From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sat, 29 Jun 1996 10:07:55 +0800
To: jfricker@vertexgroup.com (John F. Fricker)
Subject: Re: Alternic.net (was domain zapping)
Message-ID: <199606281605.JAA22735@cygnus.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 02:42 PM 6/26/96 -0700, jfricker@vertexgroup.com (John F. Fricker) wrote:
>Well, Karl's IETF draft is certainly serious. A Karl is a bit more than a
>kid with a linux box having started one of the largest ISPs in Chicago and
>being a component in the anti CIX fiasco.
>
>I still fail to see why decentralizing control of namespace is a bad idea.

Decentralizing control is a good thing; after all, that's what the 
domain name hierarchy is _for_.  One cost of decentralized control
is the need for coordination between different parts of the namespace.
Another cost is the need to move between namespaces if the
namespace owners either fail or implement policies you dislike.
Having one namespace owner per country plus a couple extra for
non-nationalist namespaces is a convenient approach for accomplishing it,
and worked well when the number of users was small enough that
managing namespaces was a low-volume non-political effort.
That's no longer true.  And as long as the namespace management
is coupled with nameserver administration, which it probably needs to be,
the number of toplevel domains will need to remain small,
and the namespace managers will be motivated to charge money
for names as a way to pay for the nameservers and administration.

Opening up the top-level namespace lets you out of NSI's control, 
if you can coordinate with them and the country-based namespace owners,
but doesn't solve the basic problem.  If you don't do it carefully,
you'll end up needing a bunch of Above-Top-Level nameservers that
serve the names of the tens of thousands of top-level domains.
Karl's draft is an interesting approach; don't know if it'll work.


#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# http://www.idiom.com/~wcs
#				Distract Authority!