cTLD and DNS upgrade

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Mon, Jul 04, 2005 at 10:44:28AM +0200,
 Brad Knowles <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org> wrote 
 a message of 40 lines which said:

> 	It all depends on who you trust.  Do you trust the PUBLIC-ROOT
> people to properly administer their servers, and to have a
> sufficiently geographically distributed group of servers, or do you
> trust the ICANN-blessed servers?

If you use the regular root name servers (those that are in BIND by
default), you trust several entities and it is therefore very
difficult to assert trust:

* the root name servers operators (which is itself a very diverse
group, some are very good at communication with the community they
serve, like ISC for F, and some are very secretive),

* ICANN,

* The US Departement of Commerce, which approves in writing every
change, whatever its importance, in the root zone file, and which will
continue to do so
(http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/USDNSprinciples_06302005.htm),
 
* Verisign, which generates the actual zone file and sign it.

> 	I don't know all of the operators of the ICANN-blessed
> servers, but I know enough of them that I know I trust them to do
> their job

Technically, I have no doubt either. These people do very well their
technical job. But there are other things in the maintenance of the
root... (see the list above).