THE ALTERNATE ROOT

It is my belief that we need to explore and define alt root issues first, and come to conclusions, later. That is why we need a working group and a careful and extended consideration of the issues.

The most significant issue is simply to define what we mean by an "alternate" or "competing" root. The answer is not obvious, even to those with some understanding of DNS.

ICANN's view that it administers the "one true root" and can ignore all other name spaces is old and increasingly discredited. That whole framework rather obviously breaks down as soon as technical innovations are introduced. It is particularly obvious in two cases: New.net, and internationalized domain names.

New.net happened because ICANN's approach to adding TLDs is too SLOW and too RESTRICTIVE. ICANN's artificial scarcity created a market, and businesses are responding to it. The free market is giving us a valuable signal: current policies are way out of line with what consumers in the marketplace want. ICANN ignores this at its peril.

Oft quoted analogies to the telephone system are also incorrect. Most national telephone systems in the world started with their own, uncoordinated number spaces. The ITU did not coordinate them until very late in the game. The coordination took place by adding a level of hierarchy (country codes) to each system. I would suggest that this process was very much like processes that might be used to coordinate alternate root systems.

You also can't call ISPs utilizing New.net's altered DNS capabilities a "conspiracy" unless you are consistent and also call ISPs' willingness to point to the ICANN root a "conspiracy."

In both cases we are dealing with voluntary business relationships and technical configurations among Internet service providers.

ICANN has no international legal authority to order anyone to point to its root, and no national government has given it any exclusive right to call itself the DNS root. ISPs point to the ICANN root because everyone else does. But if enough ISPs chose to set up an alternate DNS root tomorrow, they could do so and, I argue, SHOULD be able to do so.

The real issue we ought to be considering is this:

1. How can ICANN's process be made more responsive to real market forces? Responsiveness does not mean "industry self-regulation," where a few insiders with a dominant position in the market cartelize the name space and award each other a limited number of TLDs. I mean true responsiveness to the demands of all consumers and suppliers operating in the market.

2. Alternate and competing roots exist. How can policies be defined to minimize problems and to make them compatible?

3. Above all, let's stop the posturing: ICANN and the US Dept of Commerce root are not divinely ordained, competition is a fact of the marketplace, so let's stop viewing competitors as illegitimate or as something that will go away.

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