Einar Stefferud -- June 1997 -- DOMAIN-POLICY --------------------------------------------- History of the Internet These "off the top of the head" history incantations are getting pretty wild, and it is very distressing to see so much inaccurate stuff broadcast as fact... Let me try to quickly summarize a few things from my own observations and understandings from long experience. I have been involved in the center of these developments since 1975, in one strategic role or another. And, I was hanging around with people who were directly involved for many years before that (i.e., since 1962). The ARPANET was not built to survive Nuclear Bombs, or equivalent. It was simply built to interconnect ARPA Contractors for the purpose of sharing whatever resources could be shared by being Network Connected. Originally, the entire ARPANET was owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by ARPA, and anyone connecting to it or using a computer account on an ARPANET connected host, was required to have ARPA Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) approval, either direct or indirect. In the berginning, there was a central authority. Thus, all names and numbers were assigned by ARPA Contracted Administrators. Up to and for a while after the time that the Internet began to arise after ARPANET converted to TCP/IP in 1983, this admin function was provided by the SRI NIC, until IANA established at ISI. Then ISI and SRI shared responsibility for assignment of various names and numbers. I am cloudy on the dates and facts of this NIC/IANA transition and relationship, but the basic point is that all of it was done under the understanding that ARPA owned control the entire ARPANET. Thus, the ARPANET inhabitants tended to be genuine academics, though I would hesitate to call BBN "academic", considering how they took serious proprietary entrepreneurial interests in all the technology that they developed. So did some others in the community. My point here is to debunk this notion that academics had some kind of stranglehold on the ARPNET to assure that it would not work for business purposes. What a quaint idea;-)... Actaully, a lot of people made very good livings out of working on the Internet, and many of them were not academics. Over that early time period, lots of business was transacted among the ARPA Contractors, and among various other US Government agencies and contractors. Some business was also transacted across international boundaries among ARPA approved contractors outside the US. I clearly recall sending some of my Consulting Invoices over the ARPANET to Government Contractors, and negotiating Government Contracts with Government Agencies. All of this was clearly in an experimental mode, but we were doing it. I even had clauses in my contracts that required me to use the ARPANET in performance and administration of the contracts. So, I fear that Simon's basic premises (see below) are off the mark, and we all know that A False Premise can be used to Prove Anything. Now, after TCP/IP was deployed by ARPA on the ARPANET, it became possible to create what became the Internet because it was no longer necessary for ARPA to control everything in all IP connected networks, so autonomous systems were born and most of us knew that we were embarking on a very new kind of infrastructure development, where-in a Whole Internet would not be Wholly Owned by a Single Administration. This was a truly major paradigm shift, in that no such beast had ever existed on the earth before. But, all the existing administrative functions and responsibilities of the nascent Internet were formed around ARPA's original Singular Sole Ownership infrastructure, so nothing was ever changed until it became obvious that change was needed. Among these changes were conversion from a Government Provided Backbone, to our current multi-competitor Open Commercial Internet Backbone. As the Internet took shape, the original admin functions and operations began to change to accommodate distributed ownership and distributed responsibility. In part, DNS was created to solve the problem of naming hosts with distributed authority while maintaining network-wide integrity for name-to-address resolution. But, of course, the TLD space needed someone to administer the root, and that job automatically defaulted to IANA as the obvious administrator. Some of you might remember back to the fight over control that occurred during this paradigm shift in the Infrastructure;-)... It was a proper prelude to the current DNS War. Go read the COM-PRIV archives if you want to see a really good fight. Really big bucks were at stake there, along with the whole future of the Internet. Over time, IANA did a sufficiently good (some say excellent) job of administration to hold almost total respect from the whole Internet community, and until the mid 1990's, no one thought much about whether the root should be administered by a czar, or whether it should be more open, or totally open, or whatever... In my view, the authority of IANA derived simply from the fact that IANA properly provided TLD ROOT server administration, to the satisfaction of all concerned. No one questioned the apparent IANA authority as long as things went along smoothly. But, long before the community became aware of the need, Jon Postel and IANA were working on the idea of expanding the TLD namespace, just because the long term future need was obvious. This thinking naturally lead to other people becoming interested, in terms of both the community benefits of enlargement and the potential for earning revenue. This brings us up to the present mess where suddenly it becomes clear that there is no clear line of authority for IANA or anyone else to Czar the DNS TLD ROOT, and we are in a big fight about whether there must or must not be a clear line of authority for deciding what names can be used in the DNS TLD ROOT. Some of us say YES, and some of us say NO! And there is no obvious source of authority to decide the question for us. The IANA autority was derived from community acceptance of administrative actions taken, but