When the Internet Nearly Fractured 119
An anonymous reader writes "The Atlantic has a fascinating, if lengthy, story about a man named Eugene Kashpureff who 'ignited a battle over the future of the global network' by launching a rogue DNS registry in the late '90s. Here's an excerpt: 'He opted to go a step beyond simply registering sites on alternative top-level domains, and hijacked traffic intended for InterNIC.net. He pointed the domain to his own site, where he lodged a note of protest over how the domain name space was being controlled, and then offered visitors the option of continuing on to Network Solution's site. This was, you'll recall, at about the same moment that the federal government was attempting to make the case to the business community, to the world, that this Internet thing was no digital Wild West.'"
DNS not inherent (Score:5, Informative)
I must admit that I haven't RTFA. But the summary quotation seems to imply that DNS is somehow part of the Internet.
Just to clarify, it's not. The internet sure would be hard to use without the DNS, absolutely. But it's not unthinkable - we'd just be stuck with IP addresses for everything, and there could be no virtual hosting (multiple domains per IP, disambiguated by the Host: field).
But the DNS is really more of a universal agreement. Everybody agrees on who the roots are, and that's that. But there's no technical reason that the roots have to be who they are - hence the altroots described.
But he didn't "fracture" the Internet. That's a stupid statement. The Internet doesn't concern itself with domain names, just routing IPs - the DNS is built on top of that and maps back down to IPs. Were he successful, he would've fractured the DNS. Pain in the ass? Sure. Coke.com could go to Pepsi's site, but http://216.64.210.28/ [216.64.210.28] would still get me to the Coca-Cola website.
The difference matters, because fracturing the Internet is technical (routing), while fracturing the DNS is more of an administrative-bureaucratic-sociopolitical type of thing. Peering disputes can of course be about non-technical things like money, but it breaks at a technical level.
A little perspective (Score:5, Informative)
It's important to remember that when he did this, he was essentially fighting against the mandated monopoly on domain registration held by Network Solutions. At that time, the domain registration process had all the speed efficiency, charm, and conscientiousness as the DMV on a bad day. Meanwhile, we had several prominant cases where exceptions were made to the first come first served policy to give privately held domain names to corporations that want them even when their trademark was newer than the original registration.
At the height of that Kashpureff partially hijacked DNS for a little bit to raise awareness of alternatives.
The issues from then were partially addressed by opening up competition in domain registration and further by regulating the dirtier practices of registrars.