Hi Paul,
Welcome to the discussion. There is some signal within this noise.
I wonder if you would be willing to comment on the question of multiple roots.
It's an idea which has recently been attracting renewed vigor in these crowds,
and its supporters are so energetic, I sometimes wonder whether some new sort
of alternate root launch is imminent. Outspoken advocates of alternate and
multiple roots on this list include (presuming I've been reading them
correctly) Karl Auerbach, Richard Sexton, Jim Dixon, and Roeland Meyer, people
whom I generally consider to be sober (well, mostly) and technically astute.
They have not persuaded me, however. Despite the claims of its advocates, I
expect that the growth of a multiple root environment would be much more
troublesome than beneficial.
Now, I consider you to be a strong defender of maintaining a single root. At
least, I'm sure you once were. I have missive of yours from way back (from
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 28 October 1996) that I consider to be as forceful a statement
as any about why a coherent DNS is a good idea. I also take it as
representative of your fundamental ideology about the how the Internet should
be managed, and for what purpose.
Please look it over and let us know if you still stand by those views, and
please add whatever you might feel is appropriate on this topic.
Thanks,
Craig Simon
Copied message follows
Subject:
Re: bogosity
Date:
Mon, 28 Oct 1996 13:55:04 -0800
From:
Paul A Vixie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[ notes about root-64 being a fun experiment and about how i'm
taking all of this way too seriously. ]
> >are not in this for your revolution, man, they're in it for the money.
>
> and what are you in it for?
I have a political agenda. That's why I'm in the Internet field at all;
I used to be a programmer who held his head high around other programmers.
Now I'm writing RFCs and hacking BIND. Why? Because it scares the hell
out of the Chinese government. And the Singaporean government. And my
own U.S. government. People with ready access to accurate information
cannot be oppressed. With no counter influence, the average knuckle dragging
hairless ape will try to oppress his or her fellows as a matter of course --
this is human nature. I am a counter influence. I don't like the raw form
of human nature and I am trying to give individuals the tools they need to
avoid information oppression by their fellows.
I don't think root-64 is the right way to do that. In fact root-64 looks
like it will destabilize the network and make the whole thing work less well,
setting the information revolution back a few years or maybe a full cycle.
You people arguing about the right of people everywhere to have whatever
domain names they want are missing, and I mean entirely missing, the point.
These names need to be distinguishing -- slightly meaningful and very unique.
There needs to be just one authoritative source of information about any
given name, whether it be VIX.COM or "." or MCS.NET. Anything you do to
make this less true is like handing machine guns to those knuckle dragging
hairless apes I spoke of earlier. Chaos is inimical to freedom. The order
you see me fighting for is the status quo, because I believe that the true
fight for freedom lies in content rather than naming. Without coherent names
we won't be able to locate the content I'm so worried about. Coherency is
not free and it's never an accident.
