Randy Bush on Recent ICANN Proposals

Jodrell writes: "Randy Bush, internet architect and co-chair of the IETF's working group on DNS, has some interesting thoughts on the recent proposals to re-organise ICANN. Randy makes some interesting points about the likely result of allowing Government control into the DNSO, and on the current bloated condition of ICANN."

Randy Bush

[gdyas]

Dubya's techno, glitter-paint, party animal alter-ego.

Re:Randy Bush

[JordoCrouse]

You gotta give props to a guy named Randy Bush who can make it all the way through middle school, high school and college and finally on to be the architect of a major internet protocol without going crazy and changing his name.

Reminds me of a manager I once knew named Phat Ho.

PS: I wonder how many people searching for pr0n on the internet type in "randy bush" and get a bunch of RFCs?

Re:Randy Bush

[red5]

Reminds me of a manager I once knew named Phat Ho.

I knew a girl once named Joselin Cox.
Poor girl.

Re:Randy Bush

[sharkey]

I once knew named Phat Ho

Guy I went to high school with was named Michael Steven Hunt. He preferred to use his middle name.

Re:Randy Bush

[jo42]

...and I once worked with someone named "Frig Succar".

Re:Randy Bush

[Nethead]

I do consider the source. When I first me Randy he basicly told me to go fuck myself. It was later in a NANOG BOF where I brought up the problem of small, multihomed e-businesses having problems getting their own address space from ARIN and the problems of getting providers to accept announcements smaller than a /20 that I was able to see that, brash as he is, the guy has a clue and a well working brain. Most of the ideas expresses are thought out and well peer reviewed. It seems that a lot of the Internet "gods" are kind of twisted people. Take Paul Vixie, please. But it is this kind of genuis and free thought working in the core of the internet that has kept it a viable structure. Listen to Randy, and Paul.. most of the time they are right. If you don't like what they say, don't post it on /., subscribe to the nanog mail list and vent there.

Re:Randy Bush

[gdyas]

Jeez don't piss yourself, man. It was just my .sig. See?

We've got Bush!

[Anonymous Coward]

If ICANN is out of control, it will take a little more insight than this rant to figure out why it got to that point. If it truly wields its power badly, there must be a reason. Randy seems to want to restructure it from the ground up instead of excising only those things that ail.

The whole system is not sick, only certain parts. Figure out what those parts are and remedy them. Don't try to reinvent the entire system.

Re:competition is good in this business??

[John Hasler]

"i honestly think that if a 'UN' type of group controlled it, at cost,..."

...the 'cost' would be several thousand dollars. You wouldn't care about that, though, because you would not represent a 'qualified' organization anyway. Look at the history of 'UN' type of groups.

"...it would be much better than the current situation of 20 emails a day asking me if i want a .name domain..."

You would hand the Internet over to the politicians for 20 spams a day?

Randy's most telling point

[Amazing Quantum Man]

one computer scientist used to do this as a part time job. how much of a mountain can we make of a molehill?

To paraphrase Simon&Garfunkel:

Where have you gone Jon Postel?
The networks turn their lonely eyes to you.
What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
Jon Postel has left and gone away...

Governments have no business there

[storem]

Everything we do is either run, controled, engineered by our governments. DNS used to be run be voluteers, later by the big ISP's. Wouldn't companies/organisations like AlterNIC have more followers when people's freedom was on the line (ie: when DNS was run/dictated by governments).

Without a independent body, is there no fear of dividing the Internet up in the end? Will all countries still be reachable (through DNS)? or only those we (US) like. Will Europe have it's .eu finally? Will it be supported only in Europe?

Re:Governments have no business there

[Zeinfeld]

Everything we do is either run, controled, engineered by our governments. DNS used to be run be voluteers, later by the big ISP's. Wouldn't companies/organisations like AlterNIC have more followers when people's freedom was on the line (ie: when DNS was run/dictated by governments).

The problem is that it is not only governments who can abuse power. Individuals and corporations show they can do that just as effectively all the time. The ITU (part of the UN) has overseen plenty of critical registration processes without abusing their power. I would rather have them in charge than a wholy owned subsidiary of Enron (e.g. the US Congress).

