[governance] Alt Root Foundation - New TLD's

[Karl Auerbach]

On 11/26/2012 09:50 PM, Fahd A. Batayneh wrote:
> http://altrootfoundation.org/docs/icann%20altrootfoundation%205%20nov%202012.pdf
> 
> I am not sure to what extent this is genuine? Any thoughts from anybody?

I tend to prefer the phrase "competing roots" rather than "alternate" to
thus indicate that none are superior to, or inferior to, any others.

That said, there have been many competing root systems over the years.

Most have been run very badly, sometimes in direct violation of well
established and practiced technical standards (such as what can be in an
NS record.)

But on the other hand there have been instances of well run competing
roots.  For example there was the ORSC which was a mirror of the
NTIA/Verisign/ICANN (NVI) root.  It was more Euro-centric than the NVI
system, but that went away with the better deployment of anycast.

One interesting thing was that ORSC had a policy that said "we will not
withdraw a TLD".  ICANN does not have such a policy.  This was in the
context of the ccTLD for the now defunct Soviet Union.

There are many competing roots run internally by ISPs, sometimes these
camp on local instances of IP addresses of the "real" servers, sometimes
there is some packet inspection/redirection done, sometimes they are fed
into user machines via DHCP.  In most cases this is done by ISPs so that
they can better serve their customers by taking charge of reliability
and improving DNS resolution responsibility.  (An important part of
running a successful business, such as an ISP business, is making sure
that you have good control of the assets you need to deliver your
product, and part of an ISP's product is the perception by its customers
that its network services are "responsive" - and DNS is a big part of
that perception.)

I have written a lot about competing roots and find them a useful
concept, particularly as they give a way to naturally allow the
selection and deployment of new TLDs without the huge centralized system
created by ICANN.

But the key aspect is "consistency" - The need needs competing roots to
be consistent with one another.  Otherwise there would be very unhappy
users.

The definition of "consistency" is not obvious.  Some people take it to
mean "exact equivalence".  I take a looser definition that says that it
is not necessary that all roots contain the exact same set of TLDs, but
that where there are TLDs in common they must have the same contents.
Any reasonable root operator ought to avoid TLD names that are contested.

See http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000331.html starting at
about mid-way down at the heading "The Alternative History"

	--karl--



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