Slashdot Mirror

BillGatesLoveChild writes "CNET reports VeriSign has made its move, increasing domain name prices by 7%. From October 15 2007, .com domains will now cost $6.42 (up from $6) and .net domains $3.85 per annum. ICANN had previously voted to support the increase. Despite annual income of $323.4M from .com domain names alone, VeriSign claims it needs the increase to provide "a high level of security and reliability for .com." This increase comes in the face of complaints by customers, registrars and senators alike that VeriSign is abusing its ICANN monopoly. Yet the furrowed brows and promises of senators of investigations have come to nothing, even though the only people seemingly in favor of the monopoly are ICANN and VeriSign. With complaints about the pair running back to 2002, what can we the public do to get our elected representatives to take the great domain name ripoff seriously?"

Sushant Bhatia writes "Despite fierce criticism from Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, ICANN has decided to go ahead and create a new TLD (Top Level Domain) aimed at mobile phones and other mobile devices. Bizarrely the new domain will be '.mobi'. Considering that one of the chief banes of accessing the Internet from a mobile phone is the fact that keying in long Internet addresses takes time, the decision to use .mobi seem odd. A good place to keep up with the ongoings of ICANN is the ICANN Watch which reports that a TLD system has been launched in Turkey as the result of an alliance between the Turkish Informatics Association (TBD) and Unified Identity Technology (UNIDT)."

Sushant Bhatia writes "Despite fierce criticism from Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, ICANN has decided to go ahead and create a new TLD (Top Level Domain) aimed at mobile phones and other mobile devices. Bizarrely the new domain will be '.mobi'. Considering that one of the chief banes of accessing the Internet from a mobile phone is the fact that keying in long Internet addresses takes time, the decision to use .mobi seem odd. A good place to keep up with the ongoings of ICANN is the ICANN Watch which reports that a TLD system has been launched in Turkey as the result of an alliance between the Turkish Informatics Association (TBD) and Unified Identity Technology (UNIDT)."

Froomkin writes "ICANN this morning announced that it sent VeriSign an ultimatum: pull sitefinder by tomorrow evening or we'll sue. Details and links to discussion of the contractual and legal issues in ICANN Throws Down the Gauntlet to VeriSign on Sitefinder at ICANNWatch." Update: 10/03 19:29 GMT by M : Verisign blinked.

Froomkin writes "ICANN this morning announced that it sent VeriSign an ultimatum: pull sitefinder by tomorrow evening or we'll sue. Details and links to discussion of the contractual and legal issues in ICANN Throws Down the Gauntlet to VeriSign on Sitefinder at ICANNWatch." Update: 10/03 19:29 GMT by M : Verisign blinked.

dmehus writes "VeriSign's Naming and Directory Services division has written to ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey regarding the recent advisory concerning VeriSign's DNS wildcard redirection service. In the letter, VeriSign's Rusty Lewis says that they are open to independent and objective technical concerns expressed by various Internet bodies; they have formed their own "independent" panel of industry leading experts to produce its own, separate report; and they will not voluntarily suspend SiteFinder. It's a very terse response, and frankly, I'd have expected more from them. Slashdot readers are encouraged to visit ICANNWatch for in-depth, expert discussion on this and other issues."

Froomkin writes "ICANN's outgoing dissident Board member, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, has leaked the slate that ICANN's so-called NomCom (actually an appointments committee) has picked. The new public representatives are mostly a mix of incumbent ICANN Board directors who don't rock the boat, corporate executives, and ISOC members. Dissident Andy Mueller-Maguhn got replaced by a former member of the board of Deutsche Telekom. Dissident Karl Auerbach (who had to sue ICANN to get to see its documents) got replaced by the President of the U.S. Council for International Business. At least the Board Squatters are finally going to be history. Details at ICANNWatch." ICANN is an interesting study in how a ruling regime can usurp a democratic institution and turn it into an autarchy.

Froomkin writes "ICANN's outgoing dissident Board member, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, has leaked the slate that ICANN's so-called NomCom (actually an appointments committee) has picked. The new public representatives are mostly a mix of incumbent ICANN Board directors who don't rock the boat, corporate executives, and ISOC members. Dissident Andy Mueller-Maguhn got replaced by a former member of the board of Deutsche Telekom. Dissident Karl Auerbach (who had to sue ICANN to get to see its documents) got replaced by the President of the U.S. Council for International Business. At least the Board Squatters are finally going to be history. Details at ICANNWatch." ICANN is an interesting study in how a ruling regime can usurp a democratic institution and turn it into an autarchy.

Froomkin writes "ICANN's outgoing dissident Board member, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, has leaked the slate that ICANN's so-called NomCom (actually an appointments committee) has picked. The new public representatives are mostly a mix of incumbent ICANN Board directors who don't rock the boat, corporate executives, and ISOC members. Dissident Andy Mueller-Maguhn got replaced by a former member of the board of Deutsche Telekom. Dissident Karl Auerbach (who had to sue ICANN to get to see its documents) got replaced by the President of the U.S. Council for International Business. At least the Board Squatters are finally going to be history. Details at ICANNWatch." ICANN is an interesting study in how a ruling regime can usurp a democratic institution and turn it into an autarchy.

mattgick writes "The Register has a story on how verisign was granted the DNS lookup patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,560,634). Scripts which check to see if a domainname has been taken would be in violation with this patent. A discussion on this subject is going on over here."

Luminous Coward writes "I first saw this on The Register. Kevin Murphy of Computerwire reports: The US Department of Commerce last week quietly published a document detailing its decision to "sole-source" the contract for the so-called IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) function to ICANN, as opposed to opening the contract for competitive bidding. ICANNWatch explains why this is a bad idea. They also report that the ccTLDs and the Internet Multicasting Service have expressed interest in running IANA."

Luminous Coward writes "I first saw this on The Register. Kevin Murphy of Computerwire reports: The US Department of Commerce last week quietly published a document detailing its decision to "sole-source" the contract for the so-called IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) function to ICANN, as opposed to opening the contract for competitive bidding. ICANNWatch explains why this is a bad idea. They also report that the ccTLDs and the Internet Multicasting Service have expressed interest in running IANA."

Luminous Coward writes "I first saw this on The Register. Kevin Murphy of Computerwire reports: The US Department of Commerce last week quietly published a document detailing its decision to "sole-source" the contract for the so-called IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) function to ICANN, as opposed to opening the contract for competitive bidding. ICANNWatch explains why this is a bad idea. They also report that the ccTLDs and the Internet Multicasting Service have expressed interest in running IANA."

Some of your questions for Dr. Cerf (Vint to most people) were technical, and some were political. All discussions of Internet policy end up being a mix of the two, it seems, and Vint is heavily involved with both (although I'd have to say not only from his answers here but also from personal conversation he and I have had that his main interest is the technical side).

1) What do you think about Anonymnity?
by Planesdragon

Although there's a certain moral argument to an individual's right to privacy, there's also a statistical argument that people simply act irresponsibly when given anonymnity.

What's your take on anonymnity in the internet? Is a good thing? A bad thing? Just a thing not worth talking about?

Vint:

Anonymity is very much worth talking about. The right to privacy is sometimes manifested as a right to anonymity. Window shopping and cash transactions should not require one to reveal identity - and many people feel the same about surfing the net. In some cases, it might be argued that it is sufficient merely to protect 3rd party access to identity information but to require network users to reveal identity. In cases where whistle-blowing is at issue, or reporting of some kind of crime, anonymity may be important to protect. However, the same protection can also lead to potential abuse, as you suggest above. The ability to exploit anonymity, rather than to be legitimately protected by it, creates a genuine conundrum. So this is indeed worth talking about - I'd be interested in your further thoughts.

2) DRM?
by GreyWolf3000

What is your perspective on DRM? Specifically, do you think that the Fritz chip, Palladium, and lobbying of the MPAA/RIAA, will change the Internet fundamentally? Can the Internet be tamed at this point? If so, do you find this DRM and such to infringe upon fair use? Is there legitamacy to the common fear that in the future, computers themselves, in order to gain access to the Internet, will have so many restrictions that the Internet itself will begin to suffer from it?

Vint:

I am very concerned about legal policies that are either technically unenforceable or which would have the effect of crippling an entire genre of digital technology. Some of the DRM positions, such as those expressed in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that make it illegal to study and publish information about cryptographic methods that might be used to protect intellectual property, are unrealistic and fundamentally unsound. Your concerns strike me as well-founded. While I do believe that techniques for protecting intellectual property are desirable, I am troubled by arguments that essentially make it impossible to allow SOME information to be freely shared, if the parties producing it so desire. The Internet is a big tent and should be able to support many different models of operation ranging from highly protected information to completely open information.

3) Commercial Email's Early Days
by ekrout

As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982-1986, you led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet.

As most engineers know, we have to make some sacrifices with every project and get rid of certain features that we had hoped would be there but cannot due to monetary constraints, etc.

Could you explain some of the more difficult decisions you had to make as the head of this particular project? Moreover, was there ever a point in the project where no one thought the final product was viable?

Vint:

This project had its beginnings in late 1982. One of the most difficult decisions that Dave Crocker and I faced in the design of the underlying technology was the departure from linear addressing to allow for multiline "addresses" in MCI Mail. We had undertaken to allow people to send to email targets within the MCI Mail subscriber community, send to postal addresses, to non-MCI Mail destinations (e.g. CompuServe), to Telex destinations and (later) to FAX destinations. We departed from the classical linear addressing structure of Internet email and it took several months of debate before we concluded it was important to accommodate these multiline address structures.

We tried to get the contractors involved (HP, Digital Equipment Corporation, American Management Systems, etc) to use TCP/IP, but you can imagine that Internet and TCP/IP were completely unknown to these parties - as it had only been "rolled out" on a broad scale on the ARPANET on 1/1/1983! So we ended up having to use X.25 and a variety of proprietary protocols developed specifically for MCI Mail for lack of commercial support for TCP/IP.

Email was not well-known in the business sector when we were launching MCI Mail (Sept 27, 1983) and it was hard going to convince business people to use it. We linked MCI Mail to CompuServe as part of the roll-out of MCI Mail, seeking to make MCI Mail more useful by expanding its "connectivity". Generally, it would take from 1983 to 1992 before email became a widely appreciated service in the business world.

4) TCP/IP
by sdjunky

considering your work with TCP/IP protocols what would you change now that you can look back retrospectively to how it has been used/misused. What would you incorporate into designs now that weren't even thought of at the time that TCP/IP was created?

Vint:

I suppose I wish I had decided on a larger address space than 32 bits! (that decision was made in 1977 after a year of argument about it). Moreover, I now believe that it would have been wise for us to incorporate into the design principles the notion that every end unit ("thing with an IP address") has a way to "authenticate" itself to any other end unit. As it stands now, these end devices have to declare their own IP addresses and that leads to an architectural opportunity for deception and spoofing. In addition to that, I wish there had been some opportunity to develop end/end cryptographic methods such as IPSEC to increase the confidentiality of information passing through the net. Ironically, beginning in 1975 I began work on a secured version of Internet with the National Security Agency. Because the details of this design were classified, none of this design could be shared with the uncleared developers at universities and industry engaged in the unfolding design of the Internet.

5) Negatives of the 'Net
by Dirk Pitt

Of all the Internet has evolved to be, in what aspect of it are you the most disappointed?