Randy is right that ICANN could be done cheaper, there is no need to hold every meeting in somewhere like Ghana. The UN does just fine holding most meetings in NYC or Geneva. ICANN holds almost every meeting in a place with third tier air connections.

Randy is wrong (as he often is) in believing that the DNS root can remain an amateur effort. It is now critical infrastructure and needs to be supported as such. At the moment we get by because we don't need 13 way fault tolerance. The level of infrastructure attacks against the root is rising and at some time we will need at least five high reliability nodes on ultra fat pipes (multiple OC48)

Randy is also wrong about the prospects for funds comming from governments. It is not unlikely that the EU and Japan can be persuaded to tip in some cash. But ICANN has to look like a government agency in its spending habits, not like a dotcom startup.

I agree

[Edmund Blackadder]

For some reason Icann thought of themselves as some kind of a Napoleon giving out valuable land to lucky and soon to be rich vassals. They should just run their servers and charge what it cost to run them.

Some vary good points

[hillct]

Usually I have some point of contention with the article referenced or the opinion given but Randy Bush makes good and absoluitly valid points. He's completely correct. Unfortunately some of his solutions are more wishful thinking than potential implementations.

While it's true that ICANN could run on one or two million dollars, what organiation strives to command a smaller empire. It is the nature of those in authority to seek out greater power and methods of expanding their empire. We need to identify a strategy which ill provide incentive to the ICANN leadership toward downsiing and cost effective operations. While these incentives exist in forproffit businesses at risk of bankrupcy if they fail to operate efficiently, ICAN doesn't have this threat handing over their collective head.

Perhaps a strategy could be devised to create such a threat. This seems like the only way to persuage the jugernaught that is ICANN to amend it's ways.

--CTH

That's not just a problem with ICANN

[drew_kime]

It is the nature of those in authority to seek out greater power and methods of expanding their empire ... While these incentives exist in forproffit businesses at risk of bankrupcy if they fail to operate efficiently, ICAN doesn't have this threat handing over their collective head.

For more examples see here [dnc.org] and here [rnc.org] and here [congress.gov] and here [senate.gov].

Injecting a clue...

[alizard]

Remember that the people in government responsible for the creation and funding of Frankenstein's monster, aka ICANN don't know what a DNS or an IETF is. Is there anybody in Congress who does?

I think it's obvious that it's time to reframe the question of ICANN... from:

their proposal to turn ICANN into The Force in the hopes that with enough of our money and total control over the root, that they may find a mission someday
to
how to reduce it to a useful size and believable function as Randy Bush is proposing.

I think it's time to start taking this seriously. Like to see next year's domain referrals go up $5 a year due to charges passed along to us by any registrar who wants to sell domain names people can connect to? Or $10? Or $100?

Or prices cranked up to the point where only major corporations and governments can afford them? The proposal to expand ICANN is an ambitious one. Ambitious translates to "if this goes through, it's going to cost somebody." WE are the somebody who will wind up paying.

My last comment on ICANN started with the phrase "taxation without representation". The proposed new ICANN doesn't have any public input that ICANN would have to pay attention to.

The important point...

[pergamon]

...is that ICANN is there to serve the Internet, not control it.

I think that depends on who you ask

[gtwreck]

As a previous poster mentioned, organizations don't generally strive to shrink the scope and power of themselves. Especially in heavily bureaucratic organizations. In organizations such as these, often the most protected item is the size of the budget; and the money will get spent one way or another before somebody notices they don't need it and takes it away.

I'm sure that there are people in ICANN that *do* think of themselves as the controlling entity of the internet. In many ways, they are correct.

Re:The important point...

[shani]

...is that ICANN is there to serve the Internet, not control it.

But "the Internet" (whatever that is) never asked for ICANN. ICANN was created by the good and pure desire of the US government to get completely out of the business of running the Internet it created. Unfortunately it just got a little out of hand.

In defense of Stuart Lynn's proposal

[mpawlo]

I don't know if hell has frozen over yet, but I am actually going to defend the CEO of ICANN now.

If ICANN is supposed to have a broader scope of business I think it is approriate to involve the users more. While the ICANN elections are a true joke (just look at the results in Africa) a representation of users and non-users through theirs governments respectively is a good idea in my opinion. This will be like a UN for the Internet, a great tool for handling a new, global medium.

