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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
I think it's obvious that it's time to reframe the question of ICANN... from:
their proposal to turn ICANN into The Force in the hopes that with enough of our money and total control over the root, that they may find a mission someday
to
how to reduce it to a useful size and believable function as Randy Bush is proposing.
I think it's time to start taking this seriously. Like to see next year's domain referrals go up $5 a year due to charges passed along to us by any registrar who wants to sell domain names people can connect to? Or $10? Or $100?
Or prices cranked up to the point where only major corporations and governments can afford them? The proposal to expand ICANN is an ambitious one. Ambitious translates to "if this goes through, it's going to cost somebody." WE are the somebody who will wind up paying.
My last comment on ICANN started with the phrase "taxation without representation". The proposed new ICANN doesn't have any public input that ICANN would have to pay attention to.
Tech Public Policy stuff
...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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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.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
One of the at large board members of ICANN, Karl Auerbach was reported as saying that "We've just had the equivalent of the president of the United States abolishing Congress" in response to Stuart Lynn's proposals.
At large board members are chosen by rank and file internet users.
Personally I think this proposal is a threat to the supposed impartiality of ICANN. To allow one third of the board members to be chosen by governments will completely alter the original mandate that ICANN was originally setup.
The BBC Website and the ICCAN Watch website has a much more indepth analysis of the proposed plan.
Just you're average nitpicker.
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.