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Definitely nasty. I just got off the phone with OnRamp Communications, because they host the spammer sexywebcamchix but aren't doing anything about it.

On the front page of ONR.com, they advertise a new service called SpamSlam, which offers spam-blocking to their ISP customers for the low low price of $2 per month! Host spammers, then charge for protection ... you can't get much sleazier than that.

I think there are a few things amiss with the pfir plan and I'd like to suggest and comment on some alternatives and have a few comments about our continues use of 20th century DNS.

Look back at the creation of ICANN and it's not difficult to see why it has failed. The timeline goes something like this: when the Wired article came out in 1994 where Joshua Quittner reported he registered mcdonalds.com and McDonalds didn't want it he ended up selling it to Burger King. At the time InterNIC registrations were taking about 3 days. This shot up to 11 weeks in a matter of days. The NSF, who funded NSI to run the InterNIC, did not feel it's role, which is to foster academic and scientific advancement, included subsidizing deodorant.com and the like, so, it asked the FNCAC to do something. What they did was instruct the NSF to tell NSI to begin charging for domains. This caught the Internet community rather off guard and discussion ensued on a "newdom" mailing list (whose archives can be found here). Several forces came into play. First was the rift between the group that felt they too could run a TLD and the group that though this should be run from a great big central registry. The latter became the IAHC/CORE thing while the former became the first alternative root. The US Government shut down the IAHC and began it's own proceedings: the white paper was produced. Other governments, most notably in the form of Paul Twoomey from Australia
and Chris Wilkinson from the EU balked at the plan and the revised plan, the green paper took out the language about creating 5 new TLDs immediately (thereby throwing each conflicted group at least one bone). At the time Mikki Barry and Kathy Kleinman suggested in Becky Burr's office that a set of global meetings take place, not to decide answers to tough problems, but to determine just where there was consensus on the various issues. This became the IFWP forum and 3 meetings were held in Reston Va., Geneva, and Singapore. There was to be a followup meeting to merge these consensus points into a framework for the new corporation that was to replace IANA. While this was happening, NSI and IANA were negotiating, and Ira Magaziner, Clinton's senior science advisor and Roger Cochetti, a VP of IBM were running around selecting a new board. The IFWP wrap up meeting never happened, it was scuttled by Mike Roberts (suspicion is high he had been told be would be president) and the vast amount of time and energy, money, hopes and aspirations that was IFWP went down the toilet - which is a real shame as it was a significant body of work. Three proposals went in to the US government to form the new corporation. The IANA/NSI proposal drafted by Joe Sims and NSI, the Boston Working Group proposal (which is where the wrap-up meeting was to have been) which was a sane version of the NSI/ICANN proposal, and the ORSC proposal which was the BWG plan with greater fiscal responsibility and an existing corporate shell. Citing popular public support for the IANA/NSI plan it was selected - but if you read the public comments on the NTIA site carefully you'll see far less support than implied and much of it was tentative, frankly. A board materialized out if thin air, selected because they didn't know anything about DNS. So what went wrong? Was the original ICANN plan flawed or were the people just the wrong choices? I suggest that if Karl Aurbach and 9 people like him has been the original board we would not now be even talking about DNS; the board appointed from in high did not represent the Internet community whatsoever and instead represented telco, government and trademark special interests. It is believed the concessions made so that foreign government supported the "green paper" was that they got to pick certain members of the board. The first big clue there was trouble was when the board missed it's deadline to define a process for their replacement and simply extended their jobs; they should have been gone over two years ago now.

So what have we learned from this? In my opinion, no group that says "we're in charge" really is; respect is earned, not asserted and I think this was the great failing of both IAHC and ICANN. So while I generally like Weinstein, Newman and Farber, I do distrust the IAB to some extent based on previous debacles like the Boston Tea party where they were thrown out for claiming OSI and not TCP/IP was the way to go. The ISOC is another non-starter, it's wanted to get it's hands on the DNS for over a decade and has been a great supporter of the authoritarian regimes of both IAHC and ICANN. The key, I believe, is not some group claiming they should be in charge or that they have all the answers - nobody does - but the good old fashioned and time proven method of Internet collaborative cooperation. And this means actually doing it, not paying lip service to it like ICANN did. Oh and cut out the 5 star hotels and first class Concorde flights.

Is this about Internet governance? No. Absolutely not. In it's most basic form this is nothing more than an institutionalized debate between Dave Crocker and Karl Denninger in 1986 taken to it's logical conclusion. But it's nothing to do with governance of the Internet. Face it, if all you do is read and write email and/or usenet news, and play on ISC or muck about on the web, you may never have heard of ICANN and it certainly has zero effect on you. This is just about new top level domains, period; the IP addresses have virtually all been handed over to the regional registries and the port allocations are handles by somebody than CAN add one to a number and write it down on a piece of paper.

