[discuss] [IANAxfer] [ccnso-igrg] Two accountability questions - help pls- Workshop 23 - ICANN accountability

Thu Sep 4 08:10:27 UTC 2014

On Sep 4, 2014, at 8:14 AM, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:

> John's case for a single IANA registry seems weak to me, especially when it touches on DNS. 
> See below
> ...
>> The IANA registries themselves are actually shared, e.g. the IPv4  space consists
>> of technical/reserved entries from various IETF  specifications, and then general
> 
> Please specify these entries. 

RFC 7249

>> The same argument  applies to DNS, in that
>> portions of the DNS space are actually  defined by IETF (e.g. ".arpa") and these
>> entries have a different  in origin than the general purpose portion of the DNS
>> root zone.
> 
> Which is why they are easily separable. .arpa is just a TLD registry. It does not need to be run by the same entity that runs the DNS root zone any more than .com or .music needs to be run by the IANA. 

It does not have to be run by the same entity; it is operationally very use 
for it to be run by the same entity, since the entries in .ARPA have to be
collated from both the RIR and IETF communities.  Additionally, the protocols 
and modes of implementation for DNSSEC must be consistent across the entire 
DNS hierarchy, so even if one could presume that the content overlap is purely 
an IETF/RIR item, both the RIR and IETF communities have strong views (technical, 
administrative, and operational) on how the DNS root zone is administered.

>> Despite that, the entire DNS root zone needs to be published as  a single unit
>> (particularly when one considers DNSSEC, etc.)
>> 
>> There's no clear benefit  from having discrete operators, and it
>> would require some very  significant joint coordination to make work as
>> successfully as  the present approach.
> 
> The potential benefit might be that the highly politicized and commercialized DNS-related activities would be separate from the other stuff, which is less controversial. 

I do acknowledge that the politicized nature of DNS root zone administration 
makes having all of the IANA registries under one operator less attractive, 
and some would argue that separation is the logical result.  The highly-
interconnected nature of the Internet infrastructure leads me to a different 
conclusion, which is that every effort should be made to make administration
of all Internet identifier systems more methodical, rather that hiding from
the problem, and letting DNS registry administration become non-deterministic.

FYI,
/John

Disclaimer: my views alone.