Vixie contends that it wasn't just Kashpureff's hijacking of the InterNIC domain that was offensive. It was the indulging in propagation of alternative domains outside the consensus of the Internet community itself. Splintering DNS forks the Internet so that Internet users might never know where to go to get domains, or what they might get. If they connected to some DNS directories, they might enter Coke.com and get Pepsi. Chaos could ensue. All for what Vixie sees as not a noble question to uphold the free spirit of the Internet but instead a self-serving marketing stunt intended to promote Kashpureff's own business. Some things, writes Vixie, should just work, and DNS is one of them. The domain name system can't be subject to "the law of the jungle or the survival of the richest," he wrote to me. Because an Internet with a fractured domain name system doesn't much resemble the global Internet anymore.

* * *

There are two funny things in this preview of our more contentious Internet age.

The first: the Eugene Kashpureff of today seems to agree, in large part, with the Paul Vixie of yesterday and today, at least as far as the necessity for stability and security on the Internet goes. Kashpureff says that the attacks of September 11, 2001, helped to trigger something of a change of heart. He now works widely in the Internet engineering field, often to build up secure online spaces. "People have no clue what debt we owe people like Paul Vixie," says Kashpureff. "Nowadays, I make sure that no one gets away with what I did ever again."

The second: the DNS threats of today don't seem to be coming as much from the Eugene Kashpureffs of the world--solo hackers and coders--as they seem to be coming from world governments, particularly the United States government.

This is a reversal for a country that did so much in the modern Internet's early days to unite constituencies around the importance of integrity when it comes to the Internet's domain name layer.

During and after Kashpureff's protest, slowly, and perhaps improbably, a U.S.-led working consensus about the management structure of the domain name system emerged. Eventually, the Clinton administration's Commerce Department would lay out what became known as the Green Paper, which, with feedback from a wide range of people and bodies in the U.S. and abroad, set out a plan for how the modern Internet would function. Central to the plan was the creation of something that came to be known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. A California-based non-profit officially established in 1998, ICANN still today governs the Internet's technical operations, under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Closer to home, various parts of the United States government have, in recent days, shown an increased eagerness to enlist DNS in their political and legal battles. The Department of Homeland Security's ICE division and the Justice Department have been teaming up on DNS targeting initiatives called things like "Operation In Our Sites" and "Operation Protect Our Children." Sites thought to engage in offensive behaviors, from distributing child pornography to connecting people to downloads of music and movie files protected by copyright, have been shutdown at the domain name level, their normal contents replaced by a banner reading "This domain has been seized." Cyber Monday after this most recent Thanksgiving saw more than 80 domains thus disappeared. Last week, DHS and DOJ had to admit that they had inadvertently caused the pulling down of more than 80,000 "innocent" websites that had be co-located with sub-domains that were targeted in their operations. "A higher level domain name and linked sites were inadvertently seized for a period of time," read the joint release, though the feds assured that they quickly allowed the sites back up.