Vint:

That's a difficult question. Spam, pornographic and hate web sites, the collision of domain names with trademarks, the desire of some authorities to engage in censorship are all examples of aspects of the Internet that I find disappointing. The countervailing examples of enormously valuable information sharing and applications on the Internet seem to me to more than make up for these shortcomings. Generally speaking, the more the Internet becomes infrastructure for all parts of our complex, global society, the more we are likely to see all aspects of that society reflected in the Internet - one has to be realistic about the diversity of the population of users of the net.

6) The most surprising thing?
by zero110

Of all of the surprising uses that people have invented for the Internet, which surprised you the most (good or bad)?

Vint:

I think what surprised me most was the avalanche of content that flowed into the Internet after the invention of the WWW by Tim Berners-Lee and the subsequent rapid deployment of Marc Andreessen's Mosaic implementation of the WWW followed by Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer and many other web implementations and applications. Of course, the incredible range of content on the net was equally surprising (or disappointing - see above). Internet radio, video and instant messaging were not surprises because the concepts had been around since the late 1960s and early 1970s but when millions of people have access to these facilities and use them, the ensemble takes on characteristics that are hard to predict based on smaller scale deployments of these capabilities of the past.

7) Internet Governance
by cleetus

The internet, in order to work even at the most basic technical level, needs some standards; some governance. What do you think is the proper scope of that governace/standard setting, who are the constituents, and what are the proper mechanisms for governing?

How do they differ from what we have to day? On the whole, are you optimistic or pessimistic about all this?

Vint:

It is plain that we need standards to assist in making billions of interacting systems compatible - and the voluntary standards developed in the IETF and many others developed by various bodies seem to have been effective means by which this interoperability has been effected. I would distinguish technical standards from the far more general term "governance". That term covers a multitude of issues well beyond technical interoperability. Your question is phrased in a way that leads me to wonder whether you are mixing technical standards development and the legal framework in which the Internet functions. If you meant only to focus on the governance of the standards process, I would submit that the open procedures of the Internet Engineering Task Force have served the community of Internet users and providers well for many years.

I continue to be optimistic that we will sustain and evolve workable mechanisms both for standards development and for the general governance of the Internet, largely in the belief that the system is too valuable not to get the support it needs to satisfy both needs.

by Evro

Did you ever respond to this message from John Gilmore, which asks why you sided against Karl Auerbach, who (to the best of my knowledge) sought to gain access to ICANN's financial documents? From what I can tell, ICANN's only motivation is to make ICANN more influential (i.e. for its directors to line their own pockets). Given that ICANN is technically a nonprofit organization, this doesn't seem very ethical. Anyhow, the email text is below:

Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 14:26:26 -0800
From: John Gilmore
Subject: Re: ICANN: Auerbach's Allegations Off Target
To: vcerf@mci.net, gnu@new.toad.com

> "Karl paints this as a dispute between him and ICANN management, but
> nothing could be further from the truth," noted Board chairman Vint Cerf.
> "ICANN management is merely carrying out its obligation to follow the
> wishes of the Board as a whole rather than follow the dictates of any
> single Director."

Hi, Vint.

I haven't wanted to disrupt our friendship, so I've held off a long time in telling you what I think about how you are leading ICANN. That's why this message is a little longer than it needs to be; I'm saying things that I've been bottling up for a while.

I don't want to be considered a friend of what you now stand for.

You are on the wrong side of this issue, as you have been on the wrong side of many issues regarding ICANN. If ICANN has secrets about who it is doing backdoor favors with, those *should* be made public. And you, as Chairman, as the most prominent and trusted board member, and as the architect of the openness that should still be in the Internet, should have been way ahead of Karl Auerbach in making them public.

Even if those secrets are never made public, or even if there are no terrible secrets inside ICANN, the activities of ICANN MUST be available to every person on the Board of Directors. Without restriction, without delay, without subversion. By law, and for good reasons.

You have been a rubber stamp for many corrupt ideas out of Network Solutions, Verisign and ICANN ever since your election. When I complained to you in the past, such as when the NSI contract was amended to give them a perpetual monopoly, you said that there was nothing else that you could do. I disagreed with that sentiment then, and I disagree with it now. You could have left the contract the way it was, rather than amend it. You don't even have to make things better to keep my respect; you could keep things from getting worse. But you continue to choose to make things worse. Now you are defending ICANN's lack of openness even with its own elected directors!

ICANN was created to promise openness, transparency, accountability, and competition. It has provided none of those, and actively works every month to reduce what little it has provided. You have worked with it to eliminate, rather than create, those promises.

Opening whatever squirming can of worms that is calling the shots at ICANN is what is needed. I can see that ICANN management is terrified that directors from outside the old-boy network might actually find out the details of what ICANN does day by day. They have eliminated any future threat of that, by eliminating outside directors after this term. And they are delaying the current directors' access to information, in the hope that they can permanently avoid outside scrutiny.

I've been a director of several California corporations. I've read that part of the law myself. I've invoked it in a couple of occasions. I contributed significant funding for Karl's lawsuit. Karl is right and you and the ICANN staff are wrong. And now I find you lying about it in a press release. "ICANN management is merely carrying out its obligation to follow the wishes of the Board as a whole..." ICANN *management* instigated those policies, the board didn't. The board has never even considered them.

Virtually everyone at EFF has been looking for ways that we could help to open ICANN and get it to do what it was chartered to do. I've had to hold them back for years, telling them that participation was a waste of our scarce time -- and that no matter how much time they put in, ICANN would have to get really bad before it would ever get better. I put two years of my own life into the domain-name issues, with CORE. It became clear that the strings were being pulled behind the scenes, because the right answers were relatively obvious, yet the wrong answers got approved, providing billions of dollars of benefit to certain parties with heavy ties to the US military. Rather than ICANN making open decisions and using transparent processes, whoever pulls those strings is still controlling what happens. But under ICANN, the process is even murkier and further hidden from public scrutiny. And you're helping.

