Craig,
>I presume the DC conf. Tony was talking about was the "Forum on Internet
>Domain Names" announced at http://www.itaa.org/dnsconf.htm . Are there
>links to reports or transcripts handy?
No. This was Hank Perrit's CILP Conference in Oct 1997
See http://www.cilp.org/~rclarke/conference_framing.htm
>As far as AOL's position in the industry, I agree that it's critical.
We're not talking about politics here, but simply resolving
DNS object names.
>be focused around parties providing services to the "public" Internet.
>This reflects my own attempt to advocate and defend the concept of a
>stable, coherent, and truly global DNS.
As Stef would say, you're operating in the wrong paradigm. You
want to go visit ITU-land and the public telecom carriers.
The Internet is a user-initiated, self-organizing chaos paradigm.
The DNS exists because in 1971 Peggy Karp said "let there be names,"
and by 1985, everyone realized the task should be pushed out to
the network edges and distributed among the Mandelbrot tendrils.
There's several hundred thousand registries/registrars maintaining
zones.
Everybody has a shared interest in making that work and the names
to resolve to addresses. It's worked fairly well. You don't -
indeed you can't - achieve that through top-down mandates and
accreditation schemes. Existence is inherently unstable, and
the Internet arrangements account for that.
--tony
