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.

Comments

Re:Complete Privatization = Death of the Net

[ajs]

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!

Re:Praytell

[Mahrin Skel]

Any plan to switch over to metered, "tagged" network transfer where you buy different grades of network performance on a connection by connection basis, requires that both the primary backbones and the routing control lie with entities who want to make the switch. The backbones alone can't do it, because they no longer transfer most of the traffic. But if you controlled the routing, you could make sure that only "content flagged" traffic had any real chance to arrive.

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