ICANN vs. Alternate DNSs To Be Tested

Masem writes: "Yahoo news is reporting that a legal challege to ICANN's control on the DNS system is going to be pushed by Atlantic Root, a group that has been controlling the .biz domain (as given to them by the Open Root Server Confederation) since May. When ICANN issued the 7 new TLDs, they did recognize that there were alternative DNS systems out there and tried to avoid obvious conflicts (one reason why .web wasn't granted). However, Atlantic Root argues that ICANN willing knew about the alternate .biz when they made their ruling, and are only representing big businesses in their practices."

Comments

what ifs

[Weezul]

It's a real shame that the TLDs were not originally treated as seperate orginisations: .edu would have been required by law to prevent non-universities from obtaining domain names, .org would have been a non-profit orginisation who's charter prevented them from allowing corperations to own .org domains, .net would have been some orginisation which gave priority to "network" related orginisations (i.e. joe.net could belong to any one until some network protocol called joe gained a signifcant following), and .com would have been a free-for-all. All the TLDs would have diffrent root servers and all the TLDs would have diffrent arbitration rules. Anyone could create a new TLD by putting up a root server, but they would then need to convince people to use their server too.

Hopefully, only the TLD with reasonable arbitration rules would have a following. Ok, this last bit is a stupid libertarian pipe dream, but you would be able to create a rouge .com which did not cheat the common people like the real .com inevitibly would.

Jeff

Re:Why doesn't BIND support multiple roots?

[kindbud]

Vixie has (so I hear) declared that BIND will never support multiple roots, FWIW. However, djbdns easily handles different roots for different TLDs.

I don't want to trust them to handle their TLD's and ICANN's TLD's.

No one but ICANN handles delegations for the legacy TLDs. The dot-com zone is still resolved through the ICANN roots. The delegation to the NS for dot-com is given by whichever roots you're using. Once your cache has the glue for dot-com cached, it never has to consult the roots (any roots) again for resolution of a dot-com domain - until the glue expires, of course. A typical client cache with good uptime hits the roots only a few times a week to refresh the glue for the TLDs its clients are making queries for. With glue in cache, recursion all the way to the roots is unnecessary; to resolve a dot-com domain, the cache goes directly to the dot-com servers for which it already has records.

You can also slave an augmented root file to your own client nameserver, instead of installing a root.cache file. This permits you to see first hand what the root zone is delegating to, so you can easily verify its correctness yourself. Your cache won't ever hit the roots, since the root zone loads all the glue it needs.

Re:Front page stuff!

[Masem]

I did submit this as "The Internet/Article". It's not even a good YRO, IMO, as we're talking something that does not have a direct effect on our rights.

Re:willing knew

[Masem]

"willingly knew", sorry. Since ICANN denied .web as it's already served by an alternate DNS, they should have said the same with .biz.