All the way back at the start of ICANN, EFF and I proposed amendments that would provide a "Bill of Rights" and a "Sunshine Act" and a "Freedom of Information Act" in ICANN's Bylaws. These were all summarily rejected. ICANN does not give a damn about the fundamental rights of citizens or Internet users. It does not want to operate in. the sunshine. And it does not want information about what it's doing to be made available even to its own directors, let alone to the public. Give me one good reason why such an organization should get even a millisecond more of your support -- or anyone's.

The law gives directors an "absolute right" because directors exist to be INDEPENDENT OF and SUPERIOR TO the management. Each and every director has a separate duty to the company; each one carries it out in their own. way. The Board cannot prevent any board member from merely inquiring into the state of the company. The Board cannot condition any board member's inquiry on agreement to a set of arbitrary terms. Nor can the management. This is not only a good idea -- it's the law.

ICANN is going down, one way or another. Either it will go down like East Germany, with a peaceful transition to governance responsive to the public will, or it will go down like Japan, with big bombs dropped on it. ICANN has lost all semblance of credibility and merely seeks to entrench its unaccountable power.

I have absolutely no idea what you are doing leading that megalomaniac, unaccountable, unresponsive, anti-expression, anti-public-interest organization. Did they take your kids hostage? Did you sell your soul for a mess of pottage? What hold do they have over you?

I used to think much better of you than this, Vint. You can see that even now I'm grasping at straws rather than believe that YOU are one of the megalomaniacs. But the evidence continues to pile up, and I'm afraid it's true. I don't want to be the friend of such a person. I'll see you from the other side of the courtroom. Bye.

John

Vint:

I did not respond to John's letter.

If you think that the directors of ICANN or its staff have any opportunity to "line their pockets" you need to look more carefully at the facts. None of the directors are compensated for their work by ICANN - except for reimbursement for travel expenses and many of the directors pay their own travel costs (or their companies do).

In accordance with the court order arising from Karl's lawsuit, ICANN has released to Karl all the information he has requested, as far as I am aware. The basic dispute was NOT that the information should not be released to Karl but rather whether Karl had absolute discretion to decide what information could be released on the public. ICANN deals with proprietary information supplied by various domain name service providers, for example, and the dispute, as I understood it, revolved around how confidential information would be protected, once released to any director.

I do not agree with John's characterization of ICANN. There is an enormous amount of information that ICANN puts on its web site about all of its activities. Compared to most non-profits, ICANN is far more transparent and provides a remarkable degree of opportunity for inputs from all quarters. Even reasonable people can disagree about such things and in this, John and I plainly see things differently.

9) IPv6?
by Ransak

We've heard the hype and the 'plans' to move to IPv6 for years now, but the USA seems fairly complacent at IPv4. Do you see IPv6 becoming a reality in the near future (2 to 3 years), and from a high perspective, what do you think (besides the obvious running out of addresses) could spur the movement? Or should we not move at all, and depend on network address translation more?

Vint:

Generally I think the pressure will build only when there are a large number of IPv6 enabled devices entering into Internet space (Internet-enabled cell phones, PDAs, set-top boxes, other consumer devices, etc). People often speculate about "killer applications" for IPv6 but I generally believe that the simple availability of large amounts of address space and ease of configuration (plug and play) will be considered sufficiently significant advantages. The mixed IPv4/IPv6 environment will not be an easy one to manage - and Network Address Translation devices that today are used to "stretch" the use of IPv4 space may prove necessary to act as a bridge from an all-IPv4 world to an all (or mostly) IPv6 world. I think it will be 2-3 years before IPv6 has significant penetration but by 2005 I expect to see that happen. There has been substantial progress in implementing IPv6 in Japan and a notable "push" for it in Europe. The slogan "6 by 6" has emerged as a kind of challenge to get to significant deployment of IPv6 by 2006. In a few years, we will know whether this is realistic or not.

10) An internet of the people, or for the people?...
by tekrat

Back when the internet (as we now it) was being developed, it was a government military project.

Vint:

well, it was funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency but it was designed by graduate students at research Universities or research Institutions in the US, England, Norway, Germany and Italy.

However, after the internet revolution (of the early 90's) freed it from being Arpa-Net, we had a "golden age" where anyone could connect, and anyone with enough technical know-how could run a server and become a permanent part of the system.

well, actually, ARPANET was separated into ARPANET (bis) and MILNET around 1983 when Internet was first deployed. Commercial use came around 1989. ARPANET was retired in 1990 and NSFNET in 1995. It was open to virtually anyone with the advent of commercial access and service.

But now we see a day looming in the future where large media conglomerates control it all through draconian service agreements that dis-allow private individuals to run servers in their homes, as well as "linking lawsuits", and patents of obvious business methods, all resulting in an internet where the vast majority of the people can only passively view information rather than interactively take part in providing information.

There are a number of such issues associated with the commercial spread of the Internet - however I don't agree with your conclusion that the majority of people cannot contribute information. My impression is that many ISPs offer opportunities to put information on managed web sites. I think running servers at home is still largely not for the general public but that this will change as servers become more simple to operate and configure (plug and play). Moreover, Internet access providers will seek to offer symmetric, high capacity gigabit ethernet services because this is a most efficient way of servicing a wide range of customer needs.

Do you think it's a "good thing" for everyone to run servers (an internet of the people), or do you believe that it's better for the government and corporations to control the flow of information to citizens (an internet for the people).

I think we will see value in both - moreover, until there is ample, symmetric capacity, users will probably prefer that their server sites be operated by outsourcers and even when home servers seem natural, users may prefer to leave their operation to specialists.

