Subject: RE: Competing Domain-Name Registries Creating Tower of Cyber-Babe l

From: Erkki Kolehmainen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 13:02:02 +0200

I'm trying to avoid not to dwell into the details, but it looks as if you
are not aware of the fact that there are several countries connected to the
Internet. Several (often unrelated) companies/organizations with the same
name operate in these countries and even within one country. In fact, the
same company names are used even within the same city, provided that their
businesses are unrelated and thus would not have been confused in the
pre-Internet era. As a result, additional levels of distinction are needed
to properly identify the target, nothwithstanding the fact that several
company names have been "reserved" as domain names (I'd say stolen) by
unrelated third parties trying to make a quick buck. Also, when you say:
"Nobody is ever going to visit domains with names like .shop, anyway," you
seem to forget the info dissemination needs of the whole SME marketplace. 

Another point: I cannot register kolehmainen.fi as my domain name, since
that would be grossly unfair to all the other individuals with the same
surname in Finland, which I find quite acceptable. I could have tried to
register kolehmainen.com and would have succeeded, had I done it early
enough.

Erkki I. Kolehmainen
TIEKE Tietoyhteiskunnan kehittämiskeskus ry
TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
Salomonkatu 17 A 10, FIN-00100 HELSINKI, FINLAND
Tel: +358 9 4763 0301,   Fax: +358 9 4763 0399 
http://www.tieke.fi   <[email-masked]>

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Atkielski [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 9:16 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Competing Domain-Name Registries Creating Tower of
Cyber-Babel

It doesn't really matter, since, for the average user, there is only one
TLD,
and that is COM.

The whole concept of a TLD is an anachronism that does not apply to the
interests of multinational businesses and organizations.  It should be made
invisible to users who don't wish to specify it explicitly.  I have long
advocated a system that uses multiple hidden TLDs that are hashed from the
second-level domain name, but nobody seems interested.  For example, you can
take the first and last alphanumeric characters of a second-level domain
name,
put x in front, and create a hashed TLD which you automatically append to
the
name, so that the user doesn't have to enter it, for example:

"ibm" entered in a browser generates "web.ibm.xim"
"disneyland" entered in a browser generates "web.disneyland.xdd"
"coca-cola" entered in a browser generates "web.coca-cola.xca"

and so on.

This randomly distributes second-level domains over 1296 implicit TLDs, and
since a given name can hash to only one TLD, the TLD can be computed from
the
name, and so the user need only enter the second-level name.  The "web." on
the
front just provides a distinct hostname for the Web server for the
convenience
of the domain owner.  By doing this all the TLDs are eliminated (except for
those who still wish to type a TLD explicitly--obviously .COM et al. will be
around for some time to come), and you don't have this nonsense about a
hundred
different companies trying to come up with hundreds of different TLDs.

Nobody is ever going to visit domains with names like .shop, anyway, so it
doesn't matter who actually owns domains in those TLDs.

The current arrangement of TLDs is like requiring every company in the U.S.
to
append the abbreviation of its home state to its name: IBM-NY, Coca-Cola-GA,
Adobe-CA, Microsoft-WA, and so on.  It's a technical requirement that has no
utility from a mnemonic or business standpoint.  By using implicit, hashed
TLDs,
you can eliminate the need to specify a TLD explicitly, and you can
distribute
the second-level domains evenly over a large number of TLDs without any fear
of
duplication or any need to register any name for more than one TLD (namely,
the
TLD to which it hashes).

