There has been some recent discussion on another mailing list about
ICANN and the problem it represents. There was a proposal to do
serious work to develop a distributed system for Internet naming to
replace the DNS. This is a useful proposal but it cannot solve the
problem of what to do to provide an appropriate form to protect the
Internet's infrastructure.  ICANN does the opposite. Instead of
providing the needed protection from political pressures for the
Internet's infrastructure, ICANN intensifies the political fight over
the ownership and control of the technical functions that are critical
to the Internet's functioning.

It is important to recognize that the domain name system is
*not* the critical issue with respect to the effort of the
US government to privatize the Internet's infrastructure.

With regard to ICANN and the contest over the development of a means
of protecting the Internet's infrastructure the effort should be to
identify the real problem and to determine what can be done to solve it.

In an article about the nature of the infrastructure of the Internet
that is in danger of being handed over to ICANN by the U.S. Department
of Commerce I explain:

"(....)The least critical aspect of this infrastructure is the DNS.
The Internet could function using IP numbers in place of the
names, just as telephone addressing is in general by numbers,
rather than names. But the IP numbers and protocols are
critical to the functioning of the Internet."

>From "The Internet and Its Governance: Where Should We Look for
Models?"

Article url: http://www.circleid.com/articles/2545.asp

The *real issue* as I understand it is that the IP numbers are
critical for the tcp/ip protocol and those have been put into ICANN's
hands. The IP numbers must be unique for the messages to get to their
intended destinations on the Internet.

Also the protocol process is critical as the protocols make it
possible for communication to occur. ICANN is also being put in charge
of the protocol process.

There needs to be some means of creating a form to protect these
critical aspects of the Internet's infrastructure. (Port numbers are
also an issue, and are something that the old IANA handled, and
perhaps someone on this list can say a bit about their significance.
Here it seems just a matter of keeping track of them but also this is
an important technical function that is part of the Internet's
technical infrastructure.)

Distributed solutions to the Domain Name problem are possible and
probably the future. In my research about the history of the
international collaboration that created the tcp/ip protocol suite, I
came across the fact that early on the UK had its own form of domain
name system, and the US had its form of system, and the early tcp/ip
development was not affected by the fact that these were different
systems for naming.

I am working on a draft of a paper on the early international
collaboration that made the development of tcp/ip possible. I hope to
be able to make the paper available for comment shortly.

Ronda
ronda@ais.org

http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120

http://www.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers
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