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New DNS Agreement Announcement

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the get-together-right-now dept.

gumbo writes "The Commerce Department, ICANN, and NSI have announced their domain name agreements. " Well, of course, it's written in PR-ese, but AFAIK, it looks as if said parties have resolved their differences, and perhaps will start to some progress take place on the DNS front. Given the recent...disagreements and legal disputes this is a fairly sizeable shift.Interesting note - check out the (re)-opening of WHOIS.

1 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. ... by Signal+11 · · Score: 4
    First off, this doesn't mean a damned thing. Let's assume they decide to cooperate. Great! Wonderful! Now who owns the WHOIS database? NSI thinks it does. How do you resolve this? You have competition - that's wonderful.. but without rules it's gonna get vicious in a hurry. Is there an arbitration committee with the power to enforce it's rulings? No.

    Second problem - you're maintaining multiple independent databases. Anybody who's used SQL for more than 10 minutes knows that this is a HUGE data integrity issue. Widget Enterprises decides to register widget.com, so they call up NSI and get the order put in. Meantime Funky Foobar registers widget.com with Fabulous Registration Services. Who wins? There's no way to guarantee this situation won't occur under this system - and even if there was - these organizations have no incentives to share their customers "with the enemy" to prevent it!

    I find myself arguing against my better judgement on this one, but I can't see how the current system can support multiple root servers - they'll be constantly out of sync with the others! The solution is, of course, to have only one entity in charge of the database, or divide it up in an organized fashion (Internic gets registrations A-D, Frank Foobar gets E-M, etc).

    However, one thing I think we can universally agree on here is that Internic should not be this entity! They're a bloated, insensitive, beaurocratic, and downright stubborn organization. Completely the opposite of what we need to make the root servers function reliably. I wish we could just hold an election and eject them from the DNS Whitehouse by popular vote. :\

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