The glaring error being made by everyone right now is in the assumption that
more explicit TLDs are the answer.  In fact, they just add to the problem,
by
making a bad design worse.  TLDs are for the computer and the occasional
specialist to type in explicitly; for everyday use for businesses and the
like,
the TLD should be inferred by the computer from the second-level name.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Fleming" <[email-masked]>
To: "ietf@ietf. org" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 01:06
Subject: Competing Domain-Name Registries Creating Tower of Cyber-Babel

> http://biz.yahoo.com/st/010705/27694.html
> Competing Domain-Name Registries Creating Tower of Cyber-Babel
> By James Ledbetter - European Executive Editor
>
> Proof of Concept TLD Development...and Multiple TLD Clusters
> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf/Current/msg12215.html
> "Multiple TLD Clusters are new. There is merit in having redundancy.
> Unfortunately, consumers will have to learn through their registrar
> or registry, that they would be prudent to register in BOTH TLD Cluster
> for the most reliable, stable service, with the widest reach."
>
> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf/Current/msg12574.html
> RFC-2001-07-01-000 IPv8 Expansion of Proof of Concept TLD Development
>
>
> Jim Fleming
> http://www.DOT-Arizona.com
> http://www.DOT.Arizona
>
>
>

-
This message was passed through [email-masked], which
is a sublist of [email-masked]. Not all messages are passed.
Decisions on what to pass are made solely by Maurizio Codogno.

---

From: "Anthony Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 12:22:29 +0200

> I'm trying to avoid not to dwell into the
> details, but it looks as if you are not aware
> of the fact that there are several countries
> connected to the Internet.

I'm aware of that, but only one machine in the world can have a given IP
address, and only one machine can have a given FQDN.

Only one telephone in the world can have a given fully-qualified telephone
number, but the telephone system gets around this by allowing users to specify
only subsets of the complete number, and these subsets can point to different
fully-qualified numbers in different places.  This is rather like the open-ended
IP addressing scheme that I proposed some time ago to prevent the exhaustion of
the IP address space (IPv6 and even IPv8 will be exhausted far more quickly than
anyone expects), but nobody was interested in that, either.

At least I'll be able to point back to my archived posts years from now and say
"See, I told you so!" when the inevitable comes to pass.

> Also, when you say: "Nobody is ever going to visit
> domains with names like .shop, anyway," you seem to
> forget the info dissemination needs of the whole
> SME marketplace.

No, I'm just acknowledging the reality of user interfaces, as I illustrated in
my example.  Nobody wants to type Coca-Cola-GA, because the state in which the
company is based has no relevance for the user.  Similarly, there's no point in
typing bills-tv-repair.shop when the .shop suffix has no relevance for the user
(he already knows what Bill's TV Repair is).

> Another point: I cannot register kolehmainen.fi
> as my domain name, since that would be grossly
> unfair to all the other individuals with the same
> surname in Finland, which I find quite acceptable.

So who _can_ "fairly" register this domain name?

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 04:26:28 -0700

> address, and only one machine can have a given FQDN.

both assertions are false

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 11:11:12 -0400

> address, and only one machine can have a given FQDN.

False and False.  There's probably several tens of thousands of machines
using the same RFC1918 space, and Akamai plays some rather interesting
routing games with duplicate IP addresses to get you to the closest one.
Also, you might want to check how many different IP addresses 'aol.com'
can resolve to (including their MX farm).

> (he already knows what Bill's TV Repair is).

Remember that ABC.COM was originally ABC Design Studios in Seattle, a small
graphics shop.  This came as quite a surprise to a slower-moving distributor
of television media.

The *true* broken-ness of the DNS stems from the fact that we're using it as
a white pages service (which it isn't).  This in and of itself would not be
quite so fatal, if it weren't for the fact that the current setup of the DNS
does not accurately reflect trademark law (where trademarks are held by
a company *in a field of business*, and *in a geographic area*).  That's why
you can have an ABC Design Studios and an ABC TV network - they are in
different fields.

The DNS as set up currently doesn't understand that.

> So who _can_ "fairly" register this domain name?

A case could be made that there *is* *no* fair registration possible.

-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 12:58:44 -0400

>  This in and of itself would not be
> a company *in a field of business*, and *in a geographic area*).

this would also be fixable, if IPR lawyers didn't have financial incentive
to create dissent.  but they do, and as a result, they have been screaming
that use of a famous trademark in *any* tld is infringement.

Keith

---

From: "Anthony Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 19:47:17 +0200

> both assertions are false

Not terribly relevant to my original point, but: I want to be able to
individually address every machine on a single worldwide network running IP.
How do I do this without a unique IP address for each machine?

