[cooperation-wg] Clueful DNS from a public policy perspective

On 26 Jan 2014, at 10:23, Roland Perry <roland at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:

> In other words, isn't it the industry who should be clueful, on the users' behalf? Although not immediately applicable to this document, it is however a question for governments and regulators with their "consumer protection" hats on.

I'm not sure it is Roland.

In a regulatory/government context, DNS concerns will mainly be about "core infrastructure": ie are the root and TLD name servers operated robustly and responsibly; how do I know that; what contingency measures are needed if there's a catastrophic failure; and who do I call when there's a problem.

For the general public, I'd expect most governments and regulators would look to market forces to solve the issues around DNS robustness, just like they tend to rely on market forces to deal with the good and bad ISPs/hosting companies/registrars/etc. Some punters will pay a premium to get a better, more robust service. Others won't. Some domains must have bulletproof DNS service, other's don't. That's how it should be.

There might be some second-order effects that do raise consumer protection issues and possibly others such as data protection, national sovereignty, etc. [For instance, ISPs who do NXDOMAIN rewriting => present barriers to DNSSEC roll-out. Or the use of overseas resolving services.] However these are not about the provision of clueful or clueless DNS service per se.