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

[Roland Perry]

In message <4A5506BA.9020301 at cavebear.com>, at 13:51:06 on Wed, 8 Jul 
2009, Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> writes
>On 07/08/2009 06:29 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
>> In message <4A548A44.8040108 at cavebear.com>, at 05:00:04 on Wed, 8 Jul
>> 2009, Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> writes
>>
>>> When the 9-11 catastrophe occurred much of Africa and South America
>>> fell off the net.
>>
>> (Although some not until a fortnight later).
>
>You should read the NANOG reports on what happened.

I was reading the list at the time, and also speaking in person to many 
of the posters.

>It was not DNS related.

The major issue was obviously connectivity of users to websites - DNS 
shouldn't have a widespread single-point-of-failure in NY; but there 
were also some countries which unexpected "disappeared" a fortnight 
later when their cached DNS entries expired.

>It was more a matter that at that time Africa and S. America were 
>net-topologically dependencies of a few buildings in NYC.

That is poor network planning, there was no need for it, even then. But 
international connectivity is not an ICANN issue (it might be an IGF 
issue though).

>> Elsewhere you have advocated for a wider range of tlds in the root (eg
>> dot-ewe) but are you also advocating that all tlds must first pass a
>> test of global resilience and redundancy?
>
>If you read more deeply I say that that is a choice for the operator of 
>the root zone that accepts a given TLD.  If a sloppy root system wants 
>to accept TLDs with weak procedures, then, assuming users can know 
>about this,

That is of course the main consumer protection issue. How and why are 
they supposed to make these judgements? And remember we are talking here 
about the average Internet user who is a client of those websites, not 
the website operators themselves. Are you really wanting customers to 
boycott suppliers who use websites hosted with "weaker" DNS?

>then that would be OK.  But for root zone operator such ICANN which 
>promotes high quality TLD products, their standards ought to be rather 
>higher.

And you propose ICANN be stricter about redundancy of the DNS? That may 
be necessary, I'm not sure. Of course, the biggest hurdle is the 
somewhat arms length relationship between ICANN and the cctlds - the 
ones which are in some cases probably most likely to be run on a 
shoestring.

As an "average Internet user" I have little practical choice between 
using .com DNS or cctld DNS. That choice was made by the registrant 
whose content I want to access.

>> If all of an ISP's customers could no longer see .com (because of bad
>> data in their DNS resolver), they'd probably hear about it fairly quickly.
>
>Perhaps.  Suppose the net becomes further cross-coupled with other 
>infrastructures.  How might a VoIP phone establish a call to an ISP to 
>report the problem when the SIP phone number is under .com?  Or what if 
>the directory that lists the ISP's phone number is under .com?

You have to expect that a failure in .com will be noticed by people 
other than those VoIP customers. When it's fixed it will hopefully be 
fixed for all of them. (The same sort of thing happens when a power cut 
takes out a GSM base-station. You can't call anyone to tell them, but 
the lights probably also went out somewhere with a landline phone, who 
gets busy reporting it on everyone's behalf).

>Most of us feel that reliable DNS is worth buying. That's because we 
>view domain names as some sort of rock of eternal use.  But for some 
>short lived purposes reliability might not be worth paying for.  If one 
>only needs a domain name to be stable for a few minutes or days then 
>there might be large cost savings possible if a provider can avoid 
>building things like data escrow and backups.

That seems to be more about registrants, than the people George was 
wanting to talk about: "the average Internet user".

>The point is that ICANN is imposed a very top-down view of what the 
>internet should be onto the DNS.  It is a very unimaginative view and 
>ICANN is very xenophobic about new ideas.
>
>Had ICANN's mentality held sway in 1972 it is likely that the internet 
>would never have been born.

I'm struggling with that, because the original framework of 
.com/.org/.gov etc, plus cctlds dates from way before ICANN.

Whether they are using the most elegant method or not, ICANN does seem 
to be trying to increase the competition in gtlds, and let's not forget 
IDNs, which may be George's elephant in the room: perhaps delay in 
introducing them *is* hurting one section of the Internet-using public.

>>> It's not necessarily something that "anyone" could do. To build a
>>> usable subset of DNS it would be useful to have query densities so as
>>> to know what to prune - a DVD isn't enough to hold all of DNS. Some
>>> TLD operators would consider that kind of data to be rather
>>> proprietary. ICANN has more leverage to pry out that data than a mere
>>> mortal.
>>
>> There seem to be plenty of sites that claim to list the "top 100
>> websites" or whatever. Were you wanting to include every domain's DNS
>> data, or just the zone files from each tld?
>
>Website data is easier to obtain than DNS data.  Websites are often 
>filled with web bugs ranging from one-bit-pixels as used by 
>www.whitehouse.gov (in utter violation of their published privacy 
>policy) to things like Google's "urchin".  (And there is also website 
>tracking via Adobe Flash cookies.)
>
>So website data can be bought.

And wherever that data came from, all you need is a list of the "top X 
popular websites" for your DNS DVD, and for the purposes of that DVD 
ignore the "long tail". If you manage to facilitate 98% of Internet 
traffic via this DVD, isn't that good enough as an emergency measure?

-- 
Roland Perry
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance