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If ICANN Can't, Who Can? 91

Posted by Cliff from the digital-taxation-without-representation dept.
alanjstr asks: "After reading this article at The Register, I no longer understand how domain registration really works. Quite a few posts have come across Slashdot about ICANN elections and rights to domain names. It sounds to me like it started off as a good thing but is struggling to move to be autonomous. ICANN was created in an attempt at who should run it and How should it be paid for. Clearly the Who has become a problem with many complaining about not being represented. The How is a problem that is still unresolved. The more I think about it, the more it seems like we're setting up a new government to rule the land of Domains. How should be go about fixing this dilemma? The first thing that comes to mind is to write a Constitution to lay the groundwork. How would you complete the following: We the People of the Digital Planet Earth...." It all boils down to ICANN asking most of the ccTLDs to pay a third of it's operating costs without allowing them representation in ICANN itself. Now that doesn't sound very fair, does it?
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If ICANN Can't, Who Can? More

If ICANN Can't, Who Can?

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  • What an American centred view. Still, nothing new there I guess.
  • For God's sake, we are just talking about a simple governing body. There is no need to inflate it's status and give it such ridiculous responsibilities.

    I mean, ICAAN is'nt even that important, anyway.

    I propose that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And certainly don't create another 'big government' style overbearing beurocracie.

    KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

  • For God's sake, we are just talking about a simple governing body. There is no need to inflate it's status and give it such ridiculous responsibilities.

    I mean, ICAAN is'nt even that important, anyway.

    I propose that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And certainly don't create another 'big government' style overbearing beurocracie.

    KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.

  • Who's Next? (Score:5)

    by stx23 ( 14942 ) on Monday November 27, 2000 @04:14AM (#599096) Homepage Journal
    Clearly the Who has become a problem with many complaining about not being represented.
    The Who not being represented? I though they were one of Taco's fave bands.
  • i hate it when people call things american... exspecially just for thinking the way our law (usually) stands... that was such a non-american centered view. Still, nothing new there i guess. on a side note, the lil engine that could... i think ICANN i think ICANN...
  • Should be the elimination of any central point of control in the NET -> Starting with ICANN.

    Multiple top level registars - that's the future!!!

  • To be fair, the lack of constitution was the problem to begin with. An unwritten constitution only works for as long as those living under it adhere to the concepts and traditions.

    This was starting not to happen pre-ICANN.

    Ironic this call for a constitution. ICANN and the the ccTLDs, colonists and Britain ... "no taxation without representation"

    Seems to me that *someone* (a single entity) needs to be in charge - just who, though, that's the key point.
  • who put these bozos and WIPO for that matter in charge? I honestly don't know how they got there or who they answer to, if anyone, and I am mighty curious about the situation, especially in regards to WIPO.
  • That'd be great as long as it doesn't turn out like usenet. Not that usenet's a bad thing, I just don't want to be limited to the websites my ISP or their's decides to carry.

  • ICANN is a very backwards organization to say the least.

    Between charging 1500 dollars plus raised registration fees for .biz, how do they figure it can compete with .com? And why didn't they launch .web, which has a small chance, instead launching .museum and .coop - names that are highly specialized and could not possibly be created to compete. Each new TLD has terrible flaws either in name itself, or in their new form of sale. ICANN is unfortunately not a well-put together enough board to even come up with a constitution, so I wouldn't hold my breath on that.

    1. humor for the clinically insane [mikegallay.com]
  • Why is it that any time you have any small group of humans with even the tiniest amount of power they start to make decisions that absolutely reek of corruption. I have no idea whether or not these people are corrupt, but they seem to be acting in a way that is not in the least bit accountable. I don't think humans are suited to responsibility really. I reckon problems like this would be best handled by a big old expert system. They usually work better than people do anyway.

  • How Nominet (.uk) sees this (Score:5)

    by matthew.thompson ( 44814 ) <matt&actuality,co,uk> on Monday November 27, 2000 @04:40AM (#599104) Journal
    The big issue with this is that ICANN just "decided" to levy a tax on the registrars of country specific domains. ICANN have had no control or input into these domains as they were organised BI (Before ICANN) yet they are asking for millions of dollars from all the country specific registrars - regardless of size.

    Fromm Nominet's 2000 AGM [nominet.org.uk] notes.

    ICANN's recent attempt to invoice the ccTLD Registries had been met with a firm declaration that there was no contractual relationship between the two sides and that there should be no tax on Domain Names. However, as a gesture of goodwill, a donation of USD $100, 000 had been sent from Nominet, together with a letter making it clear that banking the cheque would imply ICANN's acceptance of the fact that it was not in payment for any specific services or any contractual obligations.
  • What confuses me is this. Surely it makes sense to have a number of bodies (just as every country has its own body) to look after different TLDs? Domain name servers update their records (if they're top level domain servers) and then the rest of the world slowly gets hold of and caches this information. Surely the .com domain could be held by a business consortiums each with a domain name server, the .org the same, etc. just as the countries are. Then all we need is either an agreement to host top level domain servers among them or a rewriting so that basic information on the holders of all top level domain servers (including countries) can be distributed for everyone's DNS server to look at.

    For instance, it's not really that decentralised at the mo. Yes, if the US president decided the Internet was bad and evil and decided to close it then the DNS servers around the world would pick up the business and we would be able to still talk to every other machine, but these DNS servers are just copies of the original ones at ICANN.

  • Allow me to rant a little bit about DNS (Score:4)

    by inquis ( 143542 ) on Monday November 27, 2000 @04:46AM (#599106)
    Now, I am a relative newbie to Unix in general. Don't even think of asking me to say anything intelligent about how DNS works or about how BIND works or about exactly what happens when I type a domain name into my web browser past the fact that it goes out to a DNS server and fetches an IP address.

    My feeling for a while now is that while Uniform Resource Locators make sense, domain names don't. Think about it from this perspective, and see if it makes any sense.

    In the context of your computer, there is a string that you can specify that can point to any particular file, or resource, on your entire machine. For example, my directory would be /home/inquis. All the user directories are subordinate to the /home directory. The /home directory and my home directory within that /home directory are logically linked.

    Jump over to a win9x box. The contents of the Windows directory are logically linked to the identity of the Windows directory itself. Everything in the windows directory belongs in that directory, because everything in there is a part of windows.

    Now look at our idiotic system of using domain names to access resources over the web. First of all, nothing requires that the domain name itself have anything to do with the content that can be accessed by using that domain name. This would be akin to sitting down at your linux box, moving to your /home directory, looking at the contents of that directory, and finding it filled with /sbin crap.

    Another problem I have with DNS is that related content is not grouped together by default. This harks back to the previous problem (you can't tell the content from the domain name). And I'm not simply talking about going to a portal that indexes web content and drilling down through the links, I'm talking about a fundamental archetecture change.

    Look at it this way. Say you want to look up newbie Linux sites, but you don't know where to begin looking. As it stands now, you can go to Google and hope that their spider has picked all of them up; you can go to Yahoo and hope that they have manually indexed them all; either way, you miss out on content.

    now, check this out... wouldn't it be easier on you and everyone else if you could just do this?

    http://xml/linux/newbie

    transferProtocol://contentType/highLevelCategory /lowerLevelCategory

    As the web stands now, it is analogous to a linux box with every single file on the entire machine crammed in the root directory. You have to know what exactly you are looking for and how to find it before you can actually find it. A more efficient system would allow even the most braindead user to shoot in the dark and still manage to find somehting useful quite quickly.

    (Response to one obvious counterpoint: you can grep a directory to find what you are looking for quickly even if you don't know its name. However, grepping the web is not trivial. The closest tool we have for doing that is Google, and we all know that while it is pretty good, it is not perfect.)

    Allright, this now ends my directionless rant. Mods, respond to this if you disagree instead of modding it down.

    Thanks, and everyone have a good day. I just pulled an allnighter writing polysci paper, so I needed a good rant.

    -inq

  • We should abandon DNS altogether. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The problems with ICANN are just the tip of the iceberg - domain names were great for the few years until 1996 or so, but all the problems we are witnessing with domain allocation and cybersquating etcetera demonstrate that DNS is a fundamentally poor concept.

    Look at it this way: Yet IPv4 has a huge address space of 256^4 unique addresses (and with the advent of IPv6, this is set to increase enormously). Considering that there are only around 70,000 words in the English language (many of which are not memorable enough for use as a domain name anyway), it seems obvious that there will never be enough domains out there to satisfy everyone.

    The solution to this is to abandon DNS altogether. People are easily able to memorise telephone numbers in everyday life, so why should we assume that they become instantly stupid and forgetful as soon as they connect to the Internet? Despite what some people (i.e. ICANN and domain registrars) would have you believe, people ARE capable of memorising IP addresses. For example, I know the IP addresses of all the machines on my LAN (192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2 and 127.0.0.1) - remembering these numbers hardly challenges my intellect. Anyone who can't remember a few simple numbers of less that 12 digits is too stupid to be allowed to live, let alone be allowed to use the Internet.

    We should revert to accessing resources just by using IP addresses, and forget about ICANN and the greedy domain registrars.

  • ICANN isn't doing what it was intended to do... (Score:5)

    by cmilkosky ( 145648 ) on Monday November 27, 2000 @04:49AM (#599108) Homepage
    A Constitution sounds like it might be a neat idea, but do you really think that you're going to get all the governments in the world to agree to the contents of a Constitution? I don't. It's a pipe dream. The problem is that different governments have different agendas. It may sound crazy, but if we had one International government (only), I think it might be easier. Or at least one with strength to rule over local country government, then something like this might be more feasible.

    Until then, I think the best way is to open it up [opendnstech.com] to everyone and get the registries to allow mass voting on what new TLDs are added. WIPO can handle the problems with trademarks.

    Another point I feel worth mentioning, is that the problem also lies with the fact that WE are not taking advantage of the alternative DNS systems out there. If we make a mass migration over to alternative DNS systems, ICANN will lose its clout. This should send a message to any future organization or government that would like to manage DNS. Check out and support:

    Open DNS Technologies [opendnstech.com]

    AlterNIC [alternic.org]

    ADNS [adns.net]

    Open Root Server Confederation [open-rsc.org]

    Name.Space [name-space.com]

    There's more too.

    Chris

    Open DNS Technologies, Inc. [opendnstech.com]

  • SuperRoot Consortium (Score:5)

    by Brazilian Geek ( 25299 ) on Monday November 27, 2000 @04:59AM (#599109) Journal
    Everyone's b*tchin' about ICANN but not many people are really doing anything about it - but in the Register article there's a link to The SuperRoot Consortium [superroot.net] that has a proposal and is actually doing something about the TLD problems.

    I know that I'm switching over, if everybody starts using their rootservers ICANN will loose it's power and all of us will be happier. Think about it, ICANN depends on their rootservers to stay in power, use other rootservers and ICANN can't touch you.

    Like I said, I'm switching...

    --
    All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...

  • Alternate DNS's - what a pain (Score:5)

    by Sabalon ( 1684 ) on Monday November 27, 2000 @05:04AM (#599110)
    Okay...I run BIND for where I work. Given that I'm not Earthlink and connecting massive amounts of the american populous to the net, but we've got about 5500 people.

    As I read through the comments on here, I find things like Superroot.net, alternic, etc...

    So, for people to get access to these rogue sites, I need to add all these other entries to my root.db and other files. And merge the entries from the various splinter groups, as I can't just dowload one groups root.db and run with it. And what is going to happen when two groups both have the same TLD listed in there?

    I'm all for ICANN going away, but like it or not, there needs to be that tiny bit of control in there to keep utter anarchy (ie alt.*) from happening.

    Anyone have a better way of handling this nightmare?
  • Think, people have trouble understanding the concept of files and folders on their systems which do not contain that much information. Most people don't even know how to find a file which the forgot the name. This on Windows which is as simple as START>FIND>FILES AND FOLDERS and filling the contains text field.

    If you want a newbie solution it should be with the documentation or within the help assuming the newbie bought the systems. If he downloaded it then the site which he downloaded from should contain links to the documentation.

    I feel the biggest problem we have with computers today, is VERY POOR DOCUMENTATION!!!!! Be it on-line, printed or on CD.

  • People are easily able to memorise telephone numbers in everyday life, so why should we assume that they become instantly stupid and forgetful as soon as they connect to the Internet?

    Perhaps, but how many do they actually memorize? 4? 8? Why would they _want_ to memorize 64.28.67.48 when they really wanted to go to www.slashdot.org??

    Another drawback is that if one changes hosting sites, or gets a new and better machine, or whatever, they can't simply redefine what gets resolved when someone lookups up whatever.whomever.whereever. No, they'll have to make the new install take the old IP number, or advertise a change of address.

    Your "solution" is at best short-sighted and ill-considered.

    James

  • So, for people to get access to these rogue sites, I need to add all these other entries to my root.db and other files. And merge the entries from the various splinter groups, as I can't just dowload one groups root.db and run with it. And what is going to happen when two groups both have the same TLD listed in there?

    Not true. And I don't know why you call them "rogue" sites. They are legitimate businesses and only prove that the public wants more. Open DNS Technologies [opendnstech.com] has something different that it's working on that doesn't require changes to root.db on servers. It also has the ability to handle when ICANN manages the same TLD. Check it out. And on top of that, it can do email between the standard DNS and theirs.

    Chris

    Open DNS Technologies [opendnstech.com]

  • I didn't mean a government, I meant a framework to guide the actions of ICANN. I'm sure they have something, but it obviously wasn't thought out well enough or we wouldn't be having all these problems.
  • I didn't mean a government, I meant a framework to guide the actions of ICANN. I'm sure they have something, but it obviously wasn't thought out well enough or we wouldn't be having all these problems.

    Oh, I agree, I'm just saying that I don't think the Constitution idea could happen in the world we live in today because of the governments that exist. If we had one world government (probably also be a pipe dream) or something like that with enough strength to enforce global laws, then this may happen, but until then, I don't see a Constitution working.

    Chris

    Open DNS Technologies, Inc. [opendnstech.com]

  • At the moment it works something like this:

    you type in a URL and your web browser queries your ISP DNS for www.theregister.co.uk.

    It doesn't know the IP addr, and so asks the DNS root for the address of the .uk server.

    This server does know about everything *.uk, and can answer the query for the IP address of www.theregister.co.uk.

    If theregister.co.uk ran it's own DNS, your browser would ultimately have to query that DNS for the IP address of www.theregister.co.uk (as happens in large organizations)

    As the article says, if the ccTLD data for enough popular countries moved, ISP's in those countries would have to change DNS root settings, to correctly resolve these domains.

    These registrars could then do cool things like create new TLD's which the alternative DNS root knew about.

    ICANN probably wouldn't like that and would keep their root server as-is, so users accessing ICANN's servers wouldn't see the new TLD's

    the 'new DNS root' could reference ICANN's existing gTLD's, so non US users could access .com, .org, etc.

    What would ultimately happen is that because the 'new DNS root' is effectively a superset of ICANN, US ISPs would ditch ICANN's root server.

    no more ICANN.
  • A few other countries that have written Constitutions: Ireland [maths.tcd.ie] (a neighbor to your country, surely you'd know at least a little bit about it), Australia [aph.gov.au], France [assemblee-nationale.fr], Republic of South Africa, Japan [ntt.com], Syria> [uni-wuerzburg.de], Belgium [senate.be] (in French), Cambodia [cambodia.org], , [uni-wuerzburg.de]Slovenia [sigov.si], Russia [utk.edu], Pakistan [stanford.edu], India [alfa.nic.in], Fiji [fiji.gov.fj]

    And finally, China [tnit.edu.tw]

  • ICANN has done an amazing job of shooting itself in the foot - the CCTLD billing being only one example.
    But it is far from clear that other roots will do any better. SuperRoot, for instance, claims that "it is not an alternative to the ICANN/IANA root". But SuperRoot lists a .biz domain operated by a different person than the one awarded .biz by ICANN. Someone has to resolve the conflict.
    And it's very clear that no matter who does it, there will be a lot of political controversy.


    Technology is simple. Politics are expensive.

  • The old maxims:
    Concentrated power=bad
    Distributed power=good

    But what about power distributed to the point where it is completely ineffectual, but at the same time (due to its democratic nature) holds a great deal of credibility? You have the United Nations, a body which passed the Universal Declaration of Human rights back in the 1940's and has yet to develop any real teeth for it.

    Mr. Dictator, sir? Please stop mutilating your own people in a desperate bid to hold on to power.

    Laws without enforcement or the will of enforcement are worse than no laws at all. If ICANN is the United Nations, then we can do what we have always done: ignore them.

    Will history remember the open-source phenomenon like it has communism: as a short-lived farce?

    www.ridiculopathy.com [ridiculopathy.com]

  • I realize this... and reading back on that post I also realize that I interchanged my terms and sometimes got more specific when I should have been getting more general.

    Think of the web as an information space. Now, slice it up in terms of transfer protocols. Next slice it up in terms of the type of content delivered over those protocols.

    so you get resource locators looking like

    ftp://txt:recipes/pies/mom's strawberry pie recipe

    and

    http://class:financial services/home banking/fifth third/lexington ky/my home baanking
    and

    news://bin:1337/warez/l4m3w4r3z.iso

    You could even pull some symlink mojo, like trunchating that ugly http RL that points you to your bank's online account management software to just

    http://class:mybank

    cool stuff, eh?

    /me zips up the flamesuit for this next one

    Philosophical angle. The problem with this scheme is that it would be dan easy for a controlling body to snip off one arm of the tree. remember, we are talking about a tree, not the amoeba that we had before. Someone could just decide to go up and disallow

    http://img:png/erotica

    and then where would you be?

    I really think an architecture like Freenet lends itself to this kind of arrangement. a heirarchially arranged, distributed metafilesystem. wow, I think I just coined a new buzzword!

    "distributed content metafilesystem"

    (now 100% buzzword compliant!)

    </sarcasm>

    but again, seriously, right now the only order the information web has is the order that is imposed upon it. The web would be a friendlier place if this order were built into the foundation itself.

    hmm... but how to deal with censorship... go freenet!

    -inq

  • Theorhetically, ICANN is democratic... (Score:3)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Monday November 27, 2000 @05:45AM (#599121)
    I mean, we did just vote in 5 new people onto the ICANN board, selected by internet users, so one cannot certainly say that these new people will continue ICANN's status quo.

    However, the problem is two-fold here: those 5 people are to replace the original, gov't selected ICANN officials, but these officals have yet to step down. In addition, the ICANN board just happened to change it's bylaws after the internet election but before the new domains were selected as to basically prevent the new members from having a say on the new domains.

    In other words, until the new members are in place and replacing the other 5, it's still mostly a gov't organized system, which is definitely not democratic in this case (at least, no representation methods). I'm sure that the change over will happen *now* but now is too late as the new TLDs are rather poor choices.

  • We should revert to accessing resources just by using IP addresses, and forget about ICANN and the greedy domain registrars.

    Excuse my bluntness, but that doesn't make any sense. How do you expect the average nontechnical person to remember IP addresses. Be honest - if you were walking on the street and saw a sign for Macy's and wanted to shop online, what would be easier for you to remember at the spur of the moment? www.macys.com, macys.com, macys.shopping, or 63.73.131.68 ? How about an email address? Would you want to send email to me at cmilkosky@opendnstech.com [mailto] or my IP address? Sorry, but as a human, I find the names easier to remember and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

    You can't just abandon DNS anymore. There has to be an orderly transition away from it that makes sense. Something new may form in the next few years, but we aren't going to be abandoning DNS any time soon because of the apps that depend on it. Everything using the Internet is built around the use of DNS.

    Chris

    Open DNS Technologies,Inc. [opendnstech.com]

  • Asking the ccTLD's to pay their dues but get no representation sounds like an old Union practice. Substitute teachers have to pay Union dues but get no Union representation or protection. The teachers Unions may be so entrenched that they are highly difficult to get rid of, but we shouldn't be letting ICANN get away with something like that.

    Aren't they here just to approve registrars and TLD's?

    forge
  • The first thing that comes to mind is to write a Constitution to lay the groundwork. How would you complete the following: We the People of the Digital Planet Earth....

    Repeat after me...
    The Internet is a computer network.
    The Internet is a tool.
    We are not citizens of the Internet.
    We cannot be citizens of a tool.


    --
  • From the SuperRoot website (my emphasis):

    The SuperRoot Consortium root is not an alternative to the IANA/ICANN legacy root since we use the IANA/ICANN legacy root as our foundation. The SuperRoot Consortium root can be thought of as a "staging root" for the testing and implementation of new top level domains.

    The phrase 'bugger' springs to mind.

    --
  • ...is tyranny!

    I expected as much from such a motley gathering of megalomaniacal CEOs. That's basically what ICANN is; a gathering of the top IT/telecom/Internet business owners with the fattest wallets on the planet. Sure, without one solidly defined organizational system, the Internet would just be a barrel with fish in it, but just look at the morons in ICANN!

  • Oh come on...

    just because he used the word "constitution" he's automatically labelled as american-centric? all a constitution is is a written document the records the common beliefs of the people. the magna carta was a fricken constitution.

    I have had enough of all these non americans complaining that we americans only think about ourselves.

    and for the record, it seems obvious to me that a written proclamation of our internet community beliefs would come in very handy in the future when legistlation is written

  • The Internet Agreement (Score:4)

    by Stultsinator ( 160564 ) on Monday November 27, 2000 @06:05AM (#599128)
    The only control ICANN has over the Internet is the control domain admins give it. You know those little entries in your DNS config that points to the TLD servers? Those can be changed. In fact, there seem to be a couple sites that offer alternatives (here's a link to a /. discussion of them. [slashdot.org]) So here's a quick Howto:

    Buy the DNS & Bind book (if you haven't already)

    Setup a nice little name server with a catchy TLD like ".slash"

    Add your friends' boxes to your new TLD

    Change your .sig to tell people how to modify their resolv.conf

    Rinse & Repeat

    Once roughly a third of the Internet is using "pirate" DNS systems some propeller-head at Yahoo or some such will have the great idea of mirroring all this at their site and ICANN will soil their trousers. You can expect ICANN to pressure ISP's into only using the "official" name servers, and a few lawsuits to settle who can run what services (named) on their own machines. Those things will likely split the Internet (again) between the haves (those who have the knowledge and will to modify their resolve.conf) and the have nots (those who must use their ISP's config.) However, that might be a Good Thing.

    "Hmm... this link to l337.h4X0r seems to be broken..."

    "Dammit! That darn sensorware must've blocked newdgeeks.slash"

  • "The Internet is a computer network.
    The Internet is a tool.
    We are not citizens of the Internet.
    We cannot be citizens of a tool."

    Isn't government a tool for running a nation? You can not successfully run anything without some sort of organization and protocols (pardon the pun... and alliteration ;-) in place.

    While your post was certainly poetic, it was also somewhat naive. But to make-up for calling your post naive, I followed your link and rated you a 10 ;-)

  • http://xml/linux/newbie

    transferProtocol://contentType/highLevelCategory/l owerLevelCategory

    Hm, no. For one thing, a document could, and often should, exist in many different content types, and servers should use content negotation [apache.org] to serve them.

    More importantly, you impose a hierarchal structure on the web, but the web was invented to solve [w3.org] the many problems hierarchal systems represent.

    Now, the DNS does represent a problem for the web, TimBL discuss this in his book, but you're going in the wrong direction, IMHO.

  • Here's a link [youcann.org] to youcann.org, a site devoted to promoting alternative TLDs. Looks like they duplicate the 'standard' DNS information and augment it with their own stuff that ICANN doesn't accept.

    It's a very interesting idea, but as this Wired article [wired.com] details, bad things happen when people disagree about who on the Internet is in charge of a certain TLD (.biz in this case).

    If you're actually interested in doing something, rather that just complaining all the time, here's an opportunity, staring you in the face.

    I think this is a great idea... But what happens when all the good TLDs are taken? Hrmmmm...

  • Lets make sure the new digital constitution is filled with the same kinds of "...shall not be infringed" rights that are regularly ignored by the US government.
  • "our internet community beliefs"

    what's this "our" business?

    in real life, i'm governed by the laws of my country. I might not agree with all of them, but they've been handed down the years and are added to/amended by the representatives of the country's choice. (Which is something that we've been able to manage without much hassle for about 700 years ... sorry, unresistable cheap shot :)

    ICANN's problem is its lack of actual representation. The @large system was a farce. It's managed to take things over without much in the way of an election - even a flawed one.

    If we could dream up a way of accurately gauging want the internet community's beliefs were, then that would probably work well for running the beast ...
  • There are like twenty good reasons why this is a bad idea. What you are talking about has nothing to do with IP or HTTP. You could certainly come up with some other type of URL (Freenet did this) that does not need domain names, but the strength of http and TCP/IP is in their massive flexibility.

    Either your idea would have to be strictly enforced, or it would be useless. And there would be no good arbitrary way to determine enforcement. Imagine if someone disagreed with the governing body's designated content type.

    DNS was not designed with the web in mind. Thank god. Would your DNS system make any *more* sense when sending emails? Not at all. How about telnet? What if I want to change the content & protocols that my server is using, and I want to do that frequently? DNS speaks about network topography, not content. This is for a lot of good reasons.

    Of course, if you wanted to create a new protocol with a new URL scheme, that's your business. If you wanted to integrate with existing systems, it could look like this:

    inquis://xml/rants/aimless

    But then you have to deal with the real problems with your idea. For example, the overhead involved would be exponentially greater than current systems. Every server would have to be indexed so many different ways, and current systems do not allow frequent lookups of leaves: That is, it is mildly computationally intensive to look up *.slashdot.org, so this is done infrequently.
    --
  • ...shall not be abridged."

    - From the first article of the constitution of Beta in Lois McMasters Bujold's universe.

    IIRC, the book this quote was taken from was written in the 80s, and is pretty forward thinking. I think something like this should be written into ANY internet constitution. Individuals may choose to limit their own access, or may choose to let someone else do it, but the infrastructure shouldn't be doing it. In short, unless you have written consent from all individuals affected, you may not deny access to information.
  • Laws without enforcement or the will of enforcement are worse than no laws at all. If ICANN is the United Nations, then we can do what we have always done: ignore them.

    This could turn into a debate on governments, but I think that the UN has no real power to enforce anything it wants to do. It depends on the representatives to have their governments carry out the actions. If you could depend on the UN itself to carry out actions, that's a different story. Give it some sort of strong military presence, and maybe things could be enforced. Don't know if that'll happen though.

    I do believe that if the UN had more strength, they could be the ones to enforce any "laws" on the Internet and more specifically to our topic, the DNS.

    Chris

    Open DNS Technologies [opendnstech.com]

  • ICANN for gTLDs only. (Score:3)

    by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Monday November 27, 2000 @06:46AM (#599137) Homepage
    Hey, ICANN could be worse. At least they did have elections, and are committed to letting the elected members of the board vote, er, eventually. They showed enough sense to keep out of the censorship business by rejecting value-related gTLDs [slashdot.org]. Meanwhile, China is threatening [slashdot.org] to run an alternative DNS and force VeriSign out of the business of registering Chinese-character domains. Does anyone really think they'd allow the Chinese-character equivalent of independence.tw?

    I hate to say it, but ICANN comes off looking like the good guys, and the nation-states seem a lot less trustworthy.

    Why doesn't each country just take control of their own ccTLD, and leave gTLDs to ICANN?

    --

  • There is no reason for having a single organization administering the DNS system. Even with the current system, both individuals and ISPs can perform name resolution using whatever collection of servers they like. ICANN has no business messing with the .uk or .de domains: if people want to resolve names in those domains, they (or their ISPs) just point to the right servers. If your ISP doesn't resolve things the way you like, you can use a third party name server, or you can change ISPs.

    There is some coordination needed to help people avoid creating conflicting TLDs. If both the UK and the US create a ".biz" within their servers, it would be bad for both. Serious registrars will cooperate, and if they won't, users just won't point at them. In either case, the function an organization like ICANN would perform would be a minor, administrative one, not justifying their current size, power, or charge structure: maintaining a list of those TLDs.

    Even with the current DNS infrastructure, ICANN is technically and administratively superfluous. I hope the ccTLD administrators will leave the current system: sooner or later, it is destined for demise anyway, and it might as well be sooner.

  • The problem with a written constitution is that loopholes are eaasier to exploit. For instance, as I understand it, the American constitution does not protect anyone's right to be an Atheist. You can be Muslim, Shinto, Seventh Day Advent Hoppist, or Discordian - those are religions, and you are free to follow them. CMIIW.
  • No taxation without representation!

    "I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
  • Please don't advocate modeling it after the US Constitution. I have a nightmare forming in my head already.

    The nightmare goes something like this: A popular election is held for the position of President of ICANN, the most popular person in the popular vote does not get enough electorial votes to sew up the election. A small country (say Tonga for instance) has some irregularities with its vote and has to do a recount to determine who wins the swing votes to determine who will win the deciding electorial votes. Because of a server crash it is discoverd that a few thousand votes that were cast have unreliable time/date stamps on them. Data recovery specialists are called in but the governing body does not give them enough time to do all their work and they are only able to do a partial recovery in the allotted time. The Tonganese government certifies the original vote but the loser files appeal after appeal and the results stay up in the air for a long time. Because it is necessary to reach a decision, the ICANN board meets and appoints the winner (who happens to not be the popular vote winner).

    As a result of all the bungling, ICANN loses a great deal of credibility with its constituancy and with other governing bodies and standards orginizations. The dwindling power that ICANN can exert throws the cyberworld into disarray. Smaller, weaker factions conspire to usurp the authority that ICANN once weilded with total authority and as a result, the once homogionus internet becomes fractured. People who want full service have to subscribe and pay for multiple accounts.
  • DNS just points to an IP address, and that host may be serving an almost infinite number of content types, e.g. GeoCities [geocities.com]. The answer to your question is its parent company: Yahoo! [yahoo.com], or any number of other sites like About, Northern Light, or Google (all .com's).

    (end comment) */ }

  • ask Florida to vote on it (Score:3)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Monday November 27, 2000 @07:18AM (#599143)
    If there are any problems assigning names.
    Simple!

  • The basic thing to keep in mind is that (so far as I can tell) no contract or U.S. statute gives ICANN authority to impose anything on anyone. DNS uses a hierarchical database. ICANN had a contract to run the top-level servers that everyone was using. But nothing forbids you to set up your own top-level server and populating it as you please. And nothing forbids others to use your alternaDNS for name resolution.

