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VeriSign CEO on Commercializing the Internet
mdj writes "CNET has an interview with VeriSign CEO Stratton Scalvos, who says it's time to commercialize the internet's infrastructure and 'pull the root servers away from volunteers who run them out of a university or lab.' He admits that's going to be 'unpopular.'" Because, after all, taking the root servers away from bright, educated comp-sci longbeards who have nothing better to do than to make them run well, and putting them in the hands of MBA bean-counters who don't know what TCP/IP is, is a sure-fire way to improve reliability.
We're stagnating on this intarweb thing. The surest way to kick progress in the pants is to take what we've built and give it to the ego-laden beautiful business boys with the shiny white teeth and small peckers, show them the power switch, and tell them to have fun.
Surely, there must be something else to build, a new frontier to conquer. Why do we need to pay any attention to what these suits say? If there's an RFC that says to ignore these fools, the filter will be nearly perfect. All of the idiots will go in one direction - the direction that Verisign points to. All of the smart people that I want to talk to will go the other way - the way of a standard Internet not beholden to a single company's vision of the inside of their own colon.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
More like they had a nasty shock when they discovered that they don't have as much power as they thought. The reaction of those running the root servers and their move towards circumventing Sitefinder via the BIND patch made it clear that there are still checks to the power Verisign currently wields. It's not surprising that they're advocating moves which will remove some of those checks so that they won't be as easily stopped next time.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
And that will probably happen. We're at the point now where it's starting to get a little painful for people who step outside of the black-and-white vision of the Net that businesses tend to have. People like me, for example, who run our own mail server at home. AOL won't listen to my mail. Why? Because I'm residential. A residential user should be sending mail through a business, or so AOL thinks.
That hurts a bit, but my reaction is to say that AOL doesn't need my mail. But what happens when ISPs start to enforce no-server limitations? What happens when governments start to enforce them?!
The same thing with name service. There are already several alternate roots, and they will only become more popular as Verisign pushes the "get the roots out of the hands of the accedmics" attitude.
Eventually, this will lead to healthy competition between the "subculture nets" and "The Internet" (we all know there's no such thing as The Internet, right? that it's just a generic term that we use to refer to consumers of IPV4 address space).
I'm hoping that wireless networks will eventually replace the default "Internet" that we've known with a decentralized cloud of mini-networks with physical routing information collected dynamically. That will require some major changes in the technology and pervasiveness of its use, but it could easily happen, and would be far more reliable and "ownership proof" than what we have today (lost all the nodes between you and your target? pause a second to re-calculate your routes and continue... self-healing network topologies are not new tech, and many useful designs exist).
Let's take the root out of the hands of these corporate greed-mongers and give it back to the people who created the world's most powerful computing infrastructure in the first place: all of us!
To control the routing, one of the pieces you need is control of DNS, *complete* control with no viable alternatives. Another piece is that you need to either be ICANN, or you have to break them.
That's the conspiracy-theory version, anyway. It's another episode of the same old fight, "The Internet won't be safe for business until business runs it." From that point of view, this is a fight between ICANN and Verisign over who gets to be masters of a "mature", commercial from the packet level up, internet.
--Dave
So, here I was wondering why VeriSign makes these horrible, actively harmful decisions. Their customers will hate them, the entire community will rise against them, people will avoid them at all costs. Then I realized that the company, like Google, must have their own set of "Core Values". Of course, Google's core value is "don't be evil". I think VeriSign's is just slightly shorter:
"Be Evil".
Once you understand the motivation, it suddenly makes sense.
Then I suggest two internets. I've already suggested this very same idea with regard to the spam problem (let there be one with spam, and one without spam, and then the spammers will have their place to speak freely).
It would be more practical to just create a new internet apart from the existing one (though "circuits" in the new one might just be tunnels in the present one). Some have said "the internet was good before the MBAs came, so we should just kick them out". Certainly it is true, but it really isn't practical to change it now; it's just way too late. What is needed is a new one.
But wait ...
We can create a "new" internet using the existing internet. If we just start a whole new set of root servers, and new top level domains, and make mail servers refuse any traffic from any addresses that don't properly validate a reverse DNS under the new name hierarchy, we would have pretty much good separation anyway, without the cost of a whole new infrastructure.
And I suggest we do this entirely with IPv6 only (starting with tunnels, migrating to raw circuits as backbones finally get IPv6 deployed). We don't actually have to use "their" root servers, so why should we.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
> That hurts a bit, but my reaction is to say that AOL doesn't need my mail. But
> what happens when ISPs start to enforce no-server limitations? What happens when
> governments start to enforce them?!
Here's what John Walker thinks will happen if these trends continue. I don't like the trend toward a consumer Internet either, since I run a mail and DNS server on my cable modem, not to mention an ssh server so I can get at my stuff from other computers. My ISP has/had? a policy against _file_ servers, which is how I plan to justify running the servers I do if they ever give me any trouble.
> Eventually, this will lead to healthy competition between the "subculture nets" > and "The Internet".
That kind of competition isn't healthy. DNS inconsistencies suck. It's extra work for anyone who has to make sure they're DNS setup is ok.
> (we all know there's no such thing as The Internet, right? that it's just a
> generic term that we use to refer to consumers of IPV4 address space).
The Internet is an IP internetwork. It is the biggest one around, and is really the only global one that most people are on, so we call it the Internet.
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
I think you left out the amount of TCP 135 and ICMP traffic from machines infected with... well... whatever worms and/or virii that came out this month.