On 18-jul-2005, at 22:49, Brad Knowles wrote:
The registry customers don't pay the bills of ICANN and the
governments who maintain the ccTLDs.
Governments? You have some strange ideas about ccTLDs.
Okay, fine -- government-authorized organizations, then. Such
as SIDN for .nl, DNS.be for .be, etc.... Like Verisign, they may
well have to get their contracts renewed with the government.
Maybe one day I'll tell you about the early days of SIDN. No
government in sight. I know this has changed a bit, but it's mostly
rubber stamping what was happening already. I'm fairly sure it's the
same way for most ccTLDs.
Like Verisign, the people who pay the bills are not the end-user
consumers of e-mail addresses and web browsers, and many of the
bill-payers are likely to be the sort of people who would want to
encourage confusion.
I don't believe the major TLDs with million+ names registered are
short sighted enough to think it's a good idea to encourage confusion.
That's why it's good that browser vendors are keeping an eye on
this.
We definitely don't want the registries being the watchers in
this case, but I also don't think we want to have a mish-mash hodge-
podge of twelve zillion different solutions, each of which is being
hard-coded into various different applications.
Apparently there's only one way that really works, so everyone will
be doing the same thing, save for some details maybe.
This is an area where we need to have some standards that can be
broadly applied to all Internet and Internet-enabled applications,
including web browsers.
Too bad standards don't crop up over night. But it would be helpful
if the IETF (or another standards organization?) would do something
here.
You wouldn't want Ford setting standards for roads, even if
they could create an agreement with GM. And you don't want each
country setting their own universal standards, either. That way
lies madness.
Remember the Bell standards? ANSI, DIN? You have to with what works,
especially in security where the cost of doing it wrong or delaying
the solution can be very high.
Let the lawyers rule the world? Yeah right, that will help.
Excuse me? How on God's Bloody Green Earth did you pull that
out of your @$$?
Ok then, what else is the dominant profession amongst (wannabe)
internet governance types?
Ultimately, the user should be in control (like I am with my
named.root
file) but the vendors should set good defaults to help the users who
can't do this themselves.
You're a customer of an ISP. You know nothing about how to run
your own nameserver. Just how exactly do you expect to have
control over your own named.root?
Buy some books at oreilly.com?
If you're not a programmer with direct commit access to Mozilla
and Opera, just how exactly do you expect to have any control over
this process?
Hopefully they make this stuff user configurable. This stuff is a lot
like SSL certificates that come with browsers. You can manage those
yourself if you jump through the hoops.
It's not so much that many people will actually do this, but the fact
that users can vote with their feet keeps the people in control down
the chain honest. (Well, more honest than they would be otherwise, at
least.)
You can't have an effictive dictatorship when people are free to move
to the next country.
