Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: more on ICANN To Evaluate Internet Keywords
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 18:27:35 -0500
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 11:51:16 -0800 (PST) Reply-To: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com> To: farber () cis upenn edu From: "Karl Auerbach" <karl+dated+1012333876.154957 () cavebear com> ICANN is not "evaluating" keywords. And keywords are not part of ICANN's role. Naming systems of the Internet are evolving; new directory services are being created. The sensible ones are being built using DNS, if they use DNS at all, merely as an underlying layer that isolates the dynamics of IP address changes and uses DNS merely as a relatively unchanging namespace and one in which the interpretations that humans may chose to apply to the character sequences used are not of any particular importance or concern. How DNS is used by users or applications is not part of ICANN's job. ICANN's role is merely to ensure that DNS runs smoothly and reliably. It would be unwise for ICANN to expand its role and to try to regulate beyond DNS itself. (But that horse may have been out of the barn for a long time - ICANN has already gone far beyond mere "technical" coordination of DNS - one has to be naive indeed to believe that the UDRP, ICANN's domain name dispute policy, has any tie to "technical coordination.") I, personally, believe that the edge of DNS is the point in the software at which a given computer makes its final decision to emit a RFC compliant packet aimed at port 53 on a DNS server. Anything that occurs before the software's decision to use DNS is, to my way of thinking, simply not part of DNS itself and is not part of ICANN's job. One particularly interesting instance of this is the path from a web browser's "address bar" to whatever pops up inside the display window. It is a long and winding path - and it is becoming a target of control (and right now on Windows platforms, Microsoft is clearly in control of that path). The text that a user pours into an address bar is just that - text. Whether it is ultimately used as a DNS name is up to the transformation engines in the browser. Using Internet Explorer as an example - depending on one's "search" settings, the text entered is kneaded umpteem different ways to see if it forms a URL that fits a certain Microsoft defined, pattern, whether it might appear to be a fully qualified domain name (again, ending with one of a series of Microsoft chosen to be recognized top level domain names), or is simply a sequence of words connected by dots and hence fodder for some kind of search engine, etc etc. As the result of these transformations, DNS queries that may be emitted as the result of something the user typed into the address bar may be quite different than the words the user typed. A lot of people think that any sequence of words connected by dots is a domain name. That's simply not true. (In fact it is amusing to note that the dot is not a part of DNS at all - the DNS protocols do not use a dot as a separator in the packets and can actually carry dots (and any other character including blanks) as characters in DNS names that are not used to identify host computers. The dot that we type is merely part of the human interface. Well, so much for Sun's marketing slogan "We are the dot in dot com". ;-) I do not like ICANN's proposal to use time at the public meetings of the Board of Directors to do these kinds of tutorial. Not only does it transform ICANN into a trade show (already dubbed ICANN-dex by someone in the press.) But, more importantly, it reduces the already far too small time available for the public to interact with the Board. However, it is useful for ICANN to make a survey of non-DNS naming systems in order to better clarify the limits of ICANN's bailiwick. --karl--
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