[OT] Internet may "fall apart" next month, says EU

[Christopher Browne]

On 10/13/05, meng <meng-D1t3LT1mScs at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Zbigniew Koziol wrote:
>
> > Well, well, so ICANN is under a contract from US department of
> > commerce? ;)
> >
> > Actually, Internet was a failure. It was supposed to create a new
> > medium where mind control could be excercied, but the idea did not
> > work, almost entirely. Contrary, it become the bastion of free speach.
> >
> > So, I am not surprised that there are voices to shut it down, or at
> > least, to partition it. Northern America has a long tradition of
> > isolating itself from their cultural roots (which are, btw, in Europe,
> > mostly).
> >
> > But I am rather optimistic: there are already too many billions of $$
> > behind the Internet, and cutting it down to parts would mean huge
> > losses. Though, from another hand, these who care for shouting mouths
> > do not care so much for money because they have them from other sources.
> >
> http://european.de.orsn.net/faq.php
>
>  From the above faq:
>
> ORSN is an abbreviation for Open Root Server Network and stands for a
> network of DNS servers in member countries of the European Union and/or
> neighbouring countries.
> The ORSN serves as a alternative for the existing root-server network
> since February 2002, which is coordinated by the ICANN. In contrast to
> the root servers of the ICANN, the ORSN servers should predominantly be
> placed in Europe. The maximum number of ORSN root-servers will be 13.
>
> Why does the internet need "ORSN"?
> Until now, the administration is done by the USA and/or the ICANN.
> Therefor, a large number of root-servers is located in America. A loss
> or the modification of the root-server information could result in
> serious consequences for all other countries concerning their internet
> use. It is for example possible to stop a whole country from using the
> internet. In practice, this scenario didn't happen so far but it can't
> be excluded either.

This misunderstands things quite a bit.

1.  There are geographically widely-dispersed root servers.  While 10
of the 13 are operated by organizations based in the USA, there are
three that are NOT, and some operate, via things like multicasting,
highly distributed root servers.

ISC, for instance, operates the "Letter F" root servers, which consist
of 33 highly geographically dispersed nodes that operate via anycast.

I expect the ones operated by the US military (G and H) don't have the
richness of international deployment

2.  A diversification of roots wouldn't forcibly need to affect name
squatting or name allocation.

There are already "alternate root" systems which, such as they support
anything, can support the existing zones (.com, .net, .org, .info,
.travel, .aero, various others, and the country codes) via pulling
zone files from the existing registry sources.

If they take much the same information from the same registries, then
this changes relatively little about name resolution.  This would be
like picking one Linux distribution over another; if they all dip
their nets into the same streams of source data, they will all behave
similarly to what you see now.

That's the case for ORSN; the point of it is to provide a set of root
servers somewhat localized to the EU that is thus convenient
(hopefully fast/low latency) for EU-based users to point to.

An entertaining one is TLDA.net; they proposed a more distributed
approach to claiming names, and proponents set up TLDs such as .god
and .satan and somewhat jokey things of the sort.  Some weren't happy
with the notion of registries "sitting in the way" charging money for
what they think ought to be free, and there are some interesting
(dunno if it could scale) alternative approaches.

As someone whose salary is paid by such a registry, I suppose I may
have some inherent bias :-), but I do find that much of the
"anti-registry" commentary is either associated with
  a) Gripes about some particular registry's operation, or
  b) A complete lack of understanding that making things work reliably
       isn't something you can do on a 486 with a couple of IDE drives, or
  c) A lack of the perspective that, for inexpensive things, it can cost
      more to do the accounting than it does to provide those inexpensive
      things.  (Case in point: I'll bet that it costs a LOT more for cellular
      companies to provide monthly itemized bills to their customers than
      it costs to operate the hardware that actually provides the cellular
      service...)

If the EU or UN or ISO or such took over the politics, there would, no
doubt, be some noticeable changes.  But I doubt that there is anything
particularly obvious about what would be the "user visible" aspects to
it.

Thinking of cell phones, again...  Consider that much the same
cellular hardware is used all around the world under numerous
political regimes and political structures.  There are variations in
what cell services exist, from country to country, and from vendor to
vendor.  The "shapes" of those variations vary quite a lot.  It is not
self-evident that the name of the political regime determines all that
much about the shape of the cellular service.

It seems to me that the same would be true for changes to the way the
Internet works.
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