[governance] How do ICANN's actions hurt the average Internet

[Roland Perry]

In message <4A547CD5.6060105 at cavebear.com>, at 04:02:45 on Wed, 8 Jul 
2009, Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> writes
>On 07/08/2009 03:10 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
>> In message <4A5400E2.2080402 at cavebear.com>, at 19:13:54 on Tue, 7 Jul
>> 2009, Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> writes
>>> If the lights were to go out on a big part of DNS, as they did in
>>> actuality over the US Northeast, and somebody calls ICANN and says
>>> "fix it", ICANN's answer will be "not our job".
>>
>> So what failed, to cause that DNS outage?
>
>I prefixed my sentence with "If".

But you followed it with "as they did in actuality over the US 
Northeast".

Do you mean the electricity (literally the lights) went out?

>So far DNS outages have been relatively minor or local.  But then 
>again, from a worldwide point of view, the loss of electrical power to 
>the Northeast portion of the US was a local matter.

Of course, a tiny proportion of the world's DNS relies entirely upon the 
Northest US.

>For example, the fact that most root and many TLD servers have their 
>own names in the .net TLD suggests that there may exist a possibility 
>of some crossover failures should .net have problems.

But the DNS resolvers will typically cache the results for a fortnight. 
Which will give people some time to work around whatever the problem 
was.

>> If it was every ISP's connectivity to every DNS root server (or to most
>> tld servers), that does indeed sound like something outside ICANN's
>> ability to fix.
>
>There are several things that ICANN can do.  Many are already being 
>done by root server operators, but nothing requires them to continue to 
>do so.  Take a look at the latter part of this: 
>http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000192.html  In it you will see 
>a list of things that ICANN could contractually require.

So you'd like ICANN to have a role in centralising the funding and 
control of the currently independent distributed root servers?

>ICANN could, but has not, engaged in any effort to make it easier for 
>people inside those regions to rebuild services locally

So they should have a role as "firefighters" moving in to re-establish 
connectivity where the current arrangements are too slow?

>I've proposed to ICANN the creation of a bootable DVD (think 
>KNOPPIX+DNS) that contains enough of a DNS system (root and TLD 
>contents) that can be shoved into an available PC to get a typical 
>community started with at least a bootstrap level of network services.

Anyone could do that. Have you approached other than ICANN with this 
idea?
-- 
Roland Perry
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