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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.
Last month Mr. Scalvos's approval rating went down to 3%. Think it will be lower this month? (vote here - bottom of page).
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
If we commercialize the entire infrastructure, prices will rise, and reliability will fall.. it has been proven many times; @Home, Privatized Power in California, and Alberta
If a completely commercial net were created, I can guarantee that underground sub-networks would pop up externally
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.
Who doesn't Michael insult in that l'il editorial blip? Wow...
or did i miss the point of the previous article?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Other corps, on occasion do the Right Thing(tm) out of self-interest (Ms vs Eolas patent suit come to mind), but these guys seem to be pure slime.
Hey!! New slashdot poll:
Who is more evil:
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
You left out Microsoft????
OK, so I have a personal interest in the world of IT and technology... and I like to know how my technology is doing what it is (infact I like to know how all I interact with works - I like to learn and increase my knowledge). I also have a CFA and MBA, as well as an undergrad in economics (I like to know how economies work too).
/. is a little prejudice (most seek to justify their own existence) but please do not refer to all MBAs in a negative light... please specify BAD MBA as the fact they are incompetant to what they claim to be should be prioritised.
MBA is used as a negative reference when it shouldn't be, a good MBA graduate should be a good manager - a good manager should be interested and should want to learn about whatever they encounter, and should defer specialist knowledge to the specialist (well, this should be specialists as a range of views should be sought) to inform. A decision based like this should be clearly justified and acceptable to all that are without prejudice as they will see the rationalisation.
ALl I can see around here is BAD MBAs being commented about... now
BTW I work as a fund manager and love, really love, ripping up many managers of IT firms when they come to meet me as they often are really clueless and only ride as an intermediary between the techie and the financier.
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
I've suspected for a long time that MBA-types hold techies in contempt. Offshoring IT jobs is another symptom of this. Sclavos' comments demonstrates the utter contempt he holds for the people that built the internet -- the very same people that made him rich!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
He seems to imply that they've spent $150m in infrastructure to run the root servers. Color me stupid, but I have trouble imagining how I could spend that much on the root servers unless I was allowed to count the $750k Sclavos salary (plus his heft options), and those of his crooked cronies, plus a new building or two. (I call them crooked because they benefitted from CSFBs shady IPO allocations) Sclavos sees a way for a single company to monopolize a market (the market of mistyped domain names), and he's in a position to try to grab it. Now he's trying to frame it as a battle between intellectuals and realistic business people, when in fact it's a battle between people who don't want a single company forcing everyone into accepting an ethically questionable service and a single money hungry jackass who realized he found an unraped portion of the Internet. The Internet raises new questions constantly, and now the question is 'what if we just installed wal-marts on every single piece of empty property'. In the real world that's a laughable concept, but on the Internet, it's actually possible, and he wants to do it.
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
ask Google
"SCO sucks" - 21,000 pages
"Verisign sucks" - 19,300 pages
It's SCO.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Oh please. Just the possibility that cultures and societies have placed far less cultural/political importance on the amassing and growth of personal and corperate wealth than the society we live in today seems to scare the bejeezus out of people.
No, the world has not always been about growing wealth (both organizational and personal).
Certainly in the past 400-500 years it has been, having started from the shift from feutal times to the following centuries of british and european capitalist economies, but there have been (are still are) pockets of society in which people are simply uninterested in increasing their wealth.
Very few people like to believe this tho, because it tends to suggest that people should feel guilty for wanting to increase their wealth and power. It's a natural thing to want a quality that might be perceived as bad to be a human constant instead of a personal choice, as it absolves the person from being driven to commit acts they might otherwise consider unethical.
Then there are countless examples of families, living today, who simply wish to retain their current standard of living, and are not neccessarily out to increase their wealth. However, such people are viewed as being 'losers who just couldnt gain wealth if they wanted to anyhow' as a means of not having to admit that the goal of growing ones personal wealth is actually a personal decision that may, in fact, have moral consequences.
Not that I'm against it, but it pisses me off when somebody says, "Well, thats the way its always been."
Murders have happened since the dawn of time, but that doesn't mean we let people 'kill or be killed' nor do we assume that the level of violence on the planet has been constant since the dawn of time.
We are in an age of the glorification of greed. Whether thats a good thing or not depends on your political and ethical leanings, I would imagine.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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
The amazing thing is his argument is based on security; he asserts that commercialized root servers will be better for security. What is the evidence of that? Microsoft? He asserts that recent hacker attacks on the root servers (which took out 9 of them at once) were because they're at universities and (one of them) in the military, but offers no argument as to why commercial ownership would be better. The whole thing has the tone of, it's time to grow up and take the toys away from the little kids because they rightfully belong to us grownups, who will do better with them. His arrogance is beyond belief! And then he's got the nerve to point out that security is more important than philosophical debates about commercialization of the net. Well, duh, but the only thing he's got supporting his position is a philosophical assumption (without evidence) that commercial servers are more secure than publicly owned ones.
