practice

Doi: 10.1145/1995376.1995392

Article development led by queue.acm.org

Technology business plans that assume
no competition—ever.
BY PaUL Vixie
arrogance
in Business
Planning

in the internet addressing and naming market there is a great deal of competition, margins are thin, and the premiums on good planning and good execution are nowhere higher. To survive, investors and entrepreneurs must be bold. Some entrepreneurs, however, go beyond “bold” and enter the territory of “arrogant” by making the wild assumption that they will have no competitors if they create a new and profitable niche. So it is with those who would unilaterally supplant or redraw the existing Internet resource governance or allocation systems. Because alternative Domain Name System (DNS) roots provide such a well-proven and understood example of this kind of arrogance, this article begins with a short slog through that swamp before discussing the more

current and topical matter of alternative numbering Whois.

The DNS root is the dictionary of top-level domain names such as .COM or .US. It is managed cooperatively and transparently by a community that includes the Internet Activities Board (IAB), which designates and recognizes the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA); the Department of Commerce (U.S. DoC), which contracts for IANA services; and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which operates the IANA functions under that contract. The IANA functions contract includes among other things the job of editing the DNS root zone to add new top-level domain names such as .XXX. Each of these entities (IAB, U.S. DoC, ICANN) is itself a multistakeholder body that engages with the community to gather input to the decisions it makes about DNS. This governance model is imperfect, but it has worked for a long time and continues to evolve.

Technically speaking, every Internet device using DNS to look things up assumes there is a universal name space with a root zone to describe the top-level domain names, and there are some well-known root name servers to publish this root zone. To be universal in this context means that every name has a specific identity and will always mean the same thing no matter where you are on the Internet when you look that name up. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) periodically revises the DNS protocol to add new capabilities, but this is always done in a backward-compatible way because of the installed base of hundreds of millions of connected devices. So while we could discuss a possible future in which new devices are connected to the Internet having a broader or somehow multiplicitous view of the DNS name space, as of today the only reliable way to treat this name space is as universal.

Given the high visibility and economic value of a new top-level domain name, DNS has been under considerable pressure to add more such names

illustration by aliCia Kubista