From a democratic point of view, the Lynn proposal is a much better proposal than the one suggested by the At Large Study Committee where domain name holders should be the ones electing ICANN board members. The latter proposal would not solve the current severe problems with ICANN when it comes to accountability, representativity and transparancy. Lynns proposal seems to deal with a few of the mentioned problems.

If ICANN is not supposed to broaden its scope of action, the proposal made by Stuart Lynn might be a way of slightly overdoing the administration of new
top level domain names. If that is the case, I agree with Randy Bush, but I fail to see that ICANN in the long run is supposed to just handle top level domain names.

Just my EURO 0,02.

Regards

Mikael

Do governments represent their citizens?

[keithmoore]

Certainly not in the US, where the best we can generally hope for is to be able to cast a vote for the lesser of two evils.

Re:In defense of Stuart Lynn's proposal

[karl.auerbach]

All that DNS needs is somebody to edit the root zone file (which implies chosing between competing demands for the same name - a situation that can be readily and inexpensively handled by a first-come-first-served rule) and to make sure that those who run the root servers are reasonable and responsible folks who follow the protocols defined by the IETF.

ICANN, however, has expanded its role into all kinds of unnecessary things - like creating a worldwide trademark law and its own system of kangaroo courts with a jurisprudence that would make Judge Roy Bean blush.

ICANN has also decided that it needs to engage in massive (and expensive) nano-management of DNS sellers - ICANN has even mandated the minimum that these sellers must spend on marketing! ICANN plans to spend every penny of that $2,400,000 that it received in application fees just to "deploy" seven new top level domains - ones like .museum, .coop, and .aero, or .name. That kind of negative innovation will turn the Internet into a reprise of the 1950's telephone company in pretty short order. With ICANN at the helm we can expect more imagination in coal mining than in Internet naming technology.

ICANN's "Governmental Advisory Committee" (GAC) is composed only of government representatives - so we can get a hint of what government in ICANN - and thus government in DNS - will look like. The GAC has proven that while it has utterly no comprehension of net technology, it is able to blither for days on end to find just the right euphemism to put into a communiqe. And when it comes to making choices, the assembled governments of ICANN's GAC have demonstrated repeatedly that they tend to sacrifice their citizens pocketbooks, property, and privacy to the predators of the net - among them NSI and the trademark industry.

What ICANN's president's plan does is to eliminate what few constraints had existed on the ability of ICANN's management to do what they pleased, which seems to be to build empires to the sky and to engage in massive travel (one ICANN staffer travels to about 50 international venues per year!) Under the president's plan, ICANN's yearly budget goes up tenfold to several tens of millions of dollars per year!

Public participation in ICANN - if it were ever to come about would provide a check to these excesses.

And such public oversight is sorely needed - ICANN's management cares not a damn for the internet community or net users. And ICANN's management has demonstrated that its goals, and its methods, are not all that far from those of Enron, except that ICANN has the benefit of being being exempt from taxes.

In the movie Coconuts Grocho Marx said about the swamp property he was auctioning: "Oh, you can get stucco, oh, you can really get stuck oh." ICANN's president's plan is the same kind of swamp - and we are all going to get very stuck unless we oppose it, prevent it, and come up with a plan for an truely limited ICANN.

Get active.

[Raindeer]

I would encourage anyone who is interested in this matter to become active themselves. There are so many issues related to the internet that encourage active participation by anyone who is interested and has something useful to say. If you can, go to RIPE, ARIN, APNIC or IETF-meetings. These organisations also have active mailinglists where your opinion (if intelligent) is valued.

I had the pleasure of going to two RIPE meetings and had the joy of seeing the RIPE-community decide the new rules on the distrubution of IPv6 space both for Local Internet Registries as well as Internet eXchange Points. (/32 and /48 for each, respectively.) And it feels cool to be able to say that I was able to raise my hand for the vote on some of these issues.

Furthermore, Esther Dyson asks the internet community to get involved into the ICANN debate and to pledge to join ICANN-at-Large. You can find that here:

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/inter es ting-people/200202/msg00241.html

ICANN at large

[The Famous Brett Wat]

Call me apathetic if you will, but so far my ICANN-at-large membership isn't worth the paper it's printed on. At-large membership is worth exactly what ICANN grants it, which is what, exactly?

