KDB Systems

I’m run­ning for the board of direc­tors for the Cana­dian Inter­net Reg­is­tra­tion Author­ity ( CIRA). If you have a .ca domain I’d like your vote. In order to vote you have to be a mem­ber (which is free). To become a mem­ber go here to register.

Your first ques­tion is prob­a­bly – What does CIRA do? CIRA man­ages the .ca coun­try code Top Level Domain (ccTLD). Now you’re prob­a­bly ask­ing – What the heck is a ccTLD? A top level domain is the char­ac­ters on the right side of the last dot in an Inter­net name. This blog lives at www.kdbsystems.ca .ca is the top level domain, kdb­sys­tems is the sec­ond level domain, www is the third level domain, and so on. My busi­ness site is at www.kdbsystems.com. In that case .com is the top level domain. Because .ca rep­re­sents a coun­try, namely Canada, it is called a coun­try code Top Level Domain. Each coun­try only gets one ccTLD. CIRA is a not for profit organ­i­sa­tion that runs the .ca ccTLD under a con­tract with the Cana­dian government.

What’s involved in run­ning .ca? First there is the reg­istry. If you want an Inter­net domain for a web site or an email server or what­ever you need a domain name. This has to be unique so that peo­ple can find it. Some­one has to keep a data­base for each TLD with all the domain names, who reg­is­tered them and how to find them on the Inter­net. Let’s walk through what hap­pens when a busi­ness decides it wants a web site. They’re Cana­dian so they want a .ca domain. They con­tact a mid­dle­man called a reg­is­trar who checks that the domain name is not already reg­is­tered to some­one else. If it’s not the reg­is­trar for a fee con­tacts CIRA and pays CIRA to insert the data into the reg­istry data­base. The busi­ness is now the proud owner of a .ca domain. They con­tact a web host­ing com­pany, often the reg­is­trar, who sets up a web site on a server that is con­nected to the Inter­net. This server has an IP address that is a series of num­bers. Peo­ple who want to access the web site have to know this IP address to find it. No one could remem­ber all of these num­bers so the Domain Name Sys­tem (DNS) was devised. The DNS trans­lates domain names, which are much eas­ier to remem­ber, to IP addresses so your com­puter can find the web site. CIRA man­ages the DNS for the .ca domain. When some­one tries to find www.kdbsystems.ca their com­puter con­tacts a local DNS server, prob­a­bly run by their Inter­net Ser­vice Provider. This DNS server prob­a­bly doesn’t know where www.kdbsystems.ca is so it con­tacts the .ca DNS servers to find out. That’s a very sim­pli­fied expla­na­tion of a com­pli­cated process. CIRA runs the .ca DNS servers as well as the reg­istry data­base. As you can see CIRA is crit­i­cal to the Inter­net in Canada. If CIRA were to stop oper­at­ing peo­ple couldn’t access gov­ern­ment and many busi­ness web sites. Any email address that ends in .ca wouldn’t be reach­able. This could have very bad con­se­quences if .ca quit work­ing for even a few hours.

My full elec­tion state­ment is here. The short ver­sion is that I have the tech­ni­cal knowl­edge to know if things are going off course. I have the tem­pera­ment needed to get along with other board mem­bers even if we have oppos­ing views. I have the strength to stick to my prin­ci­ples when needed. I have the empa­thy needed to hear the other side of the story and under­stand it. I have the busi­ness knowl­edge needed to make sure CIRA is man­aged in a way that will ensure the needed finances are in place. Lastly, and I think most impor­tantly. I believe the Inter­net is the sin­gle largest dis­rup­tive thing that has hap­pened to the human race. As the Inter­net works now most of the peo­ple in the world have access to most of the col­lec­tive knowl­edge of the human race. Dis­rup­tion can be a force for good or evil. I’d like to see the good out­weigh the evil. Part of CIRA’s man­date from the Cana­dian gov­ern­ment is “to develop, carry out and/or sup­port any other Inter­net related activ­i­ties in Canada”. The other activ­i­ties should be about keep­ing that bal­ance on the good side. I have con­sis­tently cham­pi­oned this strat­egy dur­ing my term on the board and I’ll con­tinue to cham­pion it when elected for another term.

In upcom­ing posts I’ll expand on the chal­lenges that CIRA faces, how I think CIRA should man­age them, and more about the “other activities”.

