[At-Large] I: [ALAC-Announce] ICANN News Alert -- Notice of Preliminary Determination To Grant Registrar Data Retention Waiver Request for Ascio Technologies, Inc. Danmark - filial af Ascio Technologies, Inc. USA

Kan Kaili kankaili at gmail.com
Sun Dec 20 05:52:55 UTC 2015


Thank you very much, Karl, for proving the facts and telling the history for a new comer.

Best,
Kaili


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Karl Auerbach" <karl at cavebear.com>
To: <cdel at firsthand.net>
Cc: <at-large at atlarge-lists.icann.org>
Sent: Sunday, December 20, 2015 8:34 AM
Subject: Re: [At-Large] I: [ALAC-Announce] ICANN News Alert -- Notice of Preliminary Determination To Grant Registrar Data Retention Waiver Request for Ascio Technologies, Inc. Danmark - filial af Ascio Technologies, Inc. USA


> 
> 
> On 12/19/2015 04:31 AM, Christian de Larrinaga wrote:
> 
>> Karl Auerbach wrote:
> 
>>> I've never heard that claim before.  I've run experiments with DNS and
>>> found surprisingly few limits on how far it can expand.  (For example,
>>> in one experiment [more than a decade ago] we ran Bind with tens of
>>> millions of top level domains and then ran query traffic [in which we
>>> mixed a fair amount of absent names to make it more real-life.])
>>>
>>
>> I'm intrigued. Was this done to establish evidence that a flattening of
>> the hierarchy would not be a technical problem?
> 
> The DNS hierarchy of today is extraordinary flat - almost all of the 
> fanout of DNS tree occurs at the third level or deeper.  The root fanout 
> is fairly constrained by UDP packet size limits to about 13.  The root 
> zone fans out to only a few hundred - now moving to maybe a couple of 
> thousand (most sparsely populated) TLDs.  The vast majority of name 
> queries pass through the [com, net, org, in-addr.arpa] branches before 
> the real spreading of DNS occurs.  [I suspect that the .be and .ly 
> branches get a fair amount of traffic - but they are themselves pretty 
> flatly arranged.]
> 
> Back to our experiment:
> 
> ICANN kept making Chicken Little noises about how the sky would fall if 
> the DNS root were to exceed a couple of hundred TLDs and thus utter care 
> and decades of study would be needed.
> 
> I (and a couple of others) said "that's rubbish".  So we took a fairly 
> vanilla, but reasonably powerful, PC of the era running Linux, and 
> stuffed as much memory into it as we could.
> 
> We wrote a script that took the .com zone of that era (several tens of 
> millions of names if I remember right) [don't ask how we got it, I don't 
> remember].  The script turned it into a root zone file with delegations 
> to non-existent machines.  We loaded it into bind, waited a bit for the 
> file to be digested, then began testing.
> 
> (We also generated several synthetic root zones of various sizes in 
> which we generated names of various lengths using random character 
> sequences.)
> 
> We generated queries to that pseudo root server.  Since recursion was 
> disabled (as it is disabled on all real root servers) the fact that the 
> delegations went nowhere was not particularly relevant.
> 
> The queries were not simple one-at-a-time queries.  We overlapped 
> queries and mixed in a good blend of missing names.
> 
> We were surprised how well it ran.  It pretty much demonstrated that the 
> ICANN theory that the DNS would go "boom" was a bogyman.  It 
> demonstrated that ICANN could allocate a ten new TLDs a day and still be 
> well within the technological limits of DNS resolvers based on decade 
> old hardware.
> 
> Our experiment was simple, and it did not involve zone transfers of 
> notifications or things like that.  But at least we did something 
> concrete rather than merely waiving hands.
> 
> I told the ICANN board about these experiments, but in typical ICANN 
> fashion there was no interest in following up with other actual 
> experiments to ascertain whether there was an actual basis for ICANN's 
> fears of DNS expansion.
> 
> It wasn't until a decade later that ICANN participated in the 
> one-day-in-the-life-of-the-internet data capture and analysis experiment.
> 
> (I had also suggested that ICANN undertake to induce the creation of a 
> DNS early-warning monitoring system - and even lined up a worldwide 
> array of no-cost servers to run the monitors on - and also a system of 
> DNS-in-a-box DVDs that could be disseminated so that people in disaster 
> areas could start to bring back their local communications while they 
> waited for the world to dig its way back in [I've lived in several areas 
> that were hit by disasters, so I've had practical experience with this 
> sort of thing.]  But those proposals got zero traction in ICANN.)
> 
> BTW, in later years ICANN did get more technically involved - ICANN's 
> role in internationalized domain name and DNSSEC have been good.
> 
>> ...The DNS has been taken over by those
>> using it as a pseudo business registration service.
> 
> I agree that ICANN imposed a very simple-minded business model onto DNS 
> right from the outset.
> 
> And ICANN has never reviewed those decisions from 1998 and even ossified 
> some of that into legal granite - such as the gifting in perpetuity of 
> .com/.net to Verisign in order to get Verisign to drop a lawsuit.  Even 
> worse is the gifting of fiat registry fees to Verisign and others with 
> never an inquiry as to the actual costs of providing those registry 
> services.  By my calculations that ICANN gift is costing internet users 
> over a $billion a year, every year, in excessive, unverified, unaudited 
> registry fees.
> 
> 
>> Incidentally I am not knocking the work that Jon Postel and Paul
>> Mockapetris started back in 82 ish and many others have done some
>> amazing work on DNS which we all depend on today.  But it seems to have
>> gone as far as it can.
> 
> I rather disagree that DNS is running out of steam.  It is a very 
> successful design that has great scaling properties.  And the decision 
> of the root server operators to deploy anycast technology (a decision 
> that they made on their own despite ICANN's silence) was perhaps one of 
> the great unheralded tectonic advances to the internet's resiliency.
> 
> A couple of years back there was a multi-month long workshop on cloud 
> computing - a lot of big names/internet pioneers were at the meetings at 
> SRI and Google and elsewhere - we quickly zoomed into naming as a real 
> issue: How does one name cloud things that move and divide and join 
> (especially when third parties may have persistent transaction 
> relationships with specific instances of those cloud things)?  I was 
> intriged by attribute based lookup systems, such as IFmap.  But at the 
> bottom of those systems often were good old DNS names.
> 
> --karl--
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