more on quert on US unilateral control of ICANN backfires in WSIS.

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brad Templeton <btm () templetons com>
Date: October 3, 2005 3:39:57 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: h_bray () globe com
Subject: Re: [IP] more on quert on US unilateral control of ICANN  
backfires in WSIS.


On Sun, Oct 02, 2005 at 06:25:23PM -0400, David Farber wrote:

> On Oct 2, 2005, at 6:05 PM, h_bray () globe com wrote:
>
> Somebody fill me in on this:  If the US refuses to hand over  
> control of
> ICANN, can anybody take it from us?  If so, how?


It's a fun question.  I detail a few answers at:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/howworks.html

I also detail how you could build an "icann" that had no legal
existence in _any_ jurisdiction with more modern technology.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/nojur.html


But I will summarize.   ICANN exists only because there is a natural
monopoly on the root servers.   Every machine on the internet that
runs its own DNS server (which today means largely a system at every
ISP and major corporation and institution, but people with their own
servers at home like myself) has its own pre-compiled list of the root
servers it will trust to find top-level domains.   Your server has
preset into it this list, and you use this list to ask, "where is the
server for .com" and such.   The server for .com in turn will tell you
where to find globe.com and so on.


This pre-compiled list comes from just a few sources.  Most linux  
servers
use a program called "bind" now maintained by the internet systems
consortium (isc.org) a nonprofit under the management of Paul Vixie.
Other people run Windows and use the precompiled list from Microsoft.

The problem is the natural monopoly.  The power lies entirely in the  
hands
of the millions of individual servers.  They could at any time switch to
a new root list (and many have tried to use different root lists that  
try
to do everything the main root does and a bit more.)

But the killer is they must all switch at once.  If half the net uses
one root, and the other half another root, and those roots disagree
(rather than one being a superset of the other) then you get chaos.
Half the world gets a different answer, potentially, for globe.com than
the other half.   Nobody wants that.

So, in practice, getting everybody to switch at once would be a huge
effort.  You would need a lot of political will, a real groundswell of
disapproval of ICANN to do it.  But it could happen.


However, if all the people in the world _except_ the USA were to switch
to a new root, and the USA didn't like this, the other countries would
probaby win.  That's because unless the USA tried to order americans to
use the USGov approved root list, most americans would switch to follow
the rest of the world because again, it's not productive to have a  
split.

It's quite a thing to suggest ordering people to use a specific root.
In theory it's a private choice the government should have no  
involvement
with.


If there were a groundswell of support for a move, the next step  
would be
for Paul Vixie and Bill Gates to go along with it and switch the  
defaults
to the new servers.  They would only do this, though, if they thought  
it was
what their customers were asking them to do.  They could not easily  
do it
by fiat.   Vixie and Gates are of course subject to U.S. law.  The USGov
could compel them not to do it, but boy would there be a stink about  
that,
and everybody would then just do it manually.


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