While it seems an obvious choice, remember that the situation we have now, where the internet is the "wild west" and mailboxes are littered with spam, and internet rumours become accidental news stories, is a direct result of an internet "of the people".

So there are pros and cons either way. Basically the question boils down to "do you prefer the wild west" versus "do you prefer a controlled, moderated internet?"

I think if I had to choose, I would prefer the more open environment but I also appreciate the need for legal frameworks and shared practices that are predictable. No one really likes surprises from the Internet Service Providers, for example.

- Vint

The Uniform Dispute Resolution Procedure, an expedited process for allowing corporations to steal domain names, continues to be abused as arbitrators stretch the definitions of "cyber-squatting" to any length in order to find for the corporate complainants. Lunenburg writes "Unix.Org, a site that was apparently used for noncommercial discussion of Unix(tm) operating systems, has been ruled a "cybersquatter" by a WIPO panel and given to the X/Open group. In spite of not actually matching any cybersquatting criteria, a WIPO panelist felt that by providing links to commercial sites, Unix.ORG was acting in "bad faith" and thus should be given over to the Open group." And WEFUNK writes "Exploiting an obvious technical error to help build their case, Molson Inc. has been awarded the seemingly generic canadian.biz domain from the original owner who "registered this name because I am Canadian and want to develop a Canadian business directory" and is now appealing to the courts." John Gilmore has a bit of commentary.

Dr. Zowie writes "My ISP places an opaque (intended to be transparent) web proxy between me and the rest of the world. It is causing me problems due to misconfiguration or misdesign. My question is twofold. On the micro level, what can I do in the short term to work around the broken routing (in the long term, I switch ISPs if it's not fixed)? On the macro level, what can we as a community do to prevent breakage of the net on a global scale by poorly designed routing hacks?"

Dr. Zowie continues: "I use a regional ISP with otherwise-very-good policies. However, they seem to be intercepting anything that comes from my home net on port 80, so that they can ``transparently'' cache web requests based on the payload of those packets. The proxy seems to work rather well in most cases: I never noticed it until I started using OpenNIC. Then I found that some web pages that should have resolved OK through the OpenNIC system failed even though routing on different ports worked OK.

"I did some experimentation using ``telnet'' on port 80 directly, and found that packets are being routed based only on the payload regardless of the original destination address: I can (for example) retrieve the Slashdot front page by using ``telnet www.google.com 80'' and asking for "http://www.slashdot.org http/1.1". The tech support folks seem to be stonewalling me: the main contact tells me that the behavior is "not broken" even though it clearly violates RFC 1812, the standard set of rules for IP routing.

"The practice of ``transparent'' proxy routing seems to be growing more widespread. It appears to break the internet standard in a way that works for most folks for now, but that breaks port 80 usage in general. Looking ahead, this breakage seems like a growing nightmare waiting to happen. At the very least, I expect more instances of my particular problem to appear as folks give up on the corporate hegemony of ICANN. More insidiously, transparent proxy routers break the layered nature of the internet protocol and restrict the flexibility that made it work in the first place. One would hope that such proxies would at least act like routers when the fancier proxying fails, but at least my ISP's doesn't. What about your ISP's?"

Froomkin writes: "ICANN CEO Stuart Lynn today released a plan for a "strong" ICANN that would have 5 of 15 Board members selected directly by governments and the rest by registrars, registries, plus a few Board-squatter-like ringers chosen by the ICANN Board or staff. The main justifications offered for this shift are that in order to be "strong" ICANN needs more money, more support, and less "process". Of course, promises Lynn, ICANN's "core values of openness and broad participation" should be "preserved". (Don't laugh. It's not funny.) "Meaningful participation" will be achieved by cutting out any direct representation for end-users. Oh yes, ICANN wants a much bigger budget, and to be independent of the US Dept. of Commerce, and to get direct control of the root server operators too, all so as to ensure that ICANN has unimpeded ability to execute its (undefined, growing) "mission". ICANN was supposed to save the Internet from governments; since major interest groups such as the ccTLDs and RIRs won't do what ICANN wants, and won't pay it, ICANN now turns to governments to save it from the Internet. See the Press Release here, and then look at entire plan, then visit ICANNWatch.org for updates and commentary." Yep. The proposal would eliminate any pretense of At-Large involvement in running ICANN - it would be solely a governmental and corporate body.

Froomkin writes: "ICANN CEO Stuart Lynn today released a plan for a "strong" ICANN that would have 5 of 15 Board members selected directly by governments and the rest by registrars, registries, plus a few Board-squatter-like ringers chosen by the ICANN Board or staff. The main justifications offered for this shift are that in order to be "strong" ICANN needs more money, more support, and less "process". Of course, promises Lynn, ICANN's "core values of openness and broad participation" should be "preserved". (Don't laugh. It's not funny.) "Meaningful participation" will be achieved by cutting out any direct representation for end-users. Oh yes, ICANN wants a much bigger budget, and to be independent of the US Dept. of Commerce, and to get direct control of the root server operators too, all so as to ensure that ICANN has unimpeded ability to execute its (undefined, growing) "mission". ICANN was supposed to save the Internet from governments; since major interest groups such as the ccTLDs and RIRs won't do what ICANN wants, and won't pay it, ICANN now turns to governments to save it from the Internet. See the Press Release here, and then look at entire plan, then visit ICANNWatch.org for updates and commentary." Yep. The proposal would eliminate any pretense of At-Large involvement in running ICANN - it would be solely a governmental and corporate body.

mpawlo writes: "As reported by ICANNwatch IDG Sweden has published a column where I discuss the result of the At Large Study Committee. I have been asked by Mr Byfield, one of the editors of ICANNwatch, to provide ICANNwatch with a rough summary of the article. This summary might interest some Slashdotters as well, even though it's hardly front page material. The chairman of At Large Study Committee, Mr Carl Bildt, has submitted a reply to my column. Following is a rough summary of both our articles.