that community consensus authority did not extend to an IANA hand over of it this same community consensus authority to someone else. To take it over from IANA, the new authority must earn the respect and the trust of the Internet community at large, just as IANA earned it by providing satisfactory administration over many years. This is because the Internet is like the Economy... No one owns the whole thing, while different parties own each separate part. We have in this century killed millions of people over the great question of who should "own" the various economies of the world, and the answer is "No One Should Own An Economy!" Furthermore, almost everyone who ever owned an economy has come to wish they didn't. I predict that in due course, we will all come to the same conclusion about the Internet and the great question of who should own the DNS TLD ROOT. At least we are not actually killing anyone in this DNS war, yet, though we are assasinating characters all over the place, and regularly pitting old friends and colleagues against each other in vicious arguments where there appear to be no holds barred. Many old relationships have been torn asunder. None the less, I predict that in the end we will discover that the DNS ROOT does not need a Czar to select TLD names for the DNS any more than other parts of the Internet need a Czar. It only needs to avoid naming collisions and maintain resolution coherency. Neither of these are really hard problems;-)... Just need some common sense. I note that some new TLDs have somehow been snookered into the official root servers, and I must say that I see lots of distraught complaints about the impropriety, but I see absolutely no indication that any aspect of root service was diminished in any way, so I am convinced that it is indeed harmless to add new TLDs to the root. If it can be done without permission without damage, then it should be safe to do it with permission;-)... So, all these social theories about a class war between academia, the military, and business are just so much foolishness. What is really happening is just that the DNS ROOT is the last of the original ARPANET vestigial tails to fall off the Internet skeleton. What seems to be missed by everyone so far in this DNS Control War is that the real controlling power in the system lies with the NAME Resolvers, not the Name Servers;-)... It is in the resolvers that operational software under distributed control of myriad router and host administrators decide what root servers to point to. The fact that BIND is delivered with defaults selected by Paul Vixie does not mean that Paul is the Czar, and his statements that he gets his instructions from IANA does not make IANA the Czar either. The fact that lots of administrators accept Paul's defaults is the critical key, and when administrators stop accepting those defaults and choosing others, we will all see that the servers do not have the ability to control anything about what TLD names are "in the ROOT" The fact is that all name resolver administrators have the power to point at whatever root servers that want to point to, no matter who says otherwise, since they are the people who know the passwords, and who know their own personal needs, and know the needs of their customers. So, their personal needs and the needs of their customers will take control in due course. Someday it will become easy to reset those defaults, and then the router administrators will take back control of the DNS ROOT, and that will be that;-)... In the meantime, I hope you all are enjoying the war. Cheers...\Stef PS: I hope that from this little essay, you might see that no one has a monoply on remembering and interpreting the history of the Internet, and it should be abundantly clear that Dave Crocker speaks only for Dave Crocker, and I speak only for myself. Neither of us can speak for the Internet, though I will claim to be a student of the historical paradigm shifting that the Internet has brought to us all. The fact is that there is indeed, no singular person or agency, that can speak for the Internet, anymore than there is some singular person or agency that can speak for all the customers in the global economy. So, our only available solution is to learn to be civil with each other and learn to collaborate in making the Internet work for all of us, without requiring any singular central authority. ...\s > From Simon Higgs: } Dave Crocker / IMC wrote: }> And apparently it's only Tony who would be paying attention to that }> history. No chance that those of us who have actually done the WORK of }> creating and building the Internet might actually use that history as a }> basis for careful evaluation of present behavior and might even be able }> to do that competently. } Far be it from me to disagree with that statement, but you're missing a } critical piece of the equation. The "old academic" internet that you } built was only supposed to withstand a nuclear war. It was never } designed to withstand the economic warfare that goes on everyday in the } business world (nor was it designed to withstand AOL users :). While } the internet's design is adequately robust in an academic and military } environment, it continues to display an extremely poor design with } regard to supporting today's commerce. Why? Because commercial } activities were unacceptable on the internet up until a few years ago. } The current state of the top level domains is a key area where the old } design is very obviously broken. Another is spam filter standards } (which are still in their infancy). } Your attempts, within the IAHC, to apply an academic band-aid "patch" } the top level space are admirable but very much incomplete for today's } real world usage. This is exemplified by the fact that you don't even } acknowledge any of the real work that has been done in providing } complete and viable working models of alternative DNS structures. This } is, of course, akin to chopping your legs off before you run a } marathon. An unwise choice at best. } This isn't your father's internet anymore. } Best Regards, } Simon