    ICANN more or less recognizes this one their web site. They point out that they set standards based on voluntary cooperation, adding that their authority does not come from statute or contract.

    An organization that exists on those terms can continue only so long as it is backed by at least a rough consensus. The Register article makes it look as though that consensus could plausibly implode. I'm sure that most people would rather that didn't happen--the balkanization of DNS would be a pain in the ass of biblical proportions. But the only way to avoid it will be for ICANN to rebuild the consensus that lets it survive.

    (Caveat: IAAL, but I don't practice in this area. My assertions here are based on about half an hour of legal research. If any of those assertions about the law are mistaken, I'd be grateful if someone would tell me.)
  • Meanwhile, China is threatening to run an alternative DNS and force VeriSign out of the business of registering Chinese-character domains. Does anyone really think they'd allow the Chinese-character equivalent of independence.tw?

    How China resolves names is their business, and whether you use their servers is yours.

    I think most people outside China would recognize Taiwan as the ultimate authority on "independence.tw" (in Chinese or Western characters), as well as the ultimate authority on the Chinese character equivalent of the ".tw" TLD, and that's how most people would set up their name resolvers.

    Why doesn't each country just take control of their own ccTLD, and leave gTLDs to ICANN?

    Well, one problem discussed here is that ICANN apparently is trying to exert control over ccTLDs as well. If they stopped trying that, I think people would be less upset with them.

    But one might also ask why ICANN should have any significant control over gTLDs or any involvement in the infrastructure. You don't need centralized control over gTLDs to avoid clashes, and you certainly don't need centralized control over any part of the infrastructure to make things work.

  • Anarchy != Chaos (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Please do not use the word 'anarchy' when you mean 'chaos'. (I assume that's what you mean by your comment about needing a tiny bit of control.) What we have currently is anarchy because people can choose any dns they want but we realize the benefit of sticking to a standard. If the benefit of sticking to that standard is getting less beneficial, we can coose to work with a different one or create our own. It's not like the U.S. Government where if you choose to ignore its rules you get tossed in jail.
  • Back in December of '96, when this was being debated in the Nerd World(tm), I challenged Jon's IAHC on the implicit assumption that domain names were property. That assumption was making the whole problem harder, without providing any extra value to the committee. In fact, I'm of the opinion that treating domain names as property was one of the causes of the "NSI problem" in the first place.

    The full paper is still available: see Ownership of International TLDs [iahc.org]. To make a long story short, NSI's assumption of ownership of .com

    • has created a new monopoly in a worldwide namespace.
    • has implicitly assumed that it was the property of the U.S. National Science Foundation,
    • has explicitly assumed that NSF has the right to give it away,
    • has caused financial hardship and litigation,
    • has triggered the purchase of many domains under .com for resale to individuals, small businesses and unregistered trademark holders, and finally
    • had made it possible for NSI to remove a domain or resell it without notice or appeal.

    To this we might add "has now involved the U.S. government and a quasi-private corporation in an attempt at international governance".

    --dave
  • The solution is the elimination of TLDs altogether. Major businesses will engage in legal or extralegal shenaningans to insure that they have absolute control over their present second level name in any namespace.

    Adding more TLDs doesn't do anything without restrictions on what can go onto those TLDs, and as ICANN has so amply demonstrated, the categories and restrictions get chosen through a particularly bizzarre process that leaves no one happy.

    Why do we even need a TLD namespace anyway? It served a purpose once upon a time when SRI or whoever did registrations limited them with in .COM et al, but now they're just an opportunity for registrars to make money and bring instability to the DNS system.

    http://slashdot should be enough.
  • It sounds like our differences are mainly technical.

    How China resolves names is their business, and whether you use their servers is yours.
    The article I linked to in my original post made it sound like China had the power to take over Chinese-character domains by fiat. There was a lot of discussion on Slashdot about whether the Chinese government could really do it, but I never saw anything that looked like an authoritative answer. I'm not sure whether it's really more of a technical issue or whether it's just that the PRC can do this because they have the power to force the vast majority of Chinese speakers to use whatever name server they choose.

    I think anyone who dreams of an internet populated with contradictory name tables needs to come down to earth. It sounds like a disaster to me. Whenever you told someone a URL, you'd have to explain which DNS table supported it. Let's get real. Most people don't know or care about the issue, and whatever their ISP provides is what they'll use.

    Well, one problem discussed here is that ICANN apparently is trying to exert control over ccTLDs as well.
    But the point of the article is that the cc's have called ICANN's bluff, and ICANN has no power to overrule them if they choose the "nuclear" option.

    You don't need centralized control over gTLDs to avoid clashes,
    Mmm...I'll bite...then how do you avoid clashes?

    I'm grateful to ICANN for the way it's used its centralized control so far to keep censorship [slashdot.org] out of the TLD system.

    --

  • Although a global namespace served the Internet well throughout its early days (before the perceived need for ICANN), the demand for names has now far exceeded the supply. I don't see any fair way to resolve conflicts without resorting to multiple namespaces. Why not completely switch to local namespaces?

    How much do we rely on DNS? I use it to type web addresses fairly often, but 99% of the time it would be nearly as easy to use search engines, follow links from a familiar site, or use a bookmark. I also use DNS for a variety of other services which are configured through files (in which I could just as easily us IP addresses). The trickiest transition (as far as my own usage of DNS) would be email.

    We already have a global numeric namespace (IP addresses) which has only a small number of conflicts. Those addresses can even be memorized (at least until we start seeing more of IPv6). They can continue to be used as universal locators while the mapping of names to addresses can become a local task, just like creating and renaming bookmarks in your favorite browser.

    In order for this to actually work, entities will need to be able to share namespaces with each other. We already do this in many ways, e.g. Yahoo shares its hierarchical namespace through a simple web interface.

    Has anyone done any research into the feasibility of large scale global namespaces with unique identifiers? I think there is a limit to how large they can be and what boundaries they can cross, but I haven't read anything significant on the subject.
  • I knew Saturday morning cartoons would pay off eventually!

    "That's taxation without representation, and it's NOT FAIR!"
    (originally with reference to the Boston Tea party)

    so....we should package up all of the domain names, sneak up when ICANN is not looking, and dump them in the.....nevermind

    (apologies to non-US readers)

  • Re:ICANN matters so long as people tolerate it. (Score:3)

    by cmilkosky ( 145648 ) on Monday November 27, 2000 @08:17AM (#599152) Homepage
    Quick correction there:

    ICANN had a contract to run the top-level servers that everyone was using.

    This is a common misconception. The root servers of the Internet aren't run by ICANN. They are run by supporting organizations around the world. This link [wia.org] shows where they are and who runs them. I believe the information is still accurate.

    Some quick history about root servers and ICANN. The main root server - the "A root" or a.root-servers.net, is under the control of Network Solutions (now a part of Verisign). This server is where new TLDs are added. If you check your root.db or named.ca - the A root server is listed first. Other root servers get their info from that one.

    So, ICANN, formed in October of 1998, was given the responsibility of managing DNS TLDs after the government decided that it should be in the hands of a private organization. Here is the scope of ICANN's control (in my words):

    They manage the creation of new TLDs

    They can say who is the registry to handle a TLD

    They settle disputes over domain names

    That's it. They can't touch alternate root structures.

    All that needs to be done is for people to make a mass migration over to an alternate DNS structure. If you get enough people to be interested, ICANN will lose its clout, and pretty much fizzle away.

    As I mentioned earlier, alternate DNS structures are a start, but you need more than an alternate root structure - you need compatibility with the legacy DNS structure as well - email is a perfect example. How will email servers talk to each other if one person is using an alternate DNS structure and another isn't? This place [opendnstech.com] has something different that just might pull that transition off though.