I state in my column:

"It should be noted that what we discuss is merely a regulation of new top-level domain names. In case ICANN or another domain name regulator should have a wider scope of power and decide upon other technical measures, ICANN needs to get such a mandate."

(---)

"Bildt is speaking of the leadership over the Internet and Pontus Forsstrom is speaking of the "power over the Internet. I think such metaphors lead the reader in the wrong direction. The Internet is not regulated top-down in the way that Bildt and Forsstrom suggests. The force of the Internet and the success of the Internet are depending upon the protocols. The protocols are often developed in the working groups of the IETF, but any protocol might as well be developed in a boy's room in his parents' house at Lidingo (Mikael's note: Lidingo is a suburb to Stockholm, Sweden) as well as in the most secret corridors of Microsoft. The power over the Internet is distributed."

(---)

"Bildt is convinced that ICANN will remain as a domain name regulator. Bildt suggests in his report a possibility to let the domain name holders elect the board members of ICANN. In the Bildt suggestion every domain name holder get one vote in the global election to the ICANN board."

(---)

"The only regulation that I consider sound is a global regulation based on the participation of nations. The work of ICANN affects mostly those who still have not found their way out on the Internet. To make domain name ownership a condition for voting rights is therefore not appropriate. Current domain name holders should be most interested in decreasing the amount of new top-level domain names. New top-level domain names will lead to inflation in the legal and economic rights of the domain name holder.

A new top-level domain name can lead to multiple registration of the same domain names and defamation and degeneration. A "good" domain name will be less worth if it's available under multiple top-level domain names.

However, it will benefit society if the name space is widened, while it will lead to more competition and innovation.

Hence, I find it more suitable to make as many nations as possible, offline or online, participate in ICANN or an organisation replacing ICANN. It can be achieved through the United Nations or a similar body."

(---)

"The connection between ownership and voting rights was a la mode in Europe at the mid 19th Century, but as an instrument for democracy in the 21th Century I consider the concept dusty and obsolete."

(---)

"I am afraid of the politician Carl Bildt. If Bildt's suggestion is approved and used, we will create a domain name regulator that lacks severely when it comes to representation. Only the landowners will get to vote. I am also afraid that Icann and its investigator Carl Bildt consider a widened ICANN with a broadened scope and a new government for the Internet."

Mr Bildt replies:
"It is good if we get more debates on the ICANN issues in Sweden. We brag about being best in the world on the Internet, but we are silent as mice (idiomatic expression, Mikael's note) when it comes to these issues. Crap."

(---)

"Mikael Pawlo seems to have two points. First, he wants to keep the decentralised decision making process on the Internet. Second, he wants to have some UN like organisation to make decisions, in practice probably the International Telecommunications Union, ITU."

(---)

"However, you can't have both."

(---)

"ICANN is certainly no government of the Internet and can not be such a body. The scope of ICANN is technical. But with the Internet as the most important infrastructure those issues will be important."

(---)

"Therefore I have a hard time to appreciate his (Mikael Pawlo's) suggestion as a real alternative."

Read my column (in Swedish).

Read Mr Bildts reply (in Swedish).

The column and the reply was published by the Swedish branch of the International Data Group. Please be advised that the translations are unofficial translations and that Mr Bildt may or may not agree with me on the paragraphs choosen to be translated."

mooneyguy writes: "Senators Edward Markey and John Shimkus have sponsored a bill that would seek creation of the .kids domain as an area that would be supposedly safe for children, as reported by CNN. Not only would this tread on ICANNs autonomy, but it also raises questions about enforcement and just how international standards of "decency" could possibly be determined. ICANN opposes the idea as being unworkable." Well, ICANN opposes the idea because they want to own the internet. But there are plenty of other reasons to oppose a "kid-friendly" domain. Kids in many nations of the world run around naked until well after puberty. Will they be able to post self-photos on .kids? While we're mentioning new TLDs, everyone associated with .biz apparently had a class-action suit filed against them, alleging the sweepstakes for initial registrations is an illegal lottery.

Froomkin writes: "ICANNWatch carries an update on efforts to block the .us giveaway, which include letters to the US Dept. of Commerce from Senators, from Rep. Markey, and from the US-ACM Public Policy Committee." The update also mentions this LA Times editorial drawing attention to the move.

Froomkin writes: "ICANNWatch carries an update on efforts to block the .us giveaway, which include letters to the US Dept. of Commerce from Senators, from Rep. Markey, and from the US-ACM Public Policy Committee." The update also mentions this LA Times editorial drawing attention to the move.

Froomkin writes: "ICANNWatch carries an update on efforts to block the .us giveaway, which include letters to the US Dept. of Commerce from Senators, from Rep. Markey, and from the US-ACM Public Policy Committee." The update also mentions this LA Times editorial drawing attention to the move.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "ICANNWatch has a story about why the US Dept. of Commerce's plan to give away .us is a Really Bad Idea. Bids are fixed at $0, so the public gets nothing, but the contractor can charge what he likes for .us names, he can tie in other services, and pretty much do what he likes, except .us has to have rules that favor trademarks, and do what ICANN says. Plus it's set up so Verisign has the inside track. It's all in a paper by Brian Kahin called Making Policy by Solicitation: The Outsourcing of .us (MS Word, but ICANNWatch put up a .pdf). Last week public interest groups asked for a delay of the giveaway, but will anyone listen?"

An Anonymous Coward writes: "ICANNWatch has a story about why the US Dept. of Commerce's plan to give away .us is a Really Bad Idea. Bids are fixed at $0, so the public gets nothing, but the contractor can charge what he likes for .us names, he can tie in other services, and pretty much do what he likes, except .us has to have rules that favor trademarks, and do what ICANN says. Plus it's set up so Verisign has the inside track. It's all in a paper by Brian Kahin called Making Policy by Solicitation: The Outsourcing of .us (MS Word, but ICANNWatch put up a .pdf). Last week public interest groups asked for a delay of the giveaway, but will anyone listen?"

