Re: Split the IANA functions?

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jan 07, 2014 at 07:02:34AM +0100, Eliot Lear wrote:
> That there is a single root is both a technical AND a
> political decision. 

I have to disagree with this.  The uniqueness of the root is not a
political decision.  It's a fact of mathematics.  DNS is a tree.
There's one root.

Now, one might argue that choosing this kind of name space was a
political decision.  I might buy that argument (I don't know).  There's
good reason to suppose that there was at least some organizational
principle behind the decision in favour of a hierarchical namespace.
There were technical constraints too, I think: I don't believe a fully
peer to peer system was practical in the network environment of the
1980s.  But if we wanted to call anything that had non-technical
elements in it "political", then the selection of the DNS
(hierarchical) name space was in that sense political.

This is not to say that the single root doesn't have additional
political implications.  But I will not concede that this is some
contingent fact of the DNS that could be otherwise.  The particular
root we have could be different.  That there is a single root could
not.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]