Top-Level Domain By Any Other Name
By Bill Frez
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If you follow the twists and turns of the unfolding Internet-governance saga, you may have noticed the pressure building to add new top-level domain (TLD) names, particularly since the .com domain has grown so crowded. You might even detect a rancorous dispute brewing over control of the
Domain Name Service (DNS) responsible for translating names into IP addresses. Although it's easy to dismiss this hubbub as internecine geek-baiting, the resolution of the domain-name issue could have far-reaching consequences to the future of business on the Net.
This past fall I ran a short op-ed piece in CommunicationsWeek entitled "The Net Governance Cartel Begins to Crumble" (techweb.cmp.com/cw/102896/635frez.htm), describing the AlterNIC movement and the e
fforts of renegade Internet service providers (ISPs) to buck the self-appointed monopoly that controls domain-name assignments. The mountains of hate mail I got from various I-was-there-when-the-Internet-started luminaries made me even more determined to expose this pivotal issue to the full glare of public scrutiny.
Number Please
As even newbies know, every host attached to the Internet has a unique IP address--akin to an Internet phone number. Like phone numbers, IP addresses are hard to remember. We can always maintain our own directories to look up favorite addresses, much as we maintain personal phone directories. This is, in fact, how life began on the Internet. To save us the trouble, though, some clever folks at University of Southern California (USC) developed a handy public directory service whose use was, and still is, entirely optional. Services were provided for free and all comers could register an
easy-to-remember name, binding it to their IP address. In classic Internet style, the software written to run the distributed servers that administered the directory system was passed down to other volunteers.
In time, a multitie
red hierarchy evolved. At the bottom of the hierarchy is your ISP's name server, responsible for tracking down IP addresses every time you type in a Web page request like http://coolthing.foobar.com. Think of it as a shared secretary whose job it is to call directory assistance for you. Like any efficient secretary, these servers have good memories. They maintain a local cache, so that for frequently asked names they need look no further. If the requested address does not appear in the cache, the ISP server has to go find it. If it happens to know the IP address for the appropriate second-level domain (SLD) name server, it will go and ask, "Hey there foobar.com SLD, what's the address for coolthing?" SLDs are owned and operated by, or on behalf of, second-level domain name owners
such as ibm.com and aol.com.
If the ISP's name server never heard of foobar.com, it will appeal to the hierarchy, asking the .com TLD name server, "Hey, where can I find foobar?" Unlike directory assistance, the TLD name server only gives one of two answers. It can say, "I don't recognize foobar.com" or "Here's the IP address for the foobar.com SLD server." It cannot say, "Gee, we have two foobar.coms listed, one in Detroit and one in Singapore, which do you want?" This puts the TLD operator in the business of deciding who the "real" foobar is--something with which the phone company never got involved. Enter problem No. 1.
Once in a while, a user types in an unusual name, say one ending in an obscure country code like .im for the Isle of Man. In these cases, the ISP's name server doesn't even know where to find the TLD name server responsible for that domain. I bet you didn't know the Isle of Man was a country. Or is it? Hmm, I wonder how they got hold of a top-level domain? Enter problem No. 2.
To find out the address of a TLD server, you have to ask a root server--the top of Mount Olympus in the DNS hierarchy. There are nine recognized root servers and these are run by--you guessed it--volunteers. What makes them "recognized?"
Well, their IP addresses are all included in a file that goes along with the source code that is handed out by a volunteer to anyone that wants to run a name server, along with a dire warning, "Do not touch this file or you will break the Internet!" Even though the Internet spans the globe, eight of the recognized root servers are in the United States. They have the final word on who is included within the commonly accepted family of domain names. The U.S. root servers are run by USC, PSINet, Internet Software Consortium (ISC), the University of Maryland, NASA, the U.S. Army and InterNIC. Say, who died and left these folks boss? Enter problem No. 3.
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