IETF proposed standard to partition the internet

[Eric Lyon]

Sounds like segregation in the early stages of planning. This news follows a previous debate where the U.N. wanted to take over control of all the internet and domain extensions. Apparently some feel even the U.N. having control isn't fair and have proposed another solution. A partitioning of country's allowing each country to delegate their own extensions and not have to rely on one company based on foreign soils.

There's been more and more talk about ways to take domains out of icann's control internationally. It's starting to look like it may just be a matter of time before someones idea sticks and the wheels start turning in a new direction for the internet and domains.

The proposal, entitled, "DNS Extension for Autonomous Internet (AIP)," describes a way to give each nation, which the proposal cleverly calls an AIP, "its own independent domain name hierarchy and root DNS servers." That would allow them to create their own top level domains without any need to coordinate them with ICANN or any other global entity. In other words, each country runs its own domain name space and decides for itself what TLDs exist and which domain names from outside will resolve in that space. But there would still be a role for ICANN. The IANA, which is a subsidiary of ICANN, would have to assign a unique identifier to each AIP gateway to facilitate international resolution of domain names. Say China was assigned B and the U.S. was assigned A. China could create its own google.com to catch any Chinese-domestic traffic to that site. If people outside the Chinese network wanted to access the Chinese version of google.com, and if China wanted to let them, its gateway would attach its AIP identifier to the end of the domain name. So the Chinese google site would be google.com.b and the other google, which is run by, um, foreign devils, would be google.com.a. Voila! Global compatibility! But it would also be possible for China to configure its gateway to tell people inside its network that the "other google.com" didn't exist. As the proposal puts it, "In order to realize the transition from Internet to Autonomous Internet, each partition of current Internet should first realize possible self-government and gradually reduce its dependence on the foreign domain names, such as COM, NET et al."

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