VeriSign's CEO hits back at critics
Published: 17 Oct 2003 12:35 BST
But it's not only academic organisations out there. For example, the US Army has one of those root servers.
The question is: what are we going to protect? The overall value of having the infrastructure bulletproof far outweighs the philosophical or emotional debates around whether there's a commercial entity, a government agency or some cooperative volunteer organisation. We sure as hell don't need the digital equivalent of 9/11 to convince us we need to have a better digital infrastructure.
Unfortunately, what I see happening is either hand-waving that it's not as bad as you think it is or the other side that says, "Well, there are privacy concerns, and we don't want this all in the hands of government." There's a balance point, and I'm tired of polarised arguments instead of some kind of level of cooperation between the public, private and academic segments, which we ask: what is the right balance point here?
What do you see as the sequence of events leading up to the transfer of the root servers that you're envisioning?
I'm not suggesting that I even know how to start that process, because it's tied to too much political controversy.
Do you see an imminent risk to the root servers if the status quo doesn't change?
I don't think there's a root risk scenario that's very risky at the moment. But that's mostly because we built it out on our nickel to handle the load if everyone else failed. We decided to upgrade our infrastructure and spent $150m about over the last two and a half years -- in a shrinking economy and with our revenues going down. We wanted not only to handle all the Net traffic if we needed to but also to be the fallback, if the rest of the operators went down.
Are you looking to monetise DNS lookups?
No. That base level of DNS (domain name system) response is an obligation we took on when we inherited that contract. But it would be commercially unreasonable for anyone to suggest that we shouldn't be allowed to build incremental services on top of that if they deliver value.
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