[dns-operations] root? we don't need no stinkin' root!

[Keith Mitchell]

On 11/26/19 7:40 PM, Mark Allman wrote:
> I wonder if we're ever allowed to just decide this sort of thing is 
> ridiculous old shit and for lots of reasons we can and should just 
> garbage collect it away.

To some extent, "get rid of ridiculous old sh*t" is kind of what the DNS
Flag Days are working on, though with rather more baby steps than I
suspect you are conceiving. Even these small, rational proposals have
met with push-back in some sectors. It's quite a lot of work to
deprecate stuff in a way that minimizes operational fall-out.

> To me, this whole notion is that we can in fact get rid of this
> giant network service.  If we don't get rid of it then what is the 
> incentive to move one's own resolver away from using the root 
> nameservers?

On garbage-collecting crap traffic, it's worth looking at AS112. Mostly
this runs on a bottom-up community-driven basis, where the incentive to
run an AS112 node comes from the simple self-interested economic basis
of not wanting this crap taking up capacity on one's own outbound
infrastructure.

While AS112 makes a difference, it is far from ubiquitous or optimal.
Probably there are gains to be made from more aggressive co-ordination
and advocacy (*), but I suspect these would need stronger resource
support from a more top-down source. It's far from the whole problem
space, but makes some difference at the root for sure.

Keith


(*) every so often I get a stark reminder of how low awareness of AS112
is...no, we don't want to buy transit for it, thanks..