ever since the Internet climbed down from its academic ivory tower and became a world-changing dominating commercial and social apparatus. Prior work in this area includes adding a handful of new top-level names (.INFO, .MUSEUM, .BIZ, .XXX, and so on), and current work involves throwing the doors open to hundreds or thousands of new top-level domains (.APPLE or .MICROSOFT could soon exist). In addition to that, several bold (or dare I say, “arrogant”) entrepreneurs have tried to enter the market unilaterally.

Here is how this kind of unilateralism goes: first you create your own root zone, usually by copying the IANA root zone at some point in time; and then you try to get ISPs to use your root name servers instead of the IANA root name servers. If you succeed at this, then you try to sell name registrations in your alternative name space, where your new names will be visible only to the ISPs you have convinced to subscribe to your system. No such alternative root zone has really taken off, since this value proposition is pretty shaky—there is no way to manage the risk of conflict between an alternative name and some future real name in the IANA system. There is also no good way to align the interests of the people publishing the alternative names with the interests of some population who might want to look up such names.

What’s arrogant here isn’t the willingness to charge ahead in spite of the shaky value proposition; it’s the assumption that there will be only one alternative DNS name space, even if it is a financial success. Does anyone really think that other investors and entrepreneurs would not follow almost immediately, that other teams looking for their next opportunity would say, “Well, one is enough,” or even, “Being a late entrant into that market will be too difficult”? I cannot think of a single supporting example; success breeds copycats, in all times and all places.

It’s a marvel why the investors in today’s alternative DNS systems didn’t ask about copycatting. This is a pretty standard investment question. A bunch of copycats who pull various ISPs into competing alternative DNS systems could all sell the same names to different DNS operators, and there

it’s a marvel why
the investors in
today’s alternative
Dns systems
didn’t ask about
copycatting.
this is a pretty
standard
investment
question.

would be no way for customers to tell the difference. Being first would count for nothing.

This spotlights a good test for whether some technology is a candidate for Internet governance infrastructure: Does it have to be done cooperatively, or do the physics allow for competition?

 

alternative numbering Whois

So far I’ve discussed the governance and economics of domain names, but there is another kind of Internet resource that has some superficial similarities to DNS: Internet numbering resources. Every network and every connected Internet device needs a number. This article focuses on Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses, which are usually written as four numbers separated by three dots (e.g., 192.5.5.241 or 192.168.1.1). Some of these numbers are private and can be used only for local communication— for example, the address 192.168.1.1 is used by almost every cable or DSL router in every home in the world. Hosts connected to private networks rely on their routers to translate their private addresses into public addresses, a process known as NAT (network address translation). For the purpose of this article, the discussion is limited to public IPv4 addresses that are globally unique and used without NAT.

Before the commercialization and privatization of the Internet in the 1990s, the U.S. government assigned blocks of IP addresses without fee or contract. This befits the original purpose of the Internet, which was to be an interconnection mechanism for the government and its contractors. When commercialization and privatization began, the IP address-allocation function was moved out of government hands and into an regional Internet registry (RIR) system, which now consists of five registries serving the regions of North America and the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, Asia/Pacific, and Latin America. Each RIR is a nonprofit association serving a community of network operators including both service providers and end users. Allocation policy is set in each region by a public policy development process, and resource allocations are governed by agreements that clearly describe