[governance] Re: It's Time to Stop ICANN's Top-Level Domain (TLD) Lunacy!

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Thu, Nov 04, 2010 at 05:11:23PM +1100,
 Ian Peter <ian.peter at ianpeter.com> wrote 
 a message of 114 lines which said:

> From Lauren Weinstein - copied from his blog.

But your mention of Robert Kahn was not in Lauren Weinstein's blog and
rightly so (Kahn was a creator a long time ago; his Handle system -
RFC 3650 - is promoted by him for seven years and never got any sucess
and rigthly so: it has exactly the same governance problems as the
DNS).

> The DNS and the domain name infrastructure made sense in an era
> before the universal availability of search engines and online
> directories. But for such massive costs and complexities -- such as
> those inevitably stemming from the ICANN TLD expansion -- to be
> incurred simply to map names to Internet sites is now both
> technically and economically obsolete and abominable".

Note that Lauren Weinstein does not mention, even in a very sketchy
way, what system could replace the DNS. This makes me very wary
because it really smells like hand-waving ("We need something
better").

The mention of search engines is especially stupid: domain names
provide exactly what is missing with search engines, stability. Today,
"afnic" in Google goes (depending on your previous searches) to
<http://www.afnic.fr/> Tomorrow, it may suddenly goes to
<http://www.afnic.af.mil/> or to <http://www.tsatexas.org/>. 

The domain name system does not provide "mapping of names to Internet
sites", this is very secondary and could be done by other means such
as DHTs. Its main purpose is to provide stable and reliable
identifiers. (This is where I would agree with Lauren Weinstein: UDRP
is an abomination since it breaks this stability: your domain can be
hijacked with an UDRP at any moment.)

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