In message <905DD86907DAD3119DE70000778D770F04E41246@mailsrv1.itu.ch>, "Androuc hko, Vladimir" writes: >Hello, >Dear Protocol Council Members, I'm not sure I'm responding to the proper version of this note -- I received three very similar notes, and two recall notes. (It would be nice, I might add, if the "recall" notes cited the Message-Id of the message being recalled.) Anyway -- we really need to rework the wording to make it clearer and less ambiguous -- or at least less subject to willful misreading. At the Montevideo meeting, John Klensin repeated the basic message of RFC 2826 by pointing out that the formal, mathematical definitions of things like "trees" and "roots" do not permit even a meaningful discussion of multiple roots in the DNS. Here is some possible alternative language, derived from Leslie's earlier suggestion. The Internet currently operates using a tree-structured name space known as the DNS. Of necessity, such a name space must have a single, authoritative root. Moving to a model that would not require such a single, authoritative root would require replacing the present, working DNS with some other system. Such a replacement would require the development of a new naming paradigm, as well as the protocols and software to implement it. Developing and deploying such replacement protocols would take years, and would have enormous potential for disruption of the Internet. The PSO does not see any technical benefit in such an effort. It says essentially the same thing as our earlier wording -- that one can conceive of different ways to do name resolution -- but points out the costs. While there has been little explicit discussion of the earlier, ambiguous, text within the IETF, some who have seen it and the proposals based on it have reacted very strongly. For the Protocol Council to fail to take action in this area would probably invite a unilateral response from the IETF. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb http://www.wilyhacker.com