Almost all of recorded history clearly shows that man has always operated on greed and the amassing of wealth. The measurement of that wealth may or may not have changed over the millenia but the greed has not. Since the dawn of man, people have robbed their neighbors and nations have gone to war primarily due to greed. Long before "feutal" times. Since the dawn of man greed has been a driving factor for mankind. The fact that a few people do not share this view or wish to accumulate wealth does not change the fact that society in general has always been that way.
Murders have happened since the dawn of time, but that doesn't mean we let people 'kill or be killed' nor do we assume that the level of violence on the planet has been constant since the dawn of time.
At the same time a desire or laws to prevent murder doesn't change the fact that, since the dawn of time murders have happened and will continue to do so.
Remember, VeriSign is busy telling them its side of the story. We need to tell them ours!
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
So, Stratton Sclavos says "The noise you're hearing publicly does not match the real impact of the [Sitefinder] system... ...We have asked for the data five times from anyone who has it--ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the IAB--and no one can produce data. All they can produce is these fringe stories."
Back on September 21s, Paul Twomey, president and CEO of Verisign said "As to your call for us to suspend the service, I would respectfully suggest that it would be premature to decide on any course of action until we first have had an opportunity to collect and review the available data." Well, have they seen this? It's a study that says:
The study also says:
That seems pretty clear to me. It says that 91% of the entire internet was affected, in a manner that was more costly than necessary, and not user friendly to the majority of the people that saw it. (i.e. not in their native language.)
In addition, on October 7th, Verisign released a statement that said:
48 million. So... an independant study that Verisign called for, and Verisign themselves have found that the "real impact" of Sitefinder has been tremendous. And then Stratton Scalvos has the gall to say that "no one can produce data"?!
We'd prefer ICANN to become more of a trade association that promotes the growth of the network rather than a regulatory body - Of course you would, as those 'trade assosciates' would have commercial interests on the line. 'Hey, if someone mis-spells a domain, they get a search page. We could sell advertising space, search placement, etc. Anyone disagree with this idea?' Riiiight...
How do we build a commercial business with ground rules that seem to shift based on personal agenda and emotion versus any particular logical data set? - Of course, that 'particular logical data set' = 'profit!' When 'agendas' and 'emotions' express things such as 'This network should be free of censorship, free of centralized control,' then yes, they ARE anathema to corporate profit philosophies.
Are we going to be in a position to do innovation on this infrastructure, or are we going to be locked into obsolete thinking that the DNS was never intended to do anything other than what it was originally supposed to do? - Getting into evolutionary dead-ends is generally a Bad Thing, yes. However, most 'innovation' I hear discussed is for the benefit of corporate interests, rather than improvements of underlying functionality.
A few years ago, there was the talk of making 'Internet 2', making a completely new infrastructure to replace backbones, etc. It would be 'the way of the future,' where we could have 'content on demand,' 'accurate, real-time tele-conferencing,' etc, etc, ad infinitum. Well, after blowing smoke out of their collective a$$es for a time, they've realized the costs and effort involved (back then fiber was being laid down like mad, with no end in sight, so the infrastructure for it would 'just be there'). The talk of a 'second Internet' created/operated/controlled by corporations has dwindled to a trickle. Now, the corporate effort is focusing more and more on the existing Internet. The 'content providers' (MPAA, RIAA), the infrastructure owners (ie. Sprint), 500 lb. gorillas such as Verisign, are now all focusing on the existing Internet, and the 'evolution' and 'innovation' they want are to make the existing Internet into the corporate Utopia that the 'Internet 2' was supposed to be. And it's only going to continue getting worse...
That base level of DNS (domain name system) response is an obligation we took on when we inherited that contract. But it would be commercially unreasonable for anyone to suggest that we shouldn't be allowed to build incremental services on top of that if they deliver value. - 'Embrace and extend,' as it were... But how much over-head would all these 'features' entail? For example, the following gem: The funny thing about digital security is that we've lived in a world where we only knew someone was attacking us when they hit our firewalls. It's time to evolve that world so that we get the information that an attack is coming before it hits our front door. What the hell?!? So what do you have, 'notification' packets sent before the 'real' packets?? Do you delay the 'real' packets to give enough time between the 'notification' and 'real'? "But we don't know that data's coming until it actually gets here." No shit, really?!?
And this is the type of person who's a role model for how 'commercialization' of the Internet is going to work... Yeah, I see great things coming, let me tell ya.........
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
Yes, but modern multinational corporations have a power to exercise their greed that was impossible historically without being an expansionist dictator.
There's an old saying that fits here: "Dance with the one that brung ya." If Verisign thinks they can do a better job managing the Internet, let them go out and design Internet II and see who wants to play by their rules. That wouldn't work, because the original Internet would still be here, and its principal virtue of free exchange of information between consenting parties will always beat one-sided conversations like television, movies, music, and Mintel. The only way they can get people to join their new network is to destroy the existing Internet as we know it.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Seriously, what would happen if a company "enron-ed" What happens then? At least with the root servers in the public trust, aka a University, you can be sure that they will be around for a while. But if you start handing them out, then commercial entities can start to capitalize on them.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
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.