DNS Balkanization
From NW Fusion
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"The perils and promise of international domain naming"
By FRED BAKER
Network World Fusion, 01/24/00
"This past week has seen a number of changes that
could affect the Internet. Time-Warner and AOL
have decided to combine content with delivery. Bill
Gates is set to do what he really enjoys - making
software products. And the market concluded that
Y2K was not an issue by the time the date rolled
around and is moving on. But the most important car
in the Internet roller coaster may be rattling along half
a world away.
Several name registrars have decided that they are
tired of trying to live with standard U.S. ASCII
characters in domain names. At the same time, a
grass-roots effort within the Internet Engineering Task
Force hopes to develop an internationalized Domain
Name System (iDNS).
In Sweden, a service is selling domain names that use
Swedish characters - the standard Roman alphabet
plus a few extras with umlauts over them or slashes
through them. In the People's Republic of China, two
registrars are handing out Chinese character domain
names using a proprietary format. For the locals in
both places, this is a very desirable and important
service. However, it has the insidious effect of
isolating them just when communication technology
promises to make traditional international barriers
obsolete.
The Chinese use a symbol for "crisis" that melds the
characters for "danger" and "opportunity." What one
makes of that is perhaps up to the person in the crisis:
It is an opportunity for danger to have its way, or an
opportunity to master danger by doing the right thing
when the chips are down. Applied to the
development of the internationalization of the DNS
system, it's easy to see there is danger as well as vast
opportunity.
Let's talk about the dangers first. There are at least
three categories: technical, market and legal.
Technically, people using the Internet can
communicate because computers can communicate. If
the computers cannot communicate, the people can't
talk. Legal issues arise because they expect to be able
to talk. Market issues arise because when they cannot
talk, they cannot participate in each other's
economies.
The domain name system - the distributed lookup
scheme that allows us to have names such as
"microsoft.com" and "intersim.co.uk" - works out for
most of us primarily because all of our computers use
it. You can send mail to me because your computer
and mine both understand how to ask a common
name service where to send the message. When the
name servers stop understanding each other, those
simple capabilities break down. If my name translates
to my address, but my name server doesn't talk with
yours, you can no longer access my Web site, send
mail to me, open a voice-over-IP telephone call to
me, or interact with me in any way. For you, I don't
exist. This may not be a problem for you, but if I am
trying to make my content available to you, to
exchange mail with you or to offer you a service, it is
a severe problem for me.
Now, maybe you represent a market I don't want to
participate in. If so, that's fine - we can't talk and we
don't want to. But suppose someone does want to
talk? My wife is planning a combined vacation and
business trip to the South Pacific and needs to talk
with travel consultants and tourist sites there. If they
happen to be running a name service that serves them
well but doesn't serve my wife, we will very likely not
wind up spending money on the resorts and other
services that use that name service. Why are they in
business, if not to relieve us of some cash? Who does
this serve? I have colleagues in Pacific Rim and Asian
countries with whom I correspond regularly. If their
names become inaccessible to me, does this promote
cultural exchange?
And then there are the legal difficulties these services
represent to their customers that they have lost
nothing and gained everything in going this route, and
that their ideas will be accepted as international
standards in the IETF. However, for the most part
they are not talking with the IETF, or the folks who
operate the name service. Proposals are on the table,
and the discussion of an Internationalized DNS is
moving along, but the promoters may or may not be a
part of it, or aware of it. For the people who have
purchased their names from these registrars, this
constitutes a scam more than a service.
Now let's talk about the vision. The biggest problem
here is that, in some sense, these registrars are right.
Their clients are already disenfranchised in some
sense because they cannot correctly spell their own
names using the standard name service. Providing
these parties a way to name themselves in their own
language and alphabet offers them the opportunity to
join the global village on equal footing and
communicate in languages that interest them with
communities that interest them. They complain that the
Internet is U.S.-centric, and in this sense, they are
correct. Their primary markets are not necessarily
global, but local, and being able to communicate
locally helps them to promote local business
relationships and personalities. For them to have to
use the international standard name service is
irksome. For me "pepsi.com" is very meaningful - it
may be where I go when I want to know about Pepsi.
For them, it is just as much an incoherent scribble as
Chinese characters are for me. Why should they not
be able to write names equally meaningful to them,
their correspondents and their customers?
The Internet is a global village, not just tearing down
communication barriers, but disregarding them and
blowing right past. Joining the global village is good,
and customizing the village to its expanding set of
occupants is important. What we need to do,
however, is do this in a way that builds the whole
village, rather than Balkanizing it into alleys and
ghettos which do not understand each other and
cannot communicate. The road forward for a working
Internet is to decide together how to expand the
domain name system and work together to make it
happen. The road to chaos - I should say "the
freeway" - is to force the issue using private schemes.
We stand at the junction." |