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 11:52:59 -0700 (PDT)

> How do I do this without a unique IP address for each machine?

Nothing prevents you from assigning a unique IP address to each machine.
However, this doesn't mean that every IP address in the world uniquely
identifies a single machine. There are all sorts of ways IP addresses can be
shared by multiple machines which you may or may not choose to use.

				Ned

---

From: "Anthony Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 22:11:36 +0200

Ned writes:

> There are all sorts of ways IP addresses can be

Not if you are running pure IP.  Either you can uniquely identify each machine,
or you can't, but you cannot have it both ways.

---

From: Kevin Farley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 14:17:31 -0700 (PDT)

> or you can't, but you cannot have it both ways.

What about NAT?

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 14:30:59 -0700 (PDT)

> or you can't, but you cannot have it both ways.

Nor did I say you could. The point is that how IP addresses are used varies. If
you want to use IP address to uniquely identify your systems you can. And
someone else can use a single IP address to refer to multiple systems. As
long as people are clear on what they are doing and don't assume what
they do applies to others there's no conflict.

Why is this so hard for you to understand?

				Ned

---

From: "Anthony Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 23:48:04 +0200

Ned writes:

> Nor did I say you could. The point is that
> how IP addresses are used varies.

My point is that you want to uniquely identify every machine in the world using
IP, then every machine must have a unique IP address.  If you are using names
instead of IP addresses, and you still want to uniquely identify every machine
in the world, then every machine must have a unique name.

> Why is this so hard for you to understand?

I understand it perfectly.  What I am illustrating is how poorly people
understand the real problems, how careless they are when reading, and how
readily they confuse one problem with another.  This is why fixed address spaces
will be exhausted, no matter how large they are, and this is why TLD management
will continue to be a mess, no matter what changes are made.

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 15:10:50 -0700

>or you can't, but you cannot have it both ways.

You are confused about the meaning of several statements being made.

For each machine to have a unique IP address, yes each must have an IP 
address that no other shares.

However this does not prevent machines from sharing IP addresses ALSO.

d/

----------
Dave Crocker  <mailto:[email-masked]>
Brandenburg InternetWorking  <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel +1.408.246.8253;  fax +1.408.273.6464

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 15:16:24 -0700

Thank you so much for providing a tutorial to the community that created 
the technology about which you are lecturing.  After 30 years of developing 
this stuff, I'm sure we never understood its nature nearly so well as you 
have now made us able.

d/

----------

---

From: "Anthony Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 00:29:17 +0200

Dave Crocker writes:

> For each machine to have a unique IP address,
> yes each must have an IP address that no other
> shares.

Quite so.  And if you use names in place of IP addresses, this means that every
name must resolve to exactly one machine, worldwide--which rules out local
interpretations of names.

> sharing IP addresses ALSO.

If each machine has a unique address, shared addresses are irrelevant.  If
shared addresses are used in place of unique addresses, then the criterion of
unique addressing is not satisfied.

---

From: "Anthony Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 00:30:46 +0200

Dave Crocker writes:

> Thank you so much for providing a tutorial to
> the community that created the technology about
> which you are lecturing.

You're welcome.

> After 30 years of developing this stuff, I'm sure
> we never understood its nature nearly so well as you
> have now made us able.

When I see what it has developed into and what some people propose that it
develop into, I certainly have some serious doubts.

---

From: [email-masked] (Paul Ebersman)
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 15:32:18 -0700

ned> Nor did I say you could. The point is that how IP addresses are
ned> used varies.

anthony> My point is that you want to uniquely identify every machine
anthony> in the world using IP, then every machine must have a unique
anthony> IP address.  If you are using names instead of IP addresses,
anthony> and you still want to uniquely identify every machine in the
anthony> world, then every machine must have a unique name.

Anthony doesn't seem to get the difference between requirement for
service and implementation, along with not understanding a long list
of other things...

