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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..."

3 of 385 comments (clear)

  1. Correct My Understanding- by LionKimbro · · Score: 3, Interesting
    My understanding is thus:

    • root nameservers are controlled by the private companies that host them (NASA, VeriSign, Cogent, US DoD, ...)
    • ICANN keeps the official registry of names; the private companies with the nameservers decides to go along with ICANN's registry, but is not legally required to do so
    • ICANN has one root name server, but only one
    • the private companies have, in the past, rebuked ICANN - in particular, ICANN asked them to install specific private keys and to be granted root access; the companies said (basically) to take a hike
    • Country-coded TLD's are not managed by ICANN; somebody else does that. (yes..?)


    This is just my understanding of the situation, and it probably has errors. That said, I've not once seen a good plain language explanation of how this all works, and what the actual powers and obligations are. This is my understanding of what an IETF regular told me.

    Neither the US or ICANN actually determines what goes into the root name servers: It's just by convenience and general agreement (but not obligation) that the root nameservers decide to humour ICANN, and let them maintain the list of names. There is no law or contract that says they have to do anything that ICANN says.

    Congress doesn't control this, and never did, if I understand right.

    Please correct my understanding; I'm sure at least some of this is wrong.
  2. FreeDNS by camcorder · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Time for an organisation to come up with FreeDNS. With enough cooperation, it's not impossible to bring FreeDNS networks. It might seem utopia but as in any other thing, having an alternative is always better than monopoly.

  3. Re:I have educated myself, YOU have not by Planesdragon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It has become part of a world body that has done precious little to actually help the world

    The UN was designed to do one thing: prevent World War III.

    It did that exceptionally well. The USSR and the USA never had a huge tank/nuke war in Europe, and their proxy wars were fought with unusual restraint given that each side had nuclear arms.

    The fact that the UN has been used to do some other things is a comparative footnote.