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The DE-NIC finallly spoke out. If you don't speak german, the statement doesn't contain anything that wasn't already well known: Yes, there was an problem starting at about 13:00 and it was fixed around 15:45.

Once upon a time, the DE-NIC was very respected in the german internet community. But several things happened lately, that let the trust erode. There were internal power struggles, the rising influence of domain traders inside the DE-NIC and the surprising distribution of the two-letter-domain-rush (25% of all domains ending in the hands of a single person). Perhaps this outage will be a wakeup call. If we only count the time spent on customers calling the hotline, the damage for my company is several thousand dollars.

CU, Martin

Here is the response I found on the denic.de site : http://www.denic.de/typo3temp/pics/i_64bbbffdb3.jpg

Ralf Weber dns at fl1ger.de
Fri Jun 19 10:21:04 UTC 2009

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Moin!

On 19.06.2009, at 11:27, Stefan Schmidt wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 03:12:10AM +0000, bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com
> wrote:
>>> http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/06/16/1657255/A-Black-Day-For-Internet-Freedom-In-Germany
>>> ______________________
>>
>> doubtful that it will be illegal - just ineffective.
>> DE may become a haven for questionable DNS use, esp
>> with this offical sanction to hijack.
There are other countries doing this already. In Europe at least:
- Sweden
- Denmark
- Belgium
- Switzerland
- Italy
so while I signed the petition I still will have to do this :-(.

> This is exactly the question i will ask at the "DNSSEC Testbed for
> Germany"
> event 2nd of July in Frankfurt am Main.
> -> http://www.denic.de/en/domains/dnssec/dnssectestbed.html
Well technical I can answer this now, the way DNS is deployed currently
(Clients ask ISP resolver and don't validate) DNSSEC and this
blocking is compatible. But I think it really is a political debate
rather then a technical one. DNS blocking can be a good thing
(Conficker anyone), the problem with this law is that there is no
control of the list, and that there is a IMHO justified fear that
this technique will be used for other blockings (gambling, music).

So long
-Ralf
---
Ralf Weber (Internet Citizen)
e: dns at fl1ger.de

------------------------
that's a pretty strange statement coming from one of the fathers of F***-the-DNS

Perhaps they would, but that still doesn't explain why any old resident of France, Russia, Iraq, Jamaica, Papa New Guinea or Mongolia would need to get a .uk. Without huge amounts of paper work then there's never going to be any way that you can stop all registrations that aren't applicable under a rule set, but you can certainly reduce it by making it more effort to dissuade the lazier registrants.

Also, there may be 5m 'ex-pats', but how many of them want to own .uk domains? and how many are more elderly people who have no interest in technology retired abroad for the sun (mainly Spain)? and how many of those who do want .uk domains don't have a family member who they can use as the registrant contact if they were to check .uk domains were British residents?

As I said, Canada manages it somehow so it must be possible.

It also seems fairer to have 60 million potential registrants have access to the domains they want for their own country TLD with the side effect that 5 million potential registrants (a number less than 10% of the residential population) have to have family in the country or similar to register a .uk compared to having 60 million potential registrants possibly not able to get the domain of their choice in the TLD of the country of their residence because one of the approx 6,613,900,000 other potential registrants in the world (who are 11,000% of the number of residents) got to it first.

(Yes, I know the numbers also include children and babies, but it is easier to estimate off pure populations).

Other countries with residency requirements (some I thought of and quickly checked and skimmed): .us, .ca, .fr and I'm sure there's more (IIRC .dk might have requirements, but I've spent enough time hunting around various sites). .de allows non-residents to register, but you have to have a real German administrative contact address for them to server documents to. Those were the only ones I checked and all have residency checks or limitations of some degree.

Halfway through the initial registration, the .eu domain became the third largest, behind .com and .uk.
.uk (with 4 million domain names)was only the fourth largest even before .eu started. Number one is .com, number two is .de (with about 10 million domain names). I think .eu hasn't passed .de yet.

This refers to domains _within_ the .eu domain.
Germany overtook the GB in registrations for .eu domains. GB is still second for .eu I think. .de has been bigger than .uk for quite some time I think. And .uk is only fourth biggest. .net is third.

http://www.denic.de/media/images/monatszahlen/TLD- Vergleich.gif

I wouldn't bet that the .eu domain will become second biggest. Domain squatting will become less and less important with the increasing number of TLDs, and the rush on personal domains is also kind of slowed down. People would register "firstname-lastname.de", but probably not firstname-lastname.eu, but try nickname-lastname.de first.

Current number of .de domains can be found here.

I also remember .de being the second largest name space.

Perhaps that's because current competitors and bidders like, say, DeNIC and others are not really desirable from a technical, legal and political point of view?

Verisign is certainly not a good custodian for .net and .com (due to that Sitefinder debacle), but are other registry operators, at least the ones who are currently seeking to take the job, any better?

There is an "unofficial" translation of their domain guidelines here. The first entry containing the phrase "without any profit motivation".

"In Deutschland ist es die DENIC, die diese Aufgabe als "designated administrator" im Sinne des RFC1591 übernommen hat. Sie erfüllt sie ohne Gewinnerzielungsabsicht zum Nutzen und Wohle der gesamten deutschen Internet Community, neutral und unabhängig, fachkundig und verantwortungsbewusst, diskriminierungsfrei und in Übereinstimmung mit den international anerkannten Standards für den Betrieb einer Domain-Registrierungsstelle."

This roughly translates to

"In germany, DeNic took this duty as 'designated administrator' according to RFC1591. It achieves its duty without any aim for financial profits, but for the benefit of the hole internet community, neutrally and independently, competently and responsibly, withouth discrimination and in accordance to international standards for domain registration services."

...what is VeriSign trying to pull now.

Another key trend identified by the study was the further establishment of the .net domain's role in the health and functioning of the Internet overall. While the domain accounts for only eight percent of domain names worldwide, it includes 58 percent of hosts and 30 percent of name servers.

The DENIC (the registry...

Uhm... *blush*... the link should obviously point to www.denic.de and not to www.denice.de :-)

Well, the second biggest TLD in numbers of registered domains is the .de domain for some time now (I don't know for how long... one year, two years ?). And both .uk and .nl aren't small fish either.

The DENIC (the registry for the german .de TLD) has an interesting graph showing the number of domains in the ten biggest TLDs (in english).