First, assuming that I (as a user of some service) must reach a
particular, unique machine is a geek wish, not a requirement. The
folks monitoring and maintaining the machines need to be able to get
unambiguously to that machine but that is a great use of 1918
space. Wasting public IP addresses one per machine when there is no
requirement seems to violate Anthony's claimed concern about address
space.

Second, there is no reason that, based on service requirements, I
can't choose to either use unique FQDNs *or* unique IP addresses (or
both) to meet the uniqueness requirement, assuming that really is
necessary.

ned> Why is this so hard for you to understand?

anthony> I understand it perfectly.  What I am illustrating is how
anthony> poorly people understand the real problems, how careless they
anthony> are when reading, and how readily they confuse one problem
anthony> with another.  This is why fixed address spaces will be
anthony> exhausted, no matter how large they are, and this is why TLD
anthony> management will continue to be a mess, no matter what changes
anthony> are made.

Anthony rails here about waste of fixed address space yet advocates
that in order for us to be "pure", we must waste an IP address on
every device that we need to identify as "unique" on the Internet. OK,
which do you want? Better use of address space or a dictated waste of
address space for a dubious technical "need"?

--
			Paul

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 15:33:48 -0700

<plonk!>

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 16:22:52 -0700

>develop into, I certainly have some serious doubts.

Indeed, your contributions should warrant doubts.

It makes one understand the reason the term 'adult supervision' was coined 
for this venue.

d/

----------

---

From: "Tony Hain" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 16:20:29 -0700

It is nice to know that in your corner of the Internet there are clean 1:1
mappings between each machine, its name, and its IP address. That is not the
case in many parts of the Internet today, and the reasons why are based on
local policy, not global mandate. Even if the companies in your example
wanted to get to that point they couldn't, simply because their business
requirement to be constantly live means they need more than one machine
mapped to a given name (never mind the load balancing issues). They
typically do that through multiple addresses in DNS, or may simply NAT a
single address to some 1918 space where the set of machines live. Either way
there is not a clean mapping.

Tony

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Atkielski [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 3:29 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Competing Domain-Name Registries Creating Tower of Cyber-Babel

> yes each must have an IP address that no other

Quite so.  And if you use names in place of IP addresses, this means that
every
name must resolve to exactly one machine, worldwide--which rules out local
interpretations of names.

If each machine has a unique address, shared addresses are irrelevant.  If
shared addresses are used in place of unique addresses, then the criterion
of
unique addressing is not satisfied.

---

From: "R. A. Hettinga" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 19:23:57 -0400

The punchline in all of this to me is that the aforementioned Tower was
created to *unite* language, names, if you will, not fractionate them.

To mix a metaphor like a dead horse, people seem to be grabbing the wrong
end of the biblical nit, here...

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [email-masked]>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 00:31:00 +0100 (BST)

> What I am illustrating is how poorly people understand the real
> problems, how careless they are when reading, and how readily they
> confuse one problem with another.

Give the kid points for being so amusingly and unknowingly ironically
self-referential.

L.

<[email-masked]>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 18:10:33 -0700

>Give the kid points for being so amusingly and unknowingly ironically

i did that for the first couple of iterations.

d/

----------

---

From: Mark Durham <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 18:57:05 -0700

> created to *unite* language, names, if you will, not fractionate them.

Well, no. Before God got his dander up over humanity's hubris (chutzpah?) in
trying to build a tower that would reach heaven (Trump, Wright, et al., take
note), there was purportedly only one language on Earth. But in a Reaganesque
attempt to disorganize the workers, Our Oh-So-Irritable Father put an end to
that, inflicting a brutal blow against standards-based communication and
setting the scene for Esperanto, the Rosetta Stone, and Woody Allen's "What's
Up, Tiger Lily?"

But your point *is* well taken.

> end of the biblical nit, here...

Dead horses mix no metaphors. No matter which end you grab.

Apologies for the OT....

> RAH

- - - - - - - - -
mark durham
writer and editor
[email-masked]
- - - - - - - - -

---

From: "Anthony Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 08:16:28 +0200

Paul Ebersman writes:

> First, assuming that I (as a user of some service)
> must reach a particular, unique machine is a geek
> wish, not a requirement.