An Anonymous Coward writes: "ICANNWatch has a story about why the US Dept. of Commerce's plan to give away .us is a Really Bad Idea. Bids are fixed at $0, so the public gets nothing, but the contractor can charge what he likes for .us names, he can tie in other services, and pretty much do what he likes, except .us has to have rules that favor trademarks, and do what ICANN says. Plus it's set up so Verisign has the inside track. It's all in a paper by Brian Kahin called Making Policy by Solicitation: The Outsourcing of .us (MS Word, but ICANNWatch put up a .pdf). Last week public interest groups asked for a delay of the giveaway, but will anyone listen?"

An Anonymous Coward writes: "ICANNWatch has a story about why the US Dept. of Commerce's plan to give away .us is a Really Bad Idea. Bids are fixed at $0, so the public gets nothing, but the contractor can charge what he likes for .us names, he can tie in other services, and pretty much do what he likes, except .us has to have rules that favor trademarks, and do what ICANN says. Plus it's set up so Verisign has the inside track. It's all in a paper by Brian Kahin called Making Policy by Solicitation: The Outsourcing of .us (MS Word, but ICANNWatch put up a .pdf). Last week public interest groups asked for a delay of the giveaway, but will anyone listen?"

topeka writes: "From ICANN.Blog: 'Without warning or explanation, and without even providing list members an opportunity to reorganize, Verisign today closed the long-running 'DOMAIN-POLICY' list.'" tdye adds: "Even the archives are apparently gone, before they could be rescued. Some interesting comments on the shutdown here(1) and here(2)."

mduell writes: "The U.S. government approved a deal allowing top Internet domain registrar VeriSign to retain control of the lucrative ".com" Web addresses, the Commerce Department said Friday." ICANNwatch has a couple of stories about the deal finally reached, and the steps taken by the Commerce Department to promote competition in the DNS.

You may have heard about ICANN's announcement that .info and .biz will soon be available for registration. Naturally, the deal ICANN wants to cut with the .info and .biz people has been negotiated in secret, by "ICANN staff", without public input. (Who needs public input anyway - ICANN's proposed budget for next year eliminates all funding for the At-Large elections.) And of course, by the time you want to register anything in those domains, it'll be gone - trademark holders get a special express line to register domains in the new .TLD's before they are generally available. However, ICANN neglected to mention that they need approval from the Department of Commerce before messing with the root servers. The DoC is in the process of approving Verisign's deal to keep control of the .com registry forever; they're daring to ask Verisign to give up .net earlier, and Verisign is threatening to walk out on negotiations - as if we'd be hurt.

phr1 writes: "David Holtzman, Chairman and CEO of Opion Inc. and former Chief Technology Officer at Network Solutions Inc, has written this interesting ICB editorial titled 'If we're going to have a world government, I want a revolution first." He argues that 'ICANN has the potential to turn into the first world regulatory body. By beginning to associate top level domains with content usage, they are putting themselves into the position of being the defacto arbiter of content,' and concludes 'I never felt paranoia before. I do now.' It's worth a read."

BlueCalx- writes "I was pleased this morning when I opened up my mailbox and I found my PIN number for ICANN's Members at Large program. This means that just about everyone who expressed interest at their first Slashdotting has either gotten their letter or will get it very soon." I received mine in the mail yesterday. For lots more information on ICANN, click below.

ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Essentially, they have power over the entire internet addressing system: domain names and IP addresses. People criticize the U.S. FCC for stifling low-power radio, or Congress for trying to ban indecent speech - well, ICANN has more power over communications than either of those entities, and far less accountability.

ICANN's board structure is a complex one. Probably it cannot be fully analyzed except by people devoted to the task full-time. It was designed to give corporations the dominant voice in administering the internet. A great amount of effort has been expended in stacking the deck, making sure that individuals and public interest groups do not gain any significant voice in the process. You've already seen the results of these actions. One such is the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy, which ICANN required all domain name registrars to adopt, and which makes sure that if any corporation covets your domain name, they can take it away without any problems.

But enough of that. ICANN is run by a 19-member Board of Directors. The original members were picked out of the blue (literally; no one knows how the original members were chosen, or , more precisely, whoever knows isn't telling). ICANN has been directed to move to an election process by the Commerce Department, and that's what is now underway.

Of course, the elections also have to be stacked. Business interests have already spoken. They get to pick 9 of the 19 members. Originally, nine more were supposed to be picked by the At-Large membership (that is, the general population of internet users). (The final seat would be the President of ICANN-the-Corporation.) So already, business interests would have had a 10-9 majority on the Board. I say, "would have had", because 10-9 seemed a little too close for comfort, and the At-Large elections have been cut down to just five members, to make sure they wouldn't get too much power compared to the corporate interests in ICANN. Each of ICANN's five geographic regions will elect one member.

(This is the way committees in the U.S. Congress works as well - the political party with a majority in either of the Houses gets a majority on all the committees as well, to ensure that if push comes to shove, their party wins. It is a poor omen for the future to note that corporate interests have a permanent majority in running the internet.)

The At-Large Nomination process is also skewed. The business interests in ICANN get to nominate candidates for the At-Large elections as well, and though it's theoretically possible to get nominated without going through the Nominating Committee (sort of akin to a write-in candidate), the bar is set so high that probably no one will succeed in such a candidacy. So it's likely that the choice of candidates for the At-Large election is going to look something like the choice between Gush and Bore for U.S. President - a choice between business representative X and business representative Y.

