[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] Some reg'n data I think necessary (was Re: GNSO Next-Gen RDS PDP Working Group teleconference)

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 04:21:01PM +0100, Volker Greimann wrote:
> If you are looking at the larger pricture, registering a domain name is not
> that different from applying for a phone number

This is not a great analogy.

> or being assigned an IP address when you access the internet

This is a terrible analogy.

The first analogy is weak because phone numbers in their original
design accessed a point on the network, and were the primary
identifier of that point.  That is to say, a phone number identified a
node in the network.  (This is why your phone number used to change
when you moved.)  To reach the party you wanted, you had to have a
theory of where they were, and then dial that location; if you were
lucky, they were there, and you would reach them.  Later, number
portability was invented, to bind the number to a subscriber rather
than a location.  But we still dial numbers not to reach the phone at
that location, but instead to reach a party at the other end.  (This
is why so many of us no longer know people's phone numbers: the number
is hidden behind the name directories we carry around in our mobile
phones.  It used to be that we had such a directory published on paper
-- the white pages -- but that has fallen into some disuse as
technology has gotten better.  It's not for nothing the whois went by
several early names, including "white pages".)

The second analogy is terrible because when you get an IP assigned on
connection your IP is _on purpose_ not stable.  That's because we
invented the DNS to solve that very problem.  It has been many years
since one could rely on a particular service being provided at a
particular IP, and the design of the Internet was such that it was
almost bound to be decoupled.  Moreover, most people do not offer
services at the IP they receive when they connect; but servers do.  At
least since the invention of URIs, the host name portion has betokened
merely a network-topological named service location rather than a
particular node in the network.  There is not a 1:1 binding between
names and IPs, and hasn't been since the DNS was created.

> , yet in those cases the data is not published anywhere

People keep collapsing the discussion of whether data is collected and
whether it is published.  We're never going to make any progress if we
don't attend to that fundamental difference.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com