[kictanet] Day 2 0f 10:-IG Discussions- DNS, Root Servers, IP Addresses

[Michuki Mwangi]

Morning!,

John Walubengo wrote:
> Day 2 of 10 - Infrastructure Issues DNS/Root Servers/ IP addressing
> These topmost translations tables are hosted on
> 13 computers/servers known as the Root Servers. All these Servers and
> IP addresses are managed by the US/ICANN. In addition, 10 the 13 Root
> servers are situated in the US.
> 
This is not entirely accurate Walu. The 13 toor servers are managed by 
root-server operators. A listing of the operators is available at 
www.root-servers.org.

Further to this there are now over 100 Root-servers in the world 
distributed through what is known as anycast topology. This was an 
initiative of the root-server operators - as you will see from the url 
not all have distributed their instance in this manner.

Africa has 3 countries and more will be coming in the future. The main 
reason Africa has few, is lack of the requisite infrastructure to host 
root-servers. Fortunately this has changed and we are seeing more and 
more places ready to host instances.


> 
> i) The records in the translation tables are in latin characters
> (read english) and so for example the Chinese wanting to have their
> domain names in the Chinese alphabet cannot do so (read
> discrimination)
> 
There has been alot of work on the Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) 
space. At the moment the big issue is purely on the policy side of 
implementing IDNs and not a technical one. Some countries like japan 
already have IDNs registered in the country code top level domain 
(ccTLD) registry in Japanese characters.

Another hot issue under debate is for instance the .ke ccTLD is in ascii 
who gets allocated the management of the equivalent .ke in say Arabic, 
Chinese and other characters that will be entered into the root zone.


> ii)Stakeholders, particularly, commercially oriented users cannot
> have new top level internet domains easily introduced e.g .TV, .porn
> amongst other contentiously proposed names.
>

Well this has sort of been overtaken by events now, currently ICANN has 
opened up the root for additional TLDs and will be auctioning TLDs. The 
issue will be that so who will own .KENYA, .Africa, .EAC, .SADC, .COMESA 
  and what happens to the more controversial ones as well.

PS: .TV is the ccTLD for Tuvalu and is run by Verisign through a mutual 
commercial agreement with the Government of Tuvalu.

> iii)Users, particularly in developing countries, must have their DNS
> queries traversing expensive international links to the US to get
> their translations serviced.
> 

Yes, and this can be resolved by approaching any of the root-server 
operators to have a local instance of the root-servers, and TLD-servers 
as well. For instance here in Kenya we do local resolutions using two 
Root-servers (F-Root and J-Root) TLD for .COM and .NET and .KE and word 
has it that there's discussions to bring in .org. The question is what 
role are the stakeholders playing to ensure this happens in their 
respective regions.

> iv) IP Number Assignments is also monopolised by ICANN procedures and
> ITU in particular would like to see choice (read Competition) for
> Internet Users in this space
> 

The only interaction users have when it comes to IP address space 
requirements are with their Regional Internet Registries and not 
ICANN/IANA. The only time ICANN/IANA gets involved is when there's a 
global policy issue that needs to be implemented and with the 
distribution of the IP space to the RIR.  A global policy has to be 
approved in all the 5  regions i.e Africa, Latin America, Asia Pacific, 
European and the Americas before its considered for implementation.

Secondly there's only two IP spaces v4 and v6 its difficult to see how 
there can be two managers managing the same resource i.e IP.

Lastly, there are bigger issues facing the Internet today. What i see 
however, is that there's very little effort to fix what is broken or 
whats not efficient and much effort on the control of the organizations.
IMHO i would be pleased to see more debate about how we can empower more 
  participation of the communities at both local and regional level in 
the policy debates relating the the management of these resources. How 
to further strengthen the organizations that manage these resources. 
They may not be broken, but it doesnt mean they dont need optimization.

Regards,

Michuki.