This one is my favorite Bob Shaw story, the one that really gives you a nature of his true modus opperandi.

There was a time, back before Eugene went crazy, that people, isp's and companies were begging to switch away from the legacy root zone. We didn't have any numbers but traffic was rtising sharply and pretty soon names of real companies began appearing in the logs.

Within hours of noticing GE Federa Systems showing up in our logs, Eugene made one of his famous tactical errors and posted about this to the mailing list and bragged about it.

I'd checked as soon as I'd heard and true enough, I could resolve http://free.tibet through their servers. But that didn't last very long. About 4 hours to my memory.

It stopped working. GE Federal systems had switched back to the legacy root. Huh.

Somebody, I don't remember who, I think it was Marc Hurst called me ans asked if I knew what happened to GE. I said no, but I now felt incited to find out.

So I called GE Federal systems and got through to "the computer guy". He said yeah he'd tried out alt root and that it was faster than the old one. But, a guy had called and asked him to terminate the test and he said he would so he shut it off. I asked who had done this. He said he had also asked not to report his name.

Somebody called and asked to switch roots and wanted to be kept secret? Nice. I immediatly thgioght of Bob Shaw for some reason.

I then talked to his secretary. Turns out she'd never promised to give his name away an it was indeed Bob Shaw of the ITU.

When you call and say "Uh, yes, hello my name is Robert Shaw from the International Telecommunications Union in Geveva, I'm the DNS secetariat to the US Government initiative to manage the DNS and uh, we're concerned for the blah blah stability blah blah" then you as a computer operator, have a guy on the line from GENEVA calling about something you did.

Whose gonna put their job on the line for their principles under these conditions?

But what's the ITY, a UN chartered NGO in Geneva, doing calling an American business who decided to try out a service from another American business and telling him it's dangerous and could harm the Internet. Wouldn't that be tortuous interference with a contract or something? What is the ITU anti trust liability ? Are there laws about agents of foreign countries lobbying in America?