Who said anything about users of a service?  I want to reach my parents'
machine.  They are not geeks, and I am not looking for a "service."  Therefore I
must be able to address their machine unambiguously, and this means that their
machine (and mine, for that matter) must have a unique address.

> The folks monitoring and maintaining the machines
> need to be able to get unambiguously to that machine
> but that is a great use of 1918 space.

Only fixed address spaces can be wasted.

> Wasting public IP addresses one per machine when
> there is no requirement seems to violate Anthony's
> claimed concern about address space.

On the one hand, if you assign addresses sequentially, even a 32-bit address
space will last for some time.  On the other hand, if you do not use a fixed
address space, there can be no waste.  So my concern is not violated.

> Anthony rails here about waste of fixed address
> space yet advocates that in order for us to be
> "pure", we must waste an IP address on every device
> that we need to identify as "unique" on the Internet.
> OK, which do you want?

You can have both, if you use a variable address space.

> Better use of address space or a dictated waste of

See the telephone network for an example of how to have both.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 07 Jul 2001 02:53:53 -0400

> machine (and mine, for that matter) must have a unique address.

If *you* want to reach your parent's machine, you walk into the room it's in
and smack it with an open hand until it reboots.

If however you are talking protocols, *YOU* don't want to reach the
machine.  You want some software running on one of your computers to
interact in a specific manner with some software running on one of
their computers.  And in general, you really don't care how the interaction
happens - there may be a proxy or routers or other devices in between.

Your use of the telephone network as an example is another demonstration
of just how poorly you understand the basic concepts here.

If you dial my office number, you might get me to answer on the Rolm
phone in my office.  But that's unlikely.  More likely, you'll get
my phone mail - which isn't even in the same building.  I won't discuss
how many devices answer at my house. ;)  I won't go into the issues of
a telephone line run over copper that has call forwarding to a cell phone
in a different time zone.

But see? What you cared about is that you talked.  You didn't care about
how the connection was made.  And until you demonstrate that you understand
this distinction, I'm gonna have to add my <plonk> to the list.

/Valdis (who is almost as anti-NAT as Keith, but happens to *LIKE* the
ability to play games with IP-host mappings ;)

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 11:08:50 +0100 (BST)

> See the telephone network for an example of how to have both.

As your web pages make clear, you misunderstand telephony.

Telephone numbers are not equivalent to IP addresses (although you say
they are), and it's a long time since actual telephone numbers have
been used for hierarchical routing. With number portability and so on,
telephone numbers are now more analogous to DNS entries; IP added
visible stuff on top (DNS), while telephony added less visible
signalling stuff underneath to achieve much the same end (in both
cases, a level of indirection enabling all sorts of 'features'), since
they couldn't alter their legacy endpoints. This still leaves out a
lot of detail...

You can't have efficient address-based routing and efficient
(sequential) assignment of the same addresses in the same space
without severely constraining the growth of your network - and the
telephone network does not.

L.

come back Salsman and voice upload - all is forgiven.

---

From: "Anthony Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 01:21:14 +0200

Lloyd Wood writes:

> Telephone numbers are not equivalent to IP
> addresses (although you say they are), and
> it's a long time since actual telephone numbers
> have been used for hierarchical routing.

They are more similar than different, certainly enough so for the purposes of
the vulgarization I provide.  No other commonplace technology seems to provide
so appropriate an analogy.

I don't remember mentioning hierarchical routing in my vulgarization.

> You can't have efficient address-based routing
> and efficient (sequential) assignment of the same
> addresses in the same space without severely
> constraining the growth of your network - and the

Sure you can, with variable address spaces, and the telephone network does just
that.

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 18:08:17 +0100 (BST)

On Sun, 8 Jul 2001, Anthony Atkielski wrote:

> Sure you can, with variable address spaces, and the telephone
> network does just that.

It's pretty clear you've missed, misunderstood, or ignored every point
made to you, probably due to lack of education, incredible
self-regard, or both.

I'm with randy. plonk.

L.