The latest

[Jeff Williams]

Jon,

  Ok.  I posted this to Justin privatly, but for you and the rest of
this list I am happy to post it to all.  In addition it will save me
alot of typing at any rate!  >;)

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 

These "off the top of the head" history incantations are getting
pretty wild, and it is very distressing to see so much inaccurate
stuff broadcast as fact...

Let me try to quickly summarize a few things from my own observations
and understandings from long experience.  I have been involved in the
center of these developments since 1975, in one strategic role or
another.  

ARPANET was simply built to interconnect ARPA Contractors for the
purpose of
sharing whatever resources could be shared by being Network Connected.
Though I do realize this is not DIRECTLY related to this thread or
the ARIN.  Let me be very clear on this point...

Originally, the entire ARPANET was owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by
ARPA, and anyone connecting to it or using a computer account on an
ARPANET connected host, was required to have ARPA Information
Processing Technology Office (IPTO) approval, either direct or
indirect.  In the berginning, there was a central authority.  

Thus, all names and numbers were assigned by ARPA Contracted
Administrators.  Up to and for a while after the time that the
Internet began to arise after ARPANET converted to TCP/IP in 1983,
this admin function was provided by the SRI NIC, until IANA
established at ISI.  Then ISI and SRI shared responsibility for
assignment of various names and numbers.  I am cloudy on the dates and
facts of this NIC/IANA transition and relationship, but the basic
point is that all of it was done under the understanding that ARPA
owned control the entire ARPANET.

Thus, the ARPANET inhabitants tended to be genuine academics, though I
would hesitate to call BBN "academic", considering how they took
serious proprietary entrepreneurial interests in all the technology
that they developed.  So did some others in the community.  My point
here is to debunk this notion that academics had some kind of
stranglehold on the ARPNET to assure that it would not work for
business purposes.  What a quaint idea;-)...  Actaully, a lot of
people made very good livings out of working on the Internet, and many
of them were not academics.

Over that early time period, lots of business was transacted among the
ARPA Contractors, and among various other US Government agencies and
contractors.  Some business was also transacted across international
boundaries among ARPA approved contractors outside the US.  I clearly
recall sending some of my Consulting Invoices over the ARPANET to
Government Contractors, and negotiating Government Contracts with
Government Agencies.  All of this was clearly in an experimental mode,
but we were doing it.  I even had clauses in my contracts that
required me to use the ARPANET in performance and administration of
the contracts.

  HERE WE GET TO THE MEAT OF THE MATTER.

Now, after TCP/IP was deployed by ARPA on the ARPANET, it became
possible to create what became the Internet because it was no longer
necessary for ARPA to control everything in all IP connected networks,
so autonomous systems were born and most of us knew that we were
embarking on a very new kind of infrastructure development, where-in a
Whole Internet would not be Wholly Owned by a Single Administration.

This was a truly major paradigm shift, in that no such beast had ever
existed on the earth before.  But, all the existing administrative
functions and responsibilities of the nascent Internet were formed
around ARPA's original Singular Sole Ownership infrastructure, so
nothing was ever changed until it became obvious that change was
needed.  Among these changes were conversion from a Government
Provided Backbone, to our current multi-competitor Open Commercial
Internet Backbone.

As the Internet took shape, the original admin functions and
operations began to change to accommodate distributed ownership and
distributed responsibility.  In part, DNS was created to solve the
problem of naming hosts with distributed authority while maintaining
network-wide integrity for name-to-address resolution.  But, of
course, the TLD space needed someone to administer the root, and that
job automatically defaulted to IANA as the obvious administrator.

Some of you might remember back to the fight over control that
occurred during this paradigm shift in the Infrastructure;-)...  It
was a proper prelude to the current DNS War.  Go read the COM-PRIV
archives if you want to see a really good fight.  Really big bucks
were at stake there, along with the whole future of the Internet.

Over time, IANA did a sufficiently good (some say excellent) job of
administration to hold almost total respect from the whole Internet
community, and until the mid 1990's, no one thought much about whether
the root should be administered by a czar, or whether it should be
more open, or totally open, or whatever...  This would also include
the ARIN.

In my view, the authority of IANA derived simply from the fact that
IANA properly provided TLD ROOT server administration, to the
satisfaction of all concerned.  No one questioned the apparent IANA
authority as long as things went along smoothly.

