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U.S. Won't Let Go of DNS

Posted by Zonk on from the star-systems-will-slip-through-your-fingers dept.

An Anonymous Reader wrote in with a story on the Eweek site, reporting that the Federal Government is going to keep control of the Domain Name System rather than handing it over to ICANN. From the article: "...the United States is committed to taking no action that would have the potential to adversely impact the effective and efficient operation of the DNS, and will therefore maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file..."

4 of 385 comments (clear)

  1. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/01/061825 by Evro · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/01/061825 0&tid=103

    --
    rooooar
  2. The ITU != the rest of UN by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yeah well, the agency within the UN that would administrate the TLDs, should the US release control over them, is the very same agency that made sure that the world has one telephone standard, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

    The ITU was founded before the UN was, and oviously, it has very little to do with human rights issues, they just happen to share some organizational structure.

    This constant ignorant whining of the "the UN is a worthless piece of garbage" kind, is getting on my nerves. Educate yourself instead of repeating soundbites you heard on the news.

    More info here: ITU history

  3. Re:If you believe everyone plays fair... by kfg · · Score: 5, Informative

    What about physical security? How can you guarantee that if the root servers are spread out across the world?

    The root servers are spread out all over the world. It is that, in fact, that guarantees physical security, because the system is physically distributed. There is no central point of failure to attack.

    That's rather the point of the Internet.

    KFG

  4. Paul Vixie really controls it... by argent · · Score: 5, Informative

    Basically, the identities of the root nameservers are defined by the contents of the root hints files in the nameserver software used by every company and ISP on the planet. If a release of BIND comes out and it has a certain IP address in its root hints, then that's what the people using that release of BIND will use. If Windows Server 2010 uses a different IP address, people using that nameserver will get that root server instead.

    So, most of the big nameservers out there are using BIND, with dedicated Windows shops running AD or running BIND on Windows and everyone sane using UNIX, it's really up to Paul Vixie at ISC. So long as he plays ball with the Commerce Department, nobody needs to get hurt...