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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...
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
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.
Remember, VeriSign is busy telling them its side of the story. We need to tell them ours!
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.