Randy got it right: these people were meant to serve, and are trying to rule. They will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Okay -- maybe second, after spammers.

To bad ICANN's meeting is in fucking Ghana!

[glrotate]

http://www.icann.org/accra/

Nothing like ensuring easy access.

Re:To bad ICANN's meeting is in fucking Ghana!

[shani]

ICANN did have a no-win situation regarding meeting locations.

If they did the logical thing, and scheduled meetings in the places that actually had Internet access they would get slammed for contributing to the "digital divide". Yes, it's a crock, but I'm pretty sure this was the logic.

So they decided to be "global", and whiz about the globe having meetings in Antartica, the Bikini Atoll, and on the ISS. No wonder they need a $40 million budget.

My 1.02 Cents bout ICANN

[LWolenczak]

Why are we allowing ICANN to be legit anyway? They were created by a currupt administration, who only wanted to control, thus ICANN, a offspring of a currupt administration, only wants to control. Why don't we just call our senators and repersentives, and get the political process moving to iradicate ICANN.

Re:My 1.02 Cents bout ICANN

[FatRatBastard]

Or, why don't people just move to a different root system. If a lot of the root servers are really being run sans ICANN money, all it would take would be a few large root servers to say "fuck it, we're going to do it ourselves/move to someone else" to make ICANN powerless.

Is it written anywhere that the major (or even minor) ISPs "have" to hit ICANN's (er.. Network Solutions') root server?

Technical solutions are usually simpler, cheaper and, in the end, more effective than political ones.

The view from an "At large" Board member of ICANN

[Gopher971]

One of the at large board members of ICANN, Karl Auerbach [cavebear.com] was reported as saying that "We've just had the equivalent of the president of the United States abolishing Congress" in response to Stuart Lynn's proposals.

At large board members are chosen by rank and file internet users.

Personally I think this proposal is a threat to the supposed impartiality of ICANN. To allow one third of the board members to be chosen by governments will completely alter the original mandate that ICANN was originally setup.

The BBC Website [bbc.co.uk] and the ICCAN Watch website [icannwatch.org] has a much more indepth analysis of the proposed plan.

This is very important

[elliotj]

I'm not sure everyone has fully appreciated the value of maintaining a healthy, robust, scalable and available DNS system. Without DNS the Internet effectively grinds to a halt. If you wanted to break the Internet, targetting DNS would probably be the way to go. We really can't afford to let it wither under poor stewardship.

I can't speak to the effectiveness of ICANN. I don't know much about them. All I know is that my own DNS needs are served effectively enough and I've never had trouble. But I do agree that it seems odd that it now take $20M to do what Jon Postel used to do in his spare time (well spare time is over stating the matter...but my point remains).

If you ask me, DNS needs to be reconsidered in light of the possibilities of failure if the root servers fail for some reason. I know there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of caching DNS servers around the world, so one or two root servers failing isn't a big deal. Nonetheless, I think it would be worthwhile to consider a system where centralized root server management would not be a key component.

I don't even know if such a thing is possible. Could we do a peer-to-peer DNS system where servers learn of each other (kind of like routers or Gnutella)? I think something like that might solve this problem. But I don't have the answer. We'd better hope guys like Randy Bush do.

Re:This is very important

[dollar_bar]

Yes, as some have stated and we all know, if we can take this into our own hands that is both the most political (point-making) and practical (it will work and do the job well) solution. Maybe some people could devote "their spare time" to this once again.

Wait...

[KlausBreuer]

...the guys *name* is actually Mr. Randy Bush?
Curses! Misread the title there for a moment.

Randy Bush

[photon317]

You might want to check out this link [cr.yp.to] when deciding the character of the guy stating these opinions. Apparently Bernstein doesn't think very highly of him...

Re:Randy Bush

[fearghas]

That's ok - many of us don't think much of Bernstein.

However opinionated Randy may be most/all of the time - he has garnered a lot of support with this statement from network ops people - usually prefaced with " I don't normally agree with everything Randy says but..."

f