[discuss] Real world Impact of multiple roots

Tue Jan 28 19:55:12 UTC 2014

On January 28, 2014 at 12:51 mueller at syr.edu (Milton L Mueller) wrote:

 > But Ben, the real question for you is, what advantage or benefit
 > would be gained by adding another root? For a long time, that
 > debate was about new TLDs - alternate roots promised to add them
 > faster than a stalemated and over-regulatory ICANN. Now that ICANN
 > is adding them, what is the point? If it is a political split, then
 > the 'benefits' presumably would be political too - perhaps you can
 > explain to me what they are.

I'm not Ben but someone else (David Cake) posed a similar question
just now.

Perhaps I'm missing the obvious -- did you mean what's the advantage
to ICANN to manage more than one? -- but an alternate DNS space can
co-mingle with another DNS space.

Both could return the same response (IP addrs) for, e.g., GOOGLE.COM
but different responses for, oh, SEX.COM.

That's relatively trivial.

So the benefits are the usual -- money, power, that sort of thing.

SEX.COM returns "no such address" or maybe the addr of a SEX.COM which
has been sold to a different party in the other space.

And perhaps one has to pay a separate fee to each space to have their
string resolved to their address. That's potentially a lot of money.

Sure, someone like google might have such market power they'd have to
do it for free and forego the $50/year fee, but not tens of millions
of others.

It's really just another form of non-net-neutrality.

That's what struck me when I read that 160 (?) page FCC report on
network neutrality. The naivete and single-minded focus on bandwidth
shaping.

There are many dimensions to net neutrality.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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