[governance] India's communications minister - root server misunderstanding (still...)

[David Conrad]

On Aug 2, 2012, at 2:24 PM, Sivasubramanian M <isolatedn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you for taking the time to write a detailed reply explaining the technical answers.

I hope it is helpful.

> If not bequeath the functions to a committe of 200, IANA might at least include a few experts from different geographic regions in a gesture of Internationalization. US would know that a posture of total unwillingness causes undesirable moves such as imaginative proposals for a Circus for Internet Governance.

Out of curiosity, what do you believe would be the function of these experts? The latest version of the IANA Functions contract has gone out of its way to exclude IANA staff from performing _any_ policy role -- the job of IANA staff is merely to execute publicly documented processes. I'm not entirely sure what the experts would do (at least in the context of IANA operations).

Oh, and FWIW, last I checked, IANA staff are from Australia, Belarus, Taiwan, the UK, and the US (:-)).

> The Fully Qualified Mirror that I talked about is a mirror that is not a $3k mirror of ICANN's specification, but a Mirror with specifications for its infrastructure almost as rigid that of one of the 13 root server instances.

To clarify a bit about root server architecture, most of the root servers are made up of some number of commodity servers running some open source operating system (Linux or FreeBSD) and some open source name server (BIND or NSD, although I believe 2 root servers are running proprietary code). In some cases, servers are deployed as single machines that advertise the IP address of the root server themselves. In other cases, a number of commodity servers are put into a rack and a router sits in front of them and the router advertises the root server IP address.  There is no rigid infrastructure -- each root server operator makes its own decision about how it will deploy its root server instances.  

In the case I'm most familiar with ("L"), the initial model was "big router feeding many machines in major colocation facilities around the world", but that architecture evolved to "zillions of single machines in any reasonable infrastructure all over the world".

> It could be a mirror with an elevated symbolic status. The other ideas expressed, that of moving a root server from Verisign Inc to Verisign Africa are with the same purpose of offering a glimpse, conveying an inclination.

One of the challenges here is that there is no centralized control over the root server operators.  Each root server operator makes its own decisions for its own reasons. However, ignoring that, the way root servers are generally deployed (ignoring "B", "D", and "H"), they aren't in a single place.  Thus saying Verisign (US) should "move" its root server to Verisign (Africa) doesn't make sense: Verisign's root server already is in Verisign (Africa).

What I suspect you're looking for is for administrative ownership of a root server to be moved from a current owner to a new owner outside the US (or for a current owner to relocate from the US to somewhere else). The challenge here is that since there is no centralized control, there is no one to tell one of the root operators "give your root server IP address to (say) Bill's Bait and Sushi Shop in North Korea" and as far as I can tell, there is no incentive for any of the root server operators to voluntarily decide to do this.

One could make the case that since the USG operates 3 root servers directly ("E" (NASA), "G" and "H" (DoD)) and has contracted with Verisign to operate 2 more ("A" and "J"), that the White House (being the top of the executive branch) could direct the relevant departments to a few up, but to date, I'm unaware of any concerted effort to make this case.

Regards,
-drc


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