I have been told a few times that I have ‘authority issues.’ Of course, I beg to differ. In the interesting of clarification, I will share my views regarding authority.

When I hear the word ‘authority’ the first thought that comes to my mind is the DNS. There are basically two types of DNS servers out there. Resolvers ( or recursive nameservers ) and Authoritative Nameservers.

A resolver is, in my personal view, analogous to an ‘expert.’ It stores a large cache of data, and has the ability to go out and seek data that it doesn’t have on hand. Its area of expertise is very broad, it can answer virtually any query one sends it. It is not, however, an authority. One need only look at the output of nslookup to know this.

An authoritative nameserver, as its name implies, is an authority. Its scope of authority is narrow, but the validity of its answer is absolute. It need not ask anyone for answers. By answering a query, it defines the correct answer to that query. The resolver, or expert, relies on the authority to obtain its data in the first place.

This can be applied to organizational, social, and governmental concepts of authority as well. The lawyer may well be an expert on case law, but the judge’s ruling defines it. A psychologist may have a detailed dossier on a patients moods, but the patient himself or herself defines it.

The question may arise of from where authority is derived. How does the judge get the power to rule?

To understand this, I will again refer to the DNS as an analogy. An authoritative nameserver has authority delegated to it from the parent zone. The parent zone from its parent zone, and so on, all the way to the root.

Here is where the analogy really gets interesting. What makes ICANN’s root servers so authoritative? By the same token, who gives the government the right to govern? Social contract theory seems to indicate that the government’s authority is delegated to it, by those that rely on it. The same could be argued regarding the DNS root. Since resolvers start their queries by asking it for an authoritative answer, the public internet as a whole basically delegates authority to the DNS root.

Just as the root servers delegate to the gTLD servers, and to various ccTLD servers, and so on down the line, so do governments and organizations.

Because of this, I conclude that authority comes from delegation.

What about someone who has been granted authority, but fails to exercise it? In DNS terminology, this is called ‘Lame Delegation.’ I feel that in human situations, ‘lame’ is an apt term for such a thing as well.

Now that I have summed up my personal views regarding authority, I will offer a guess as to a possible reason why some incorrectly assume that I do not respect authority.

There are those who are not authoritative, but wish they were, or feel they should be. Just as I do not have one iota of respect for such shameful things as the DNS spoofing, I do not have any respect for those who assert authority that is not theirs to begin with.

If a judge issues a court ruling, thats cool, thats awesome, thats why we have judges. If some schmuck in a coffee shop decides it should be something else, the coffee schmuck’s opinion I fail to see as authoritative. If his ego is hurt by this, he may rationalize that those who don’t agree with him disrespect authority.