Paul Vixie, Internet Systems ConsortiumIn the Internet addressing and naming market there's a lot of competition, margins are thin, and the premiums on good planning and good execution are nowhere higher. To survive, investors and entrepreneurs have to be bold. Some entrepreneurs, however, go beyond "bold" and enter the territory of "arrogant" by making the wild assumption that they will have no competitors if they create a new and profitable niche. So it is with those who would unilaterally supplant or redraw the existing Internet resource governance or allocation systems. Because alternative DNS (Domain Name System) roots provide such a well-proved and well-understood example of this kind of arrogance, this article begins with a short slog through that swamp before discussing the more current and topical matter of alternative numbering Whois.Alternative DNS RootsThe DNS root is the dictionary of top-level domain names such as .COM or .US. It is managed cooperatively and transparently by a community that includes the IAB (Internet Activities Board), which designates and recognizes the IANA (Internet Assigned Number Authority); the U.S. DoC (Department of Commerce), which contracts for IANA services; and ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which operates the IANA functions under that contract. The IANA functions contract includes among other things the job of editing the DNS root zone to add new top-level domain names such as .XXX. Each of these entities (IAB, U.S. DoC, ICANN) is itself a multistakeholder body that engages with the community to gather input to the decisions it makes about DNS. This governance model is imperfect, but it has worked for a long time and continues to evolve.
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