    Chris

    Open DNS Technologies [opendnstech.com]

  • Hi, I think we just need a new root registry, with the spirit of the open source community. thanks ... Collin
  • This was proposed a while back: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/reagle/ICANN-p roposal-19990120.html Guidelines for Proposed ICANN Policies and Activities

    The ICANN Board will look to the following guidelines in the consideration of its own conduct and proposed policies and actions arising from supporting organizations. Accordingly, the Board expects that the supporting organizations will include consideration of these guidelines as part of their policy development and evaluation processes. These guidelines are not intended to be rigid. Rather, they seek to establish a culture of institutional openness and accountability, and promote policies that are intrinsically limited in their scope, but rigorous and uniform in their application.

    1. Policies should be adopted on the basis of technical merit; policies should not discriminate on the basis of expressive content.
    2. With respect to proposed policies, consensus positions and recommendations should be accompanied by minority opinions and dissenting views, if any. The consensus position or recommendation should address and respond to minority concerns.
    3. Activities and policies should be rigorous in defining and enforcing the scope of their activity. Where appropriate, sunset clauses, expiration dates, and expectations regarding the revisiting of a policy or activity should expressly stated.
    4. Criteria of success should be expressly stated and used a basis for criticism and improvement.
    5. Proposed policies must be shown to be in the best interests of the Internet community and should demonstrate strong evidence that such policies can be implemented. Where appropriate, the Board encourages the testing of proposed policies on a smaller scale. The implementation and operational use of a technical policy demonstrates an interest and ability to deploy the policy at large.
    6. Policies must be applied in a consistent, well founded, and uniform manner. Policies should be designed so as to minimize the risk of selective enforcement or abuse.
    7. The Board encourages policy development processes characterized by openness, transparency, decentralization, bottom-up coordination and constructive competition among small groups and communities.
  • Atheism is also a religion. Atheists don't have proof that there isn't a god or gods - they have faith that there isn't. If you have some conclusive proof either way in this question, you'd certainly do well to reveal it.

    And at any rate, w/o a Constitution at all, it would be far easier for, say, Catholics to ban all other religions. Jefferson, who had a fair bit of involvement with the matter of religious freedom actually hated pretty much all organized religions; his solution was to keep any of them from acquiring power over the others, and it's worked pretty well so far.

  • ... it's called the OpenNIC [unrated.net].

    -robin

  • OpenNIC (Score:2)

    by lem ( 112608 )

    As one of the folks quoted in the Reg article, I'm kinda surprised that the DNS project I'm working with hasn't be referenced here yet. Well, I'll take care of that ... ;-)

    The OpenNIC [unrated.net]

    The OpenNIC is working on and promoting a system much like what's being discussed here. We want a global DNS root in which any person or group which can technicaly build and support a root is a welcome and equal participant and in which new TLDs are created simply by vote of the users.

    Within OpenNIC, we operate several TLDs (.oss and .null, presumably, would be of the most interest to this crowd).

    Cheers,
    -robin

  • No one has yet shown me why we even need a central "government" to control domains. The domain naming system is nothing more than a commonly implemented, highly distributed, and rather arcane, search engine. And it's not even a very slick search engine.

    If we are going to form a representative body to manage it for us, then we have to decide who the "us/we" part is. Are "we" the ones who register names or are "we" the ones who are going to be looking up names. I think it should be the latter, if anything. We are, of course, the ones who decide what goes into our own DNS data files, or DNS lookup list. We decide how we shall see the world.

    As I have mentioned before, it is possible for the whole domain naming system to be run with every server having its own root zone. Will that result in confusion? Probably, but mostly only for corporate suits who were (and probably still are) all confused by all this internet stuff, anyway.

  • Mmm...I'll bite...then how do you avoid clashes?

    It would work itself out: users have no interest in using name servers that don't let them resolve links, and information providers have no interest in registering with servers that aren't widely used.

    I think anyone who dreams of an internet populated with contradictory name tables needs to come down to earth. It sounds like a disaster to me. Whenever you told someone a URL, you'd have to explain which DNS table supported it. Let's get real. Most people don't know or care about the issue, and whatever their ISP provides is what they'll use.

    Because it's a disaster, it's not a stable state: for any TLD, only one would survive in pretty short order. It's the ISPs that basically make the choice for most people, although you'll probably also start seeing buttons on web pages "click here to add .SNAFU to your universe". Maybe ISPs would even create some form of coordinating body, but with a structure different from ICANN.

    Think of it more as a marketplace: rather than having ICANN making some ex cathedra decision about what TLDs are worthy, lots of people would just create TLDs and ISPs and end users would coordinate and pick and choose. Or think of it as the equivalent of the "alt.*" newsgroups.

    I'm not sure whether it's really more of a technical issue or whether it's just that the PRC can do this because they have the power to force the vast majority of Chinese speakers to use whatever name server they choose.

    Well, it's pretty obviously the latter, since formally, the only domain China has any say in is ".cn".

    What is kind of interesting, of course, is how China plans on coordinating with the other countries using Chinese characters; I doubt, for example, that the Japanese are willing to let the Chinese determine all uses of Chinese characters (many of them identical to Japanses Kanji) in the ".com" TLD.

    What is clear is that there is no reason for those countries to give VeriSign hundreds of millions of dollars for having been granted a US government monopoly at some point in the past.

  • Duh? (Score:1)

    by MadAhab ( 40080 )
    So much for the view that Americans are the only ignorant people.

    Actually, the rights of atheists are quite well protected. With the notable exception of "In god we trust" on our currency, and the tendency to take oaths on bibles, religious expression in the context of the state is a big no-no in America. Though it pisses off a number of ignorant rednecks, the courts have consistently found that our laws do not permit promotion of religion via public property.

    I'll ignore for a moment that atheism is based on beliefs without proof, and therefore qualifies as a religion, and that the guarantees of religious freedom are not in the Consitution, but in the Bill of Rights.

    Boss of nothin. Big deal.
    Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.

  • > It all boils down to ICANN asking most of the ccTLDs to pay a third of it's operating costs without allowing them representation in ICANN itself. Now that doesn't sound very fair, does it?

    Yeah, taxation without equal representation. You'd think people would have learned their lesson about trying to pull that, what with the British getting their asses handed to them on a plate in the late 1700s over the exact same issue... ;-)


    --

  • Not to seem loutish, but of course it's an American-centric viewpoint. We did, after all, sort of invent and propagate this ``Internet'' thing and still have the highest number of 'net users globally. I'd equally expect to here Brit-centric viewpoints in a debate about scones, tea, or cricket.

    ;-) (yes, I'm just being silly.)


    --

  • I too, am rather a UNIX newbie, and not remarkably knowledgable. However, I feel that a lot of the concepts in organization on computers we use need re-thinking. Check out our e-group [egroups.com], and maybe we'll get something done. ;)

    Joshua

    Terradot [terradot.org]

  • It just gets too difficult to decide where something should go. Or where people would expect to find it.

    Does "Bank Of America" go into Bank or Financial Services, or Mortgage, or idiots with high fees - or all three and pay thrice the fee...perhaps the people who say http://www.bankofamerica are correct. No com, no net, no org. Who knows.

    Ahh...for the early nineties when the internet was simple and you could still find cool stuff on ftp sites!

  • Re:Duh? (Score:1)

    by cmg ( 31795 )
    > 4. A cause, a principle, or an activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion

    Well, if atheism is what you pursue with devotion, that seems to qualify as a religion.
  • Right; likewise, people can be religiously devoted to Linux. However, there's nothing inherent in atheism that demands this kind of devotion, any more than there is in Linux. Read the next-to-last line in the parent to your post [slashdot.org], then try again.
  • What is clear is that there is no reason for those countries to give VeriSign hundreds of millions of dollars for having been granted a US government monopoly at some point in the past.
    Here's where we agree completely!

