Subject: Re: Split the IANA functions?

From: avri doria <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2014 10:27:30 -0500

Hi,

I thought the only reason the DNS root is a single root and not a banyan like root, is because classes don't really work and there has been a political (business, economic etc ) tendency (hard to call it decision) to not fix or replace.

avri

Sent from a T-Mobile 4G LTE Device

-------- Original message --------
From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]> 
Date:01/07/2014  09:44  (GMT-05:00) 
To: [email-masked] 
Subject: Re: Split the IANA functions? 

On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 07:02:34AM +0100, Eliot Lear wrote:
> That there is a single root is both a technical AND a
> political decision. 

I have to disagree with this.  The uniqueness of the root is not a
political decision.  It's a fact of mathematics.  DNS is a tree.
There's one root.

Now, one might argue that choosing this kind of name space was a
political decision.  I might buy that argument (I don't know).  There's
good reason to suppose that there was at least some organizational
principle behind the decision in favour of a hierarchical namespace.
There were technical constraints too, I think: I don't believe a fully
peer to peer system was practical in the network environment of the
1980s.  But if we wanted to call anything that had non-technical
elements in it "political", then the selection of the DNS
(hierarchical) name space was in that sense political.

This is not to say that the single root doesn't have additional
political implications.  But I will not concede that this is some
contingent fact of the DNS that could be otherwise.  The particular
root we have could be different.  That there is a single root could
not.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: David Conrad <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2014 10:34:11 -0800

Avri,

> I thought the only reason the DNS root is a single root and not a banyan like root, is because classes don't really work and there has been a political (business, economic etc ) tendency (hard to c…

Using classes simply moves the single root up to the IANA class registry.  Classes work fine: the minor issues to deal with are that there is no applications that support a way to make distinctions on classes, some widely deployed DNS servers do not support classes, no DNS UIs or DNS-based systems support classes (and we can't even get simple RR types like type 99/SPF supported to the point we've apparently deprecated the use of that RR type), and, in order to use classes, we'd have to figure out some way to get people's pointy haired bosses to understand that <class123>:phbporn.com is _not_ <class666>:phbporn.com.  From my (perhaps a bit cynical) perspective, the ship has not only sailed on the use of classes, but it has hit an iceberg and sunk long ago.

Regards,
-drc