But, long before the community became aware of the need, Jon Postel
and IANA were working on the idea of expanding the TLD namespace, just
because the long term future need was obvious.  This thinking
naturally lead to other people becoming interested, in terms of both
the community benefits of enlargement and the potential for earning
revenue.

This brings us up to the present mess where suddenly it becomes clear
that there is no clear line of authority for IANA, ARIN, or anyone else
to
Czar the DNS TLD ROOT, and we are in a big fight about whether there
must or must not be a clear line of authority for deciding what names
can be used in the DNS TLD ROOT.  

Some of us say YES, and some of us say NO!  And there is no obvious
source of authority to decide the question for us.  The IANA autority
was derived from community acceptance of administrative actions taken,
but that community consensus authority did not extend to an IANA hand
over of it this same community consensus authority to someone else.
To take it over from IANA, the new authority must earn the respect and
the trust of the Internet community at large, just as IANA earned it
by providing satisfactory administration over many years.

This is because the Internet is like the Economy...  No one owns the
whole thing, while different parties own each separate part.  We have
in this century killed millions of people over the great question of
who should "own" the various economies of the world, and the answer is
"No One Should Own An Economy!"

Furthermore, almost everyone who ever owned an economy has come to
wish they didn't.  I predict that in due course, we will all come to
the same conclusion about the Internet and the great question of who
should own the DNS TLD ROOT.  At least we are not actually killing
anyone in this DNS/IP address war, yet, though we are assasinating 
characters all over the place, and regularly pitting old friends and 
colleagues against each other in vicious arguments where there appear 
to be no holds barred.  Some of my old relationships have been torn
asunder.

None the less, I predict that in the end we will discover that the DNS
ROOT does not need a Czar to select TLD names for the DNS any more
than other parts of the Internet need a Czar.  It only needs to avoid
naming collisions and maintain resolution coherency.  Neither of these
are really hard problems;-)...  Just need some common sense.

I note that some new TLDs have somehow been snookered into the
official root servers, and I must say that I see lots of distraught
complaints about the impropriety, but I see absolutely no indication
that any aspect of root service was diminished in any way, so I am
convinced that it is indeed harmless to add new TLDs to the root.  If
it can be done without permission without damage, then it should be
safe to do it with permission;-)...

So, all these social theories about a class war between academia, the
military, and business are just so much foolishness.  What is really
happening is just that the DNS ROOT is the last of the original
ARPANET vestigial tails to fall off the Internet skeleton.

What seems to be missed by everyone so far in this DNS Control War is
that the real controlling power in the system lies with the NAME
Resolvers, not the Name Servers;-)...  It is in the resolvers that
operational software under distributed control of myriad router and
host administrators decide what root servers to point to.  The fact
that BIND is delivered with defaults selected by Paul Vixie does not
mean that Paul is the Czar, and his statements that he gets his
instructions from IANA does not make IANA the Czar either.  The fact
that lots of administrators defaults is the critical
key, and when administrators stop accepting those defaults and
choosing others, we will all see that the servers do not have the
ability to control anything about what TLD names are "in the ROOT"

The fact is that all name resolver administrators have the power to
point at whatever root servers that want to point to, no matter who
says otherwise, since they are the people who know the passwords, and
who know their own personal needs, and know the needs of their
customers.  So, their personal needs and the needs of their customers
will take control in due course.

Someday it will become easy to reset those defaults, and then the
router administrators will take back control of the DNS ROOT, and that
will be that;-)...  

Jon Lewis wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 25 Jun 1997, Jeff Williams wrote:
> 
> >   Respectively, I disagree with you statment that ARIN has nothing
> > DIRECTLY to do with DNS.  This is a common misunderstanding I believe
> > that needs correcting terribly.  They are irrevacably related.
> 
> How are they "irrevacably" related?  How are they related at all?
> 
> > > also have published my own lengthy analysis of why ARIN is important......
> > > I believe that I sent a copy to this list.
> >
> >   No comment here.  I leave that statment to your own evalustion.
> 
> Excessive quoting, and mangled grammar and spelling just make you look
> like a fool...or have you recently started learning this language?
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Jon Lewis <jlewis at fdt.net>  |  Unsolicited commercial e-mail will
>  Network Administrator       |  be proof-read for $199/message.
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regards,
-- 
Jeffrey A. Williams
DIR. Internet Network Eng/SR. Java Development Eng.
Information Eng. Group. IEG. INC. 
Phone :913-294-2375 (v-office)
E-Mail jwkckid1 at ix.netcom.com