Slashdot Mirror
US' Capitol Hill on the Internet
Anguirel writes "Wired has a few stories from the Hill. First up, ICANN gets a hearing before the House to answer questions about proposed fees. Next, House Majority leader Dick Armey denounced the UN e-mail tax saying it's just the UN being greedy and trying to profit from the Internet. Finally, Y2K conspiracy theories gained some credibility as a conference on the President declaring martial law was held by the US Reserve Officers Association. "
I find it interesting the number of government, quasi-government ond international bodies that actually think they have some authority over domain names (and the number of individuals who think they're right).
DISCLAIMER: I'm not saying anything about ICANN here (yet), but feel free to take this as a bash of WIPO, NetSol, the Clinton administration, etc...
DNS is set up by convention and volentary adherance to RFCs published by the IETF. The many parties involved volentarily go along with this because it's already in place, standards in general are a good thing, and peer pressure to do the right thing. This is as it should be.
If our current DNS system gets FUBARed by the powers that be, there is no law saying another system can't be put online by the people and businesses that use the net. Anybody with a big enough server can run DNS as long as they don't interfere with the operation of the current system. I can serve the domain www.aint.Igreat if I choose to. You can configure your system to use my server if you want to (just set your named.conf to consider my server authoritative for the .Igreat zone)
There are a few of those now, and a few Wins and other resolvers that can be accessed as well. They remain fringe servers because they're too small to handle a large load, and not everybody can access them. That could change if the current DNS gets FUBARed. The current system has no basis in law, and new systems are not prohibited (or prohibitable).