Nevertheless, you should get involved. It's your internet that ICANN is governing, and if you plan to spend any time on the net in the future, you'd better speak now. The electorate (the number of people who've registered to vote in ICANN's elections) is extremely small - less than 20,000 people all told. Because of the regional split, the members for Africa and Latin America could be elected with only a few hundred people participating! Your vote will count much more than it would in almost any other election process, and you're controlling the future of the worldwide communications network. It's worth the effort.

A few links:

• Declan McCullagh posted some info on the election process and statistics on the electorate
• ICANNWATCH's comments on the Board elections
• Join Now. The registration process could close at any time.

Lawrence Lessig - the name may be familiar from the Microsoft trial - has written an excellent book, which I've taken my time reviewing because I felt I had to read it twice to grasp the full import. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace covers the real future of your liberties on the internet, and it is not a happy book. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace author Lawrence Lessig pages 297 publisher Basic Books rating 10/10 reviewer Michael Sims ISBN 0-465-03912-X summary A gloomy look at the forces which shape the internet.

Slashdot isn't the first to review this book. Declan McCullagh (Wired), Andy Oram, and Carl Kaplan (NY Times) have all taken a look at it, he's been interviewed, there's an audio debate (mp3 format) between Lessig and McCullagh, and at least a couple of other places have all mentioned it and it is, at this writing, 134 on Amazon.com's best-seller list. I was privileged enough to receive a review copy of the book some time ago, but my review has been delayed because the book is too deep to easily sum up. It's a book about law, and about policy, and about the internet, which doesn't require any grounding in any of the above, but it seems like it would be appropriate for people at almost any level of knowledge - if you know more, you'll get deeper insights, and if you know less, you'll get the basics. A fractal book, in other words. An almost philosophical work, disguised as a law book.

To start with, Lessig's book is a counter to John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Barlow had a good idea, a good goal, but he was totally and completely wrong about how to achieve it, and his declaration and the mindset it embodies has and will do great harm to the future of civil liberties on the internet.

Cyberspace is not and has never been independent of real life, or of government. What it has been is a place where the rules of real life were hard to enforce. That doesn't mean that the rules don't exist - just that it has been hard to make people obey them. The problem for people, like me, who like this state of affairs, this lack of enforcement, is that there's no reason cyberspace has to remain in its current state.

Cyberspace wasn't designed to enforce real-world rules. Such enforcement wasn't built in to the code that runs the internet, was consciously avoided in the early internet designs, and therefore regulators have been working in an environment unfriendly to them. Copying of digital works is easy. Transmitting and receiving content, even forbidden content, is easy. Etc.

But just because it was designed that way once, does not mean that it need be that way in the future. There are tremendous forces (business and government) that would prefer an internet which is friendly and cooperative to regulators. The people building the internet of tomorrow are not professors and geeks, they're CEO's and to a lesser extent, bureaucrats. If the architecture of the internet is "adjusted" to favor regulation instead of disfavor it - and the current internet builders all have reasons to favor regulability - regulating behavior on the internet is not impossible, it's trivial. Lessig has a short chapter on "is-ism", the belief that just because something is, so must it always be. Applied to the internet, this is "We are free, and will always be so." Wrong, wrong! The internet is totally man-made, and what man has made, man can change.

It is hard for me (or Lessig) to emphasize this point too much: the people who claim that we should keep our hands off the internet are completely playing into the hands of government and business. While the net-libertarians have buried their heads in the sand, the net is being changed, constantly, to favor regulation by business and by government.

Lessig takes a look at the infrastructure of the internet and how it is changing for the worse. There's another terrible flaw in thinking about the internet, which runs roughly: "whatever restrictions are placed, someone of technical competence can get around them". This is not true, not if the architecture is designed to support those restrictions rather than oppose them.

The internet, says Lessig, is about to "flip" from "unregulable" to "totally regulable". When that occurs (neither Lessig nor I think there's an "If" involved), who will be regulating the place? Currently corporations, with guidance from government - guidance coming in the form of regulations like CALEA, which make demands not on individuals, but on the code. Once the code is altered to be conducive to regulation, regulation follows naturally.

Lessig makes a great point about open source software. Closed source code which incorporates regulation (censorware is the easiest example, but there are many others) means that the people who are regulated can't even tell exactly what regulation is occuring. When the source code is available, you can at least tell exactly what you can and cannot do, or exactly how your privacy is being infringed. Open source code is inherently less suited to enforcing regulation on users.

I can't do justice to the book without rewriting it. Lessig is deeply skeptical about the ability of the U.S. government to initiate policies which promote, rather than denigrate, the civil liberties we have come to take for granted in cyberspace. Government is busy selling off our freedom to corporations through mechanisms such as ICANN. But no one else is going to do it - and with a government actively hostile to liberties or even one that adopts a hands-off approach, freedom in cyberspace is headed downhill at a tremendous pace.

I recommend this book to almost anyone who cares about the future of the internet. It's well-written - he's a good teacher. It's got some awesome examples - like how Communist Vietnam is more effectively libertarian than the U.S., because it doesn't have the infrastructure of control that we do. It is a scholarly work, but the footnotes are pushed off to the end - they alone are worth the price of the book to a serious student, but someone looking to just read can skip them without problems. It's a deep and thus far unmatched view of what will shape the net of tomorrow, the most inspiring book I've read this year.

Some of Lessig's other papers and articles are available on his home page. The book has a promotional website as well, available at code-is-law.org or what-declan-doesnt-get.com.

Pick this book up at fatbrain.com.

What the world needs a really good webpage explaining the importance of ICANN in plain English. Until someone writes it, we'll just keep bringing you the news. This week, the controversial organization begins replacing its 9-member interim board with an 18-member real board. There are interesting tidbits in both the New York Times story (free reg. required) and the CNET story.