Re: ICANN proposes new way to buy top-level domains - Network World

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com>
Date: October 29, 2008 7:29:00 PM EDT
Cc: dave () farber net, Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:    ICANN proposes new way to buy top-level  
domains - Network World

David Farber wrote:

> *From: *"Bob Frankston" <Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com

> $185,000 isn’t a lot of money for snake oil. The real question is  
> what is ICANN doing to give us stable identifiers...

What do you mean by "stable"?  And why should we presume that it such  
stability is universally desirable?

I suggest that we (and most particularly ICANN) have been running  
after the Chimera of "stability" without really asking whether that is  
something we always need or are willing to pay for.

I would suggest that the answer is quite context sensitive, depending  
on what the users want to do and what they are willing to pay for, and  
whether or not we care about some future archivist or historian.

There are several aspects to "stability":

1. Not everybody needs nor wants domain names that persist forever.  
Some things (for example an announcement of next months's high school  
show) hardly need something that is carved into stone for the ages.

2. Domain names are decidedly not a globally unique stable identifier.

For example there are many things that give different DNS answers  
depending on the perceived location of the querier.

And DNS names are notoriously unstable over time.  Even under the  
hands of one operator the records returned at different dates can be  
quite different.  And given that many domain names trade partners more  
often than dancers at a hoe-down there is often not a lot of even the  
most tenuous relationship between what the domain name represents on  
Day A and what it represents on Day B.

If one is looking for tags for archival storage and access to data,  
domain names don't fill the bill.

I wrote some thoughts on this several years ago - http://www.cavebear.com/archive/rw/nrc_presentation_july_11_2001.ppt 
 - and came to the idea that stable identifiers require two major  
things:

- They must either be valid everywhere or invalid everywhere.

- They must have three kinds of invariance:

 - location (i.e. Every valid name must have the same meaning no  
matter where it may be uttered.)

 - client (i.e. Every valid name must have the same meaning no matter  
by whom it may be uttered.)

 - temporal (i.e. Once a name becomes valid it must have the same  
meaning no matter when it may subsequently be uttered.)

Domain names aren't get mixed reviews on all of these, but they are  
particularly weak on the last (temporal invariance).

                --karl--









-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com