What is urgent IMHO is that we make sure it is done "a la Internet", by a 
> voluntary effort and not by on an ITU or USG managed budget. This is why we 
> are launching the "dot-root" project for a three parallel asynchronous root 
> servers systems next generation DNS+ experimentation. We call on who wants 
> to participate, sharing his DNS competence and one on-line machine. The 
> target is to experiment and then consensually implement a DNS.2 
> architecture, operations, policy, at root and user system level - able to 
> support the full "." namespace. Do you want to join?

>>As a simple example, I allege that it is possible that ICANN is playing 
>>antitrust by locking out other Internet Standards Processes and 
>>organizations. This is simply demonstrated by that IANA will not issue a 
>>system port except to an organization that has an IETF RFC number. So no 
>>one from ITU or any of the other standards orgs can submit anything for 
>>the issuance of a System Port on the Global Internet unless they play 
>>ICANN's PSO Game and that is clearly anti-trust since ICANN does not own 
>>the Internet. Which simply says, that without the IETF/IESG/IAB processes 
>>in place, nothing gets codified as an Internet Standard and personally 
>>that is the largest load of BS anywhere.

> May be we can have it another way. ICANN manages the Status Quo because 
> sticking to the RFC 920 and alleging that no one is now in charge of the 
> namespace, but the ITU which did not really took over yet, is helping some 
> to make stable returns. So it does not lead people to go ahead with major 
> innovations and make them better organize a technical status quo. And 
> freeze innovation.

> Exemple: the key development to free the Internet from ICANN is a Windows 
> dns-resolver plug-in. No one on sourceforge even proposed it.

>>Another concept here is that the Domain Owners are more the friend of the 
>>Registrars than ICANN is, and if you don't believe me, then ask Verisign 
>>how many bodies to GoDaddy they lost because GoDaddy is more friendly to 
>>end users at the wallet level. And most of the Domain Registrars don't 
>>realize this yet because we spend so much time arguing about personal sh*t 
>>and not the goals of the group.

> May be the main thing is that we do not need the Registrars at all nor to 
> pay for DNs. It is surprising that no one works on the necessary development.

> The "root intox" works well. This is brainware: what counts is not the way 
> the network is, but the way the peole believe it is to be used.
> jfc





-- 
Best regards,
William X Walsh <william@wxsoft.info>
--
Save Internet Radio!  
CARP will kill Webcasting!
http://www.saveinternetradio.org/


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