[governance] Re: Alternative DNS systems and net neutrality

[McTim]

Hello all,

I have been away for the last 10 days, so just catching up now.

On Nov 17, 2007 12:13 AM, Dan Krimm <dan at musicunbound.com> wrote:
> Whatever, Veni.  This is just rhetorical jousting.
>

Or a firmly held opinion that's opposed to yours.

<snip>

>
> And excuse me, how is ICANN "responsible for" only a "small segment of the
> Internet"??

Because, via IANA it only has a very narrow role to play.

 Isn't ICANN responsible for the *entire DNS* over the *entire
> Internet*?

Not at all.  DNS is a distributed hierarchy.  Most DNS administration
is done near the edge of the network. ICANN is responsible for a very
small fraction of it!

Let's say I want to visit your website, and I have never been there
before (and neither has any other customers of my ISP).  Let's also
say for the purposes of this discussion that no other customers of my
ISP have been to a .com site either (or the cache of my DNS server has
just been flushed.)

I put http://www.musicunbound.com/ in my url window, and my cranky old
box (called sentry.bushnet.net) makes a query for the Address record
for the above URL.

Well, since the cache has just been flushed it doesn't "know" how to
reach this site (even if it ever has had it in cache).  But sentry
"knows" how to reach the rootservers, so it asks one of these.   It
gets a response saying basically "dunno that, but I DO know how to
find the NS for .com, heres the address of that one, go ask it", so
sentry, armed with the address of .com's NS, asks the same question to
.com's NS (say d.gtld-servers.net). at	192.31.80.30, which says
"dunno, but go see ns2.dreamhost.com. at 66.33.206.206, he can tell
you", so sentry troops down the pipe again to 66.33.206.206 asking
ns2.dreamhost.com what the adress of www.musicunbound.com/ is, and
because it's an authoritative server for the zone, ns2.dreamhost.com
says, you need the webserver at 208.113.195.100, and my browser can
fetch it.

The point of that long story is just to illustrate that ICANN via IANA
has helped to populate the rootzone, and signed various deals with
Verisign to admin the .com zone (this example), and a rootserver (or
2).  However, it is certainly possible that my query went thru a
non-ICANN/non Versiign administered rootserver(there are 10 of them).
My local recursive caching, forwarding NS did much of the heavy
lifting, and the bulk of the work is in setting up and maintaining the
NSs at the edges, (your edge and mine).

ICANN has nowt to do with the various routers, switches and servers
between my browser and your website, those are owned by ISPs large and
small.  Of course, these run on IP, but ICANN really has very little
to do with IP address distribution either, since that is done by the
RIRs and LIRs.  Of course IANA distributes to the RIRs, but that's
purely an administrative function.


> Everyone and everything on the Internet uses the DNS,

Who told you this?   Some things things don't.

because
> DNS is in effect the main gatekeeper to any content or applications on the
> net

It's not.  DNS is a layer of misdirection allowing humans to type in
things they can recall, a handy "phone book" if you will.  It might go
away in a decade, and we would have something better in place.

<snip>

>
> But if we are to resolve this, we can't avoid dealing with the political
> elephant.  Better to look straight at it and deal with it on its own terms,
> however inconvenient it may be to those in power for everyone else to
> actually see it.  But be realistic: elephants are too big to sweep under
> the rug.

My opinion, oft-stated in this forum is that it's a molehill, that
some see as a mountain.

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
$ whois -h whois.afrinic.net mctim
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