It’s been over a year since I posted to this blog. In that time I’ve become increas­ingly con­cerned about Inter­net Gov­er­nance and how it affects all of us. It’s not that I’m no longer inter­ested in tech­nol­ogy and Microsoft. I just got home from help­ing at a Microsoft spon­sored event, the MVP SMB Com­mu­nity Road­show, in Win­nipeg yes­ter­day. We were demon­strat­ing Win­dows Mul­ti­point Server 2011 among other things. It’s almost unbe­liev­able how cool this is and what a dra­matic effect it could have on IT for the SMB mar­ket. It is mostly tar­geted at the aca­d­e­mic mar­ket but I think the poten­tial for SMB is much big­ger. I’m still very excited about tech­nol­ogy. Inter­net Gov­er­nance though ramps up my excite­ment to a whole other level.

In 2008 I was elected to the board of direc­tors for the Cana­dian Inter­net Reg­is­tra­tion Author­ity for a three year term. That term is almost up and I’m stand­ing for re-election. Dur­ing my three years on the board as I gained knowl­edge of the domain indus­try, how the Inter­net works, DNS, ICANN, the IGF, ISOC, and more I realised that the world has come to rely on the Inter­net. For some­thing that the world relies on its gov­er­nance is very dif­fer­ent from any­thing else I can think of. It is not well under­stood by peo­ple out­side of those involved. There appears to be a strug­gle for con­trol of it that could have pro­found con­se­quences for all of us. Cur­rently the Inter­net is gov­erned by a very loose con­glom­er­a­tion of com­mer­cial inter­ests, gov­ern­ments, spe­cial inter­est groups, and just plain peo­ple. ICANN arguably the most impor­tant Inter­net Gov­er­nance organ­i­sa­tion has what’s called a multi-stakeholder bot­tom up gov­er­nance model. Any­one can attend an ICANN meet­ing. There are three a year and they move all over the globe. It’s free for any­one to reg­is­ter and attend but you do have to pay your own expenses. CIRA will be host­ing one in Toronto in 2012. Once there you can attend almost any ses­sion. Very few are closed. There is a pub­lic forum where any­body can get up to the micro­phone and have their say. You can join spe­cial inter­est groups within ICANN and put for­ward poli­cies through these groups. It is very chaotic and con­fused but some­how the Inter­net stays run­ning. The net­work pro­to­cols used to con­nect and com­mu­ni­cate with the Inter­net are free and open. No one con­trols them. All this chaos, con­fu­sion, and lack of con­trol con­found gov­ern­ments and many com­mer­cial inter­ests. They want more reg­u­la­tion and con­trol. Some gov­ern­ments want to cen­sor what their cit­i­zens can see and do on the Inter­net. Some com­mer­cial inter­est groups want more con­trol of com­merce on the Inter­net. Some of the spe­cial inter­est groups want more reg­u­la­tion to pro­tect the pub­lic from the gov­ern­ments and com­mer­cial inter­ests. The pub­lic seems to just want to access all the cool stuff on the Inter­net, prefer­ably as cheaply as pos­si­ble. Right now there seems to be some sort of bal­ance between all these diver­gent inter­ests. The bal­ance sways a bit but so far it is some­where near the mid­dle. I’d like to see it stay in the mid­dle. To that end I’m going to use this blog to explore Inter­net Gov­er­nance issues. Because I’m cur­rently in the mid­dle of try­ing to get re-elected to the CIRA board I’ll prob­a­bly be blog­ging about that a lot. Because tech­nol­ogy fas­ci­nates me there’ll def­i­nitely be posts about the tech­nol­ogy of the Inter­net. Finally when I see some­thing cool like Mul­ti­point Server 2011 I’ll write about that.

Stay tuned my next post will be about the CIRA election.

I’m leav­ing this morn­ing for a three day trip to Ottawa for a CIRA board meet­ing. I depend on my Black­berry and my lap­top to run my busi­ness while I’m on the road. I’m going to do an exper­i­ment this trip. I’m going to run Fedora 11 exclu­sively on my lap­top. I’ve always had a multi-boot setup on the lap­top of Win­dows Desk­top, Win­dows Server, and Linux. The cur­rent setup is Win­dows 7 Ulti­mate, Server 2008 R2, and Fedora 11. I’ve set the default boot to Fedora 11 and hope to keep it that way for the next three days. I’ve tried this in the past with var­i­ous dis­tros of Ubuntu and Open­Suse. Nei­ther worked out. For some rea­son I always had to boot into Win­dows some­time dur­ing the road trip. It was usu­ally some­thing to do with Exchange or my Black­berry. I rely on my Black­berry and Exchange to man­age my time, email, and basi­cally my busi­ness. I’ll try to keep this blog up to date with my expe­ri­ences and at the end I’ll post the results.