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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).
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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!
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!