But didn't ICANN break up NSI ? Nope. That was Ira Magaziners plan executed through the Department of Commerce. You don't really think NSI gave in because ICANN though it was a good idea do you? What has ICANN really done in 4 years? They've knuckled under to WIPO and given us the horribly flawed UDRP and 7 really stupid TLDs that despite $2.$M worth of scrutiny still had huge problems to the point of being dragged into court over it.

What alternative roots exist? Quite a few actually, and while on the face of it you might think this would be a problem, but face it, if you can pick up your mail and get to Yahoo! then they work, and any of them will let you do that. The differences in them are what new TLDs they publish in their root zones. I need to disclaim right away that I coordinate, with Brian Reid's help, the ORSC root, and it's generally believed to have the greatest penetration and is certainly the longest continuously operating one. The barrier to entry it low: show us working TLD servers and we'll list you. Other notable ones are the TINC root which is operated by some old time Usenet people such as Peter da Silva which has a policy of one tld per entity, which I don't like think can be made to work (the now defunct eDNS tried this and it was found to be too easily worked around), PacROOT which in my opinion swings too far the other way with their NameSlinger client - I don't think I know the proper number of TLDS any entity should operate but I do know it's not in the hundreds if not thousands; this raises anti-trust issues, and OpenNIC which is pretty good but only has a small number of new TLDs. There is also NameSpace which believes they should run all tlds. This grates against the notion of the root as a collection of independantly run TLDs in my opinion. But, it doesn't matter to me which one people use as long as they use one of them. Vote with your nameservers - it is in nobody's interest to break anything and using any of these roots will let you see all current DNS names and a whole universe of new ones although how many depends on which one you pick.

Why do we still use root servers? Now this is where it gets interesting. What if the US Government suddenly shut off the legacy root servers? 90% of the net would feel some sort of perturbation immediately especially since at least one TLD (.SE) is name-served directly from the root (not TLD!) servers as are many in-addr.arpa delegations. As the TTLs to TLD servers expired, users of the legacy root would not be able to resolve any DNS names. But, people that use other root servers would be immune to the demise of the legacy roots (modulo one of Swedens 7 .SE nameservers of course) but an even better tactic in my opinion is to primary the root zone for yourself. Then, any or all root servers could be shut off and you wouldn't notice a thing. This would leave you with one remaining problem and that is where could you get the root zone from. Your upstream might be a good place or as DJB has suggested, a cryptographically signed root zone could be posted to usenet periodically. This has the inherent advantage of being out of band of TCP/IP; that is, even a UUCP connection could inject the zone into the news stream. That's one answer to "how do you bootstrap DNS without DNS".

Do I think ORSC should be the next ICANN as the ICANNWATCH poll suggests? No and hell no! Nobody should be in charge, and given that the net and the DNS itself is edge controlled - that is, whoever has the root password to a nameserver determines what dns names exist and what don't - any model that asserts a central authority is doomed to fail. There is need for coordination, but not authority.

Vote with your nameserver; vote early and vote often.

Richard Sexton
March 19, 2002

Here's a bit of synchronicity. Just this morning I received a spam in my personal mailbox. I have 5 addresses: work, personal, and 3 spamtraps that go to trash by default. Whenever my 2 real addresses get spammed, I go medieval. Headers revealed the spam was sent through an open relay at ... Naju Noan Elementary School of Chonnam Province, Korea.

What's the deal with the Korean school system? Did someone donate a few thousand default-setup NT servers to them after the dotcom bust?

According to NameSpace, the class-C block belongs to Soonhwa Cho (jeonnam3@soback.kornet.net), and the class-A belongs to Korea Network Information Center (hostmaster@nic.or.kr). I've written to KrNIC before, and they flatly disavow any and all responsibility for net abuse in their subdomains. They refer me to their WHOIS server.

Now, there are a few problems with that position. The most important is that NajuNoan's whois entry belongs to yang yeon ho (noan1@edunet4u.net), and that address bounces back as invalid.

So what to do? AFAICT, the only answer is for some off-white-hat hackers to 0WN the whole damn Korean edu network and secure those servers remotely whether they like it or not.

OpenNIC
Open RSC
AlterNIC
Tiny Org
NameSpace

(Links courtesy of Lionfire.)

Why is is a US issue? Because Congress created ICANN (essentially). There are a couple of ways that TLD allocation can be handled

• the US government can set up an agency.
• The US government could hand it over to a UN agency.
• The corporations which run most of the big nameservers could create their own agency.

In general, I prefer things being done by the private sector, but the corporate solution will likely lead to a monopoly for the benefit of the big corporations. The government and ICANN are doing things badly - name.space has shown that there is no technical limitation to many gTLDs being created, but right now, the answer is to get