The Politics of DNSSEC: The Light Begins to Dawn at IETF by Milton Mueller

Milton Mueller posts on the Internet Governance blog what he calls “an astounding post by VeriSign’s DNS expert, Dr. Phillip Hallam-Baker, made on the IETF list.” Milton says in this posting, Dr Hallam-Baker “incisively describes the political implications of signing the root using DNSSEC, something we at IGP have been trying to do for about a year now. He also calls for sharing the signing authority, as IGP has also been doing. When we do this, we are sometimes accused of needlessly ‘politicizing’ the issue. Wonder what they’ll say now. Let’s put Hallam-Baker on that IGF panel on ‘critical Internet resources’ maybe, and see if his candor survives the glare of publicity?”

Milton Mueller posts on the Internet Governance blog what he calls “an astounding post by VeriSign’s DNS expert, Dr. Phillip Hallam-Baker, made on the IETF list.” Milton says in this posting, Dr Hallam-Baker “incisively describes the political implications of signing the root using DNSSEC, something we at IGP have been trying to do for about a year now. He also calls for sharing the signing authority, as IGP has also been doing. When we do this, we are sometimes accused of needlessly ‘politicizing’ the issue. Wonder what they’ll say now. Let’s put Hallam-Baker on that IGF panel on ‘critical Internet resources’ maybe, and see if his candor survives the glare of publicity?”In his post, Dr. Hallam-Baker asks for consideration of a robust infrastructure that needs to be robust over several decades, and “the likelihood that whoever is in charge of the root might perform an action that some party might consider a defection over such an extended timescale.” Dr. Hallam-Baker concludes, “So no, I don’t think that there will be a unitary signer. The architecture is inherently flawed. Rather than have a single party sign the root we should probably look to a situation where there are multiple signer entities.”
http://blog.internetgovernance.org/blog/_archives/2007/9/9/3217425.html

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