Public Identifiers

[Paul Prescod]

W. Eliot Kimber wrote:
> 
> But doesn't "persistent" mean "when I request a thing, I get one"?
> Persistence is defined by the resource owner--if I transfer ownership of
> drmacro.com to someone else and they serve it from a different machine with
> a different IP address, it's still drmacro.com if we say it is, and if we
> do, then the drmacro.com resource is persistent. 

There is a difference between YOU transferring ownership and INTERNIC
transferring ownership. Internic has no knowledge of what commitments
DRMACRO made, and thus will not require the new owner to live by them.
This isn't just a sociological issue, nor purely technical: it could have
serious legal ramifications.

> If we say "no, it's a new
> and different drmacro.com, then the resource isn't persistent.  But
> changing the IP address and ownership of the resource doesn't necessarily
> affect the persistence.

It's a different resource because the people who made the original
commitments (perhaps legally binding commitments) to make certain
resources available no longer have control over the resource and do not
have the opportunity to choose whether to continue to live up to their
commitments.

An FPI is persistent because ISO legally constracts to not reassign them.
This may mean nothing technically, but neither does the fact that the
American government legally asserts that e-commerce transactions based on
USD have value. If either ISO or the American government goes out of
business, their promises are worthless, but by then we'll have other,
bigger problems than our links breaking (which, I guess, is the real
point).
 
 Paul Prescod  - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

It's such a 
Bore
Being always
Poor
LANGSTON HUGHES
http://www.northshore.net/homepages/hope/engHughes.html

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