The real issue of that Internet Draft is not based in technology, rather it is based in politics. As many have pointed out, there is zero chance that the IETF process will allow this draft to grow to any sort of internet standard status. But the IETF is not the last word - it never really was. Just look a the of network services as shown by IANA. It shows something on the order of 15,000 network services many of which were done outside of the context of the IETF - http://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/service-names-por... There is no technical doubt that parallel, competing DNS roots could be established. There are many who argue that that would cause a split in the internet name space. It could. But that is a possible outcome, not a necessary outcome. Personally I look at the issue not as one of singularity or multiplicity of DNS roots but rather as one of consistency. Everyone, I hope, has seen the Monty Python tobacconist sketch - more often called the Hungarian Phrase Book sketch in which a person has a Hungarian-to-English phrase book that horribly mistranslates things. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akbflkF_1zY Think of DNS roots as competing phrase books. A poor DNS root such as shown in the sketch might be funny, but it would make its users angry and would have minimal commercial prospects and, if it survived at all, it would tend to evolve into a special niche. Think of DNS roots as facing the same kind of pressure - if they are inconsistent, i.e. if they surprise their users, then those users (or their ISPs) will vote with their feet and choose a less surprising DNS root. Now, there is the argument of misrepresentation - it is a valid argument. But there are existing mountains of laws and regulations in every country that can be brought to bear on people (natural or corporate) that engage in fraudulent representations. It may be harder than one likes to turn an accusation into a punishment, but due process is neither always efficient nor always quick. And there is a flaw in the internet architecture - which is the lack of universal mutual identification and authentication. We tend to use the internet as if we we though that every time we utter a domain name we get perfect answers. Anybody who utters "google.com" in a web browser while traveling learns that DNS names lack geographic uniformity. And we all know that DNS names lack temporal uniformity because we have all encountered DNS names that have been re-purposed. Consequently that flaw in the internet architecture contributes to this belief that domain names are somehow perfect master keys. We would be silly to pick up a telephone, tap out a number we believe to be that of our doctor and as soon as someone - anyone - answers we blurt out our deepest secrets. We know better - it could be a wrong number or someone else may have picked up. But on the internet we do not know better, we blurt out like that. So the problem with arguments about misleading data from competing roots are based more on a lack of a universally deployed internet layer to do consistent identification and authentication than they are based on DNS itself. My own sense is that if we allow competing roots we would not have needed ICANN's TLD processes; new TLDs could have grown in much the same way that new products aspire to shelf space in stores. Those TLD products that got user acceptance would survive and those that didn't would fail - that is true "bottom up" consensus rather than the rather forced system we see in ICANN. For more on that idea see http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000331.html Back to the internet draft: In my business (testing of internet protocols for robustness) I see a lot of corporate energy to create internet drafts in order to gain ability to claim "we ware working within the IETF" while moving forward on an idea no matter whether the IETF goes along or not. I suspect that the authors of this draft are serious technologists who are earnest about their ideas and that the ideas themselves are worthy of examination and consideration. But the larger political message is that the mantra of a singular, rigidly catholic DNS is starting to evolve into a message that elides the rigid hierarchy from exactly one provider to a message that envisions something more like separate and equal hierarchies that are sufficiently consistent with one another that users will not be discomforted, at least not any more than they are today by client geo-IP based name resolution. --karl--