    [...]how do you avoid clashes?
    It would work itself out: users have no interest in using name servers that don't let them resolve links, and information providers have no interest in registering with servers that aren't widely used.
    It sounds like where we part ways is in your assumption that after it worked itself out, we'd still have an internet with strong institutional respect for free speech. It could easily work itself out so that corporations, religious fundamentalists, and repressive governments grab themselves a big censorship role. It could work itself out so that real free spech was available only to Unix sysadmins with the time and motivation needed to create their own alternative DNS tables. Libertarianism is groovy, baby, but tell that to the PRC.

    ICANN is more democratic than the governments under which most of the world's population lives (which isn't saying much for democracy in the world today). That seems like a good reason not to give control over gTLDs to anyone but ICANN.

    --

  • unfortunately, your argument does not hold, for one cannot prove a negative. this would be like saying, "you have no proof ghosts don't exist". atheists hold that there is no god, for they see no proof for his existence. the person making the affirmation bears the burden of proof, and all religions affirm that god exists, so they must prove this.

    however, you are correct in saying our constitution has worked pretty well so far. unfortunately, little things like "in god we trust" and "one nation under god" grate on the nerves of atheists in a government that supposedly protects all piritual beliefs, including the right not to believe in any gods.

  • Taxation without representation. Wasn't that the major cause of the American Revolutionary War?
  • You guys aren't addressing the biggest concern of the people who are against ICANN: they (rightly) fear the centralization of authority because it leads to inevitable abuse by those with economic and political power. ICANN is a problem for me because it limits domains to "official" ones that its member registrars sell. Pressure from registrars with commercial interest leads ISPs to use only "official" root servers, and it's a bandwagon effect; if ICANN servers are used initially, the chance that a new ISP uses ICANN increases. So basically the internet names will end up with either 99% using ICANN and 1% using others, or everyone using others. Unfortunately, over 99% of ISPs currently use ICANN, so it's already set.

    You guys are missing the fact that you are the ones with the knowledge necessary to implement your own authority. All it takes is organization, which is something h4x0rs are notoriously bad at. You have to be a businessman to be able to organize something this big. Unfortunately, Joe Internetuser doesn't give a fuck, so the public is of no help.

    There has to be a large influential group of h4x0rs who announce to the mass media that the ICANN system is flawed and also that there is a new, superior system which encompasses all ICANN TLDs while adding thousands more. The media also doesn't give a fuck unless the general public cares. The only way this can get news coverage is with the endorsement of a large company like IBM. Unfortunately, the people who know how the internet works are all working for some dumbass manager who only sees $$$, so they aren't of any help. I'll be establishing my own TLD pretty soon, so it's obvious which side I'm on. Central authority sucks and it defeats the purpose of the internet. That is something ordinary people won't ever realize because all of their knowledge comes through the filter known as entertainment.

    I'll support any effort to maintain electronic freedom if anyone else wants to put in the time. A tech users group of 100,000 users might do the trick.
  • I must say that I have to disagree with you on this. For anyone to keep track of all of those servers to keep them in their resolve.conf file would be quite the nightmare. Given that few people would resort to this means that none of the tlds will go much farther than a small select group of people. I would have to say that if the expanse of the tld you create is your group of friends you might as well be handing out your ip because that would be the only way most people could find you. Also none of the domains would have many more than a few sub-domains for 2 reasons.

    First is that these amature severs would likely be bandwidth limited enough that if many domains were hosted the pipeline to the server would buckle under the load and then all those sites would be effectively unreachable.

    Second, who would provide free use of their servers to host a sub-domain? Probably not anyone that would tolerate heavy use of the bandwidth to provide this service. Well then you could charge people for the use of your domain and server, but who would pay. A common domain really isn't that much money and anyone with a net connection can find them. To get to the alternet domain the subscriber needs to tell people not only the domain, but also how to connect to your server to use the domain. I doubt many people would pay for that pain.

    Also you mention mirroring through yahoo.com, but how would yahoo find them. I suppose that yahoo could provide a form to submitt the ips of the servers you want to add to the service and then send a spider to cache all the pages hanging off that server, but would this really remove controll from ICANN? ICANN is still guiding the users to yahoo.com and the users never acctually use the pirate domain system as the sites would only appear as pages below yahoo.com. I somehow doubt that this would be the way to challenge ICANN. If someone where to launch a priate domain system then there would have to be a well organized plan and group behind it which would be able to supplant ICANN before ICANN would be messing their pants.

  • I'm very nearly at the point where I will start to buy into the rogue DNS thing. It is dangerous, because you could end up with chaos. But ICANN is trying very hard to be worse. They're both incompetent and autocratic.

    The whole 'ICANN is short of money' thing is getting way too old. Most of ICANN's money is going into a single expensive lawfirm, which has a cozy relationship with the Board of Directors. The rest is being squandered on staff salaries. ICANN could tighten its belt if it wanted to; but it still isn't willing. They'd rather just tax countries which had and have nothing to do with them.

  • Don't worry about the marketing pitch. The SuperRoot Consortium used this wording to avoid the "alternative root" label. The goal is to get the new TLDs into the ICANN root. If that fails, then there still is another, better root zone out there with all the TLDs already in - which you can use today - RIGHT NOW. :-)

    One of the new ICANN board members uses this root, and even has his own TLD in it (look for .EWE).

    Download the zone files [superroot.net]

    FYI: There are no conflicts between the ORSC root zone and the SuperRoot Consortium root zone- they've been sync'd for the last year or so.

    --
    DNS Root [dns-root.org]
  • We kicked your ass once, please don't make us do it again.

    No you didn't. And not only did you not kick anyone's ass, you weren't even there at the time!
    And not only where you not there, you weren't even close to being there!
    And not only were you not even close, you didn't even exist!
    That beats even Al Gore's exagerations...

    :-)

    (I thought I should put that smiley in bold, as some people have no sense of humor/humour regarding such matters :)

  • When the people you elected to administer a common shared resource start preventing you to use that resource and fueling corporations and lobbies lawsuits against normal people, then it's high time for the normal people to say

    NO Fucking NO bordel

    The domain names are basically entries inside databases, nothing more. It's a fucking Common resource. If people tell you that a name is their property, it's time to give them the finger.
  • representing the 5.5 Billion users worldwide outside the USA. The words 'Tea', 'Boston' and 'No taxasion without representation' paint a picture of almost total hipocracy coming out of a US Government Institution. 'Third World' and for that matter 'First World' countries are asking themselves IF ICANN had a constitution could they be relied upon to have a voting system that was not only workable but also democratic. The fact that as currently constituted ICANN is a self-appointed dictatorship which the vast majority of informed net users outside the US find utterly distateful particularly as many of them are often lectured by the US on matters of democracy. That said, it comes as no supprise that ICANN is totally flawed because it was set up by a system of partisan interest which cannot organise itseld better than the worlds largest democracy (India) yet with less than one third of the population. Unless ICANN gets it's act together and very quickly the Declaration of Net indepandance will have the name of a NewZealand lawer at the top of the list and not John Hancock and DNS will exist no more.
  • Okay some of the comments are quite interesting, but most of them sound like the good old "I'm not sure what we rebel against, but it's good to oppose the establishment anyway".

    I've been writing mails to ICANN's chairwoman for quite a while - and get replies to each of them, how's that for caring about the 'consumer'?
    So, before yelling that your voice is not heard at each other, start yelling in ICANN's direction, so that they can hear you.

    When I first contacted her, at was a matter of introducing a group I am a founding member of. We are concerned about what BigBadCorp and IgnorantImbecileGov were doing to 'Our' Internet.
    We are in the process of formalizing our own articles and come forward with demands.

    Instead of ignoring the announcement, she actually got back to methin a few hours, giving her opinion, voicing concerns and explaining a few things that they did and why.

