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Randy Bush on Recent ICANN Proposals
Jodrell writes: "Randy Bush, internet architect and co-chair of the IETF's working group on DNS, has some interesting thoughts on the recent proposals to re-organise ICANN. Randy makes some interesting points about the likely result of allowing Government control into the DNSO, and on the current bloated condition of ICANN."
one computer scientist used to do this as a part time job. how much of a mountain can we make of a molehill?
To paraphrase Simon&Garfunkel:
Where have you gone Jon Postel?
The networks turn their lonely eyes to you.
What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
Jon Postel has left and gone away...
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Usually I have some point of contention with the article referenced or the opinion given but Randy Bush makes good and absoluitly valid points. He's completely correct. Unfortunately some of his solutions are more wishful thinking than potential implementations.
While it's true that ICANN could run on one or two million dollars, what organiation strives to command a smaller empire. It is the nature of those in authority to seek out greater power and methods of expanding their empire. We need to identify a strategy which ill provide incentive to the ICANN leadership toward downsiing and cost effective operations. While these incentives exist in forproffit businesses at risk of bankrupcy if they fail to operate efficiently, ICAN doesn't have this threat handing over their collective head.
Perhaps a strategy could be devised to create such a threat. This seems like the only way to persuage the jugernaught that is ICANN to amend it's ways.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
...is that ICANN is there to serve the Internet, not control it.
I would encourage anyone who is interested in this matter to become active themselves. There are so many issues related to the internet that encourage active participation by anyone who is interested and has something useful to say. If you can, go to RIPE, ARIN, APNIC or IETF-meetings. These organisations also have active mailinglists where your opinion (if intelligent) is valued.
/48 for each, respectively.) And it feels cool to be able to say that I was able to raise my hand for the vote on some of these issues.
r es ting-people/200202/msg00241.html
I had the pleasure of going to two RIPE meetings and had the joy of seeing the RIPE-community decide the new rules on the distrubution of IPv6 space both for Local Internet Registries as well as Internet eXchange Points. (/32 and
Furthermore, Esther Dyson asks the internet community to get involved into the ICANN debate and to pledge to join ICANN-at-Large. You can find that here:
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/inte
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As a previous poster mentioned, organizations don't generally strive to shrink the scope and power of themselves. Especially in heavily bureaucratic organizations. In organizations such as these, often the most protected item is the size of the budget; and the money will get spent one way or another before somebody notices they don't need it and takes it away.
I'm sure that there are people in ICANN that *do* think of themselves as the controlling entity of the internet. In many ways, they are correct.
The problem is that it is not only governments who can abuse power. Individuals and corporations show they can do that just as effectively all the time. The ITU (part of the UN) has overseen plenty of critical registration processes without abusing their power. I would rather have them in charge than a wholy owned subsidiary of Enron (e.g. the US Congress).
Randy is right that ICANN could be done cheaper, there is no need to hold every meeting in somewhere like Ghana. The UN does just fine holding most meetings in NYC or Geneva. ICANN holds almost every meeting in a place with third tier air connections.
Randy is wrong (as he often is) in believing that the DNS root can remain an amateur effort. It is now critical infrastructure and needs to be supported as such. At the moment we get by because we don't need 13 way fault tolerance. The level of infrastructure attacks against the root is rising and at some time we will need at least five high reliability nodes on ultra fat pipes (multiple OC48)
Randy is also wrong about the prospects for funds comming from governments. It is not unlikely that the EU and Japan can be persuaded to tip in some cash. But ICANN has to look like a government agency in its spending habits, not like a dotcom startup.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
All that DNS needs is somebody to edit the root zone file (which implies chosing between competing demands for the same name - a situation that can be readily and inexpensively handled by a first-come-first-served rule) and to make sure that those who run the root servers are reasonable and responsible folks who follow the protocols defined by the IETF.
ICANN, however, has expanded its role into all kinds of unnecessary things - like creating a worldwide trademark law and its own system of kangaroo courts with a jurisprudence that would make Judge Roy Bean blush.
ICANN has also decided that it needs to engage in massive (and expensive) nano-management of DNS sellers - ICANN has even mandated the minimum that these sellers must spend on marketing! ICANN plans to spend every penny of that $2,400,000 that it received in application fees just to "deploy" seven new top level domains - ones like .museum, .coop, and .aero, or .name. That kind of negative innovation will turn the Internet into a reprise of the 1950's telephone company in pretty short order. With ICANN at the helm we can expect more imagination in coal mining than in Internet naming technology.
ICANN's "Governmental Advisory Committee" (GAC) is composed only of government representatives - so we can get a hint of what government in ICANN - and thus government in DNS - will look like. The GAC has proven that while it has utterly no comprehension of net technology, it is able to blither for days on end to find just the right euphemism to put into a communiqe. And when it comes to making choices, the assembled governments of ICANN's GAC have demonstrated repeatedly that they tend to sacrifice their citizens pocketbooks, property, and privacy to the predators of the net - among them NSI and the trademark industry.
What ICANN's president's plan does is to eliminate what few constraints had existed on the ability of ICANN's management to do what they pleased, which seems to be to build empires to the sky and to engage in massive travel (one ICANN staffer travels to about 50 international venues per year!) Under the president's plan, ICANN's yearly budget goes up tenfold to several tens of millions of dollars per year!
Public participation in ICANN - if it were ever to come about would provide a check to these excesses.
And such public oversight is sorely needed - ICANN's management cares not a damn for the internet community or net users. And ICANN's management has demonstrated that its goals, and its methods, are not all that far from those of Enron, except that ICANN has the benefit of being being exempt from taxes.
In the movie Coconuts Grocho Marx said about the swamp property he was auctioning: "Oh, you can get stucco, oh, you can really get stuck oh." ICANN's president's plan is the same kind of swamp - and we are all going to get very stuck unless we oppose it, prevent it, and come up with a plan for an truely limited ICANN.
I'm not sure everyone has fully appreciated the value of maintaining a healthy, robust, scalable and available DNS system. Without DNS the Internet effectively grinds to a halt. If you wanted to break the Internet, targetting DNS would probably be the way to go. We really can't afford to let it wither under poor stewardship.
I can't speak to the effectiveness of ICANN. I don't know much about them. All I know is that my own DNS needs are served effectively enough and I've never had trouble. But I do agree that it seems odd that it now take $20M to do what Jon Postel used to do in his spare time (well spare time is over stating the matter...but my point remains).
If you ask me, DNS needs to be reconsidered in light of the possibilities of failure if the root servers fail for some reason. I know there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of caching DNS servers around the world, so one or two root servers failing isn't a big deal. Nonetheless, I think it would be worthwhile to consider a system where centralized root server management would not be a key component.
I don't even know if such a thing is possible. Could we do a peer-to-peer DNS system where servers learn of each other (kind of like routers or Gnutella)? I think something like that might solve this problem. But I don't have the answer. We'd better hope guys like Randy Bush do.