    Next, she actually started to make suggestions and raise issues in regards to our budding association that we hadn't really considered, while asking for our input in regards to the future of ICANN. If that is not listening to 'the people', what is?

    Our initial plans were based on a democratic system in which owners of domain names have one vote to the 'commercial house', while everyone with an e-mail account that cares to identify him/herself get a vote in the 'public house'.
    As counter-balance we suggested an appointed body that would consist of the companies that provide the backbone, with ISPs and HSPs as well as infrastructure providers being represented [Rep house].
    The idea was that the Rep House and the public house had even power to introduce new net-laws, while the commercial house would supervise their implementation. Freedom and democracy, live and let live.

    But then she pointed out just exactly what types of vested interests, lobbying groups etc, she has to deal with at ICANN, everyday and no matter how noble and honest our cause was, it was a matter of time until our association would either bring the net down due to anarchy and system break-downs or the association itself would fail to it's job because of [self-]interest groups, etc which tend to surface in any type of association.

    So, we are back to the drawing board, trying to figure out what amounts pretty much to the ideal form of government for the Internet. A government that is not subject to any national laws or restrictions and that has only three tasks - keep the internet functioning and expanding; make the Internet secure for everyone ; keep any third party that wants to influence a free net out of the game;

    However, for anything like this to happen, we need to act fast, before national legislation in various countries is passed and outlaws our attempts. So, if you guys are serious, get busy, don't just yell around.

    In regards to ccTLDs having to pay tribute to ICANN, well I think it's a good idea. Not because it increases the power ICANN has, but because it decreases the possibility over major fuck-ups on nation levels - [self-]interest groups are such a pain. Apart from that, it ensures the smooth jumping from dot au to dot com to dot whatever-ccTLD, as everyone has to adhere by the same standards. Trust me on this one, I've travelled far more than most people on the planet and can tell you that if this sytem wasn't enforced, countries like Iran, Myanmar, Lybia, to name just three, would immediately come up with their own system and not give a darn, if it was compatible with the greater net or not.

    As so often in heated /. discussions - why don't you try to step back, compare data against two or three possible scenarios, before hitting [Reply] and yelling 'fraud', 'conspiracy', etc.?

    Most of us have to trouble shoot various sytems every now and then. Do we turn around and say, doesn't work, buy a new one - or do we try to find a way to make an existing system work, maybe slightly modify it over time, rather than buying new ones each time?

    If the world was to follow your advise, then it would get very expensive as we'd need to change systems and overhaul constitutions twice a day [three times on fridays].

    The world is lucky that we keep yelling. Just imagine, we would sit back, think, devise solutions to problems and then make a combined effort to implement them... Has it ever appearred to you people just exactly what immense power we have as a group?

    this is exactly while politicians and organizations tend to listen if we start making arguments, rather than just bitch and whine. I have not met any high ranking public servant that wouldn't take a suggestion from techies serious enough to warrant it a personal reply. After all, they never know what we will do if they don't...

    So use that brain power and your abilities trying to find solutions - then post them for discussion. Once we have something that appears workable, we can suggest it to the relevant people. And if that doesn't work and we are all really unhappy, well, then - you know... ;-))).

    But if we don't try, then we have only ourselves to blame. If we buy into the conspiracy theory and think that they are out to get us, well, then we can always come up with our own conspiracy.

    And if we are more reasonable and don't believ in conspiracies as such, then one could almost say it is very much our 'civic duty' in a democracy to indicate flaws in the system and tooffer possible solutions.

    Remember, indicationg flaws in others, but no solutions, that job is already taken. It's called 'Politician'.

  • We need to process domain name registrations and to apply an eventual priority to this.
    This should be managed by a program, not by an office : an office means staff and also costs.
    Hence the title of this reply.
    You have to ask them to allow you to use a given name, why ?
    What if by hashing your domain name string a program would just be quick enough to tell you "Ye're the first, buddy, this name's yours.".
    If instead of this you need some useless, redundant organisation that will prefer spending time and money to define a .museum TLD instead of .sex (like it or not, this would be the best way to limit e-pornography), then we definitely shouldn't discuss.
    Icann wrote they are here to govern the Internet (their word, not mine).
    So, I'll advise decent Internet people to just choose freenet as their Mayflower before it is too late.
    --
  • Information wants to be free, and much content actively *defies* categorisation, since "to define is to limit" (as the Buddhists say). That's your problem when trying to impose a top-down categorisation system. The answer, IMHO is to look at the problem on a more granular level: self-categorisation through probability, for example (e.g. like Autonomy do). G
  • I think that INTERNIC determines these but I'm not sure. I know the DNS server looks up www.yahoo.com and sends you to the correct IP address but who and how they get assigned that address I don't understand. It's like the question, where does bandwidth come from?
    --Nick D.
    inick@netacs.net
    http://www.inick.net
    http://www.lavoixceline.com
  • You say "WIPO can handle the problems with trademarks"

    You obviously have not been paying attention to what has been happening.

    Goto WIPO.org.uk [wipo.org.uk] to find out.
  • America is a free country Ð at least thatÕs what they told me when I was little. So why do we need an organization like ICANN to approve what names will become available for TLD usage? Someone should rethink this whole idea and come up with a different organization whose sole purpose would be to process applications (for a REASONABLE fee) and approve them on first come - first serve basis. Who are they to decide who gets what? Are they descendents of witch hunters, who just managed to keep high positions in the family? Every era seems to bring some other kind of control freaks, who are given the power to make decisions. LetÕs analyze the abbreviation ICANN. Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers. For ASSIGNING Names and Numbers. So why donÕt they start ASSIGNING? Or should I say why donÕt they start doing their jobs? Name.Space [namespace.org], from New York City, is a company whose ideas I have been supporting from the end of 1998, when I found out about their main area of interest. Name.Space has been trying to introduce new TLDÕs ranging from "dot art" to "dot zone". They have a long list of satisfied clients (I am one of them) who use those TLDÕs. We the clients have been patiently waiting for those TLDÕs to be approved by BPPÕs (Big People in Power), so that we can do with them whatever it is we plan to do. Enlighten me if I missed something Ð but Ð does someone own the Internet? Or is it free for everybody to use for whatever purposes they wish to? (Providing that they donÕt commit crimes). Name.Space [namespace.org] has been serving the needs of us clients, who wish to have domains under "dot art" etc, for a number of years. We are repeat customers, who believe that the inevitable future of the Internet lies in an unlimited number of TLDÕs in all languages, scripts or numbers of the world. I personally disapprove the control any organization or individual claims to have over the Internet, which is not supposed to be owned by anyone. If you own something, only then should you be allowed to be in control of it. If this is not the case than you can become a user like everybody else on the Internet. The Internet is very much in its infancy. LetÕs not make it another communist regime or dictatorship Ð letÕs make it the free network for people to use. LetÕs join forces with Name.Space [namespace.org] and similar organizations and individuals with similar ideas and free up the Internet for all. Cheers, Igor
  • Libertarianism is groovy, baby, but tell that to the PRC. ICANN is more democratic than the governments under which most of the world's population lives (which isn't saying much for democracy in the world today).

    The problem isn't with whether ICANN is democratic, it's with centralization of the domain name system. As long as software is written assuming that there are central authorities who run everything in a benign and democratic fashion, countries like the PRC have easy, central targets for censorship: they know what they have to block. (And, no, I'm not a libertarian and I don't think this is a libertarian issue.)

    It could work itself out so that real free spech was available only to Unix sysadmins with the time and motivation needed to create their own alternative DNS tables.

    Unlikely. If it was widely accepted that end users mess around with name resolution, the process would become much simpler and would enjoy pervasive support in operating systems. That would make it harder, not easier, for countries like the PRC to censor because they don't have easily identifyable targets anymore, and they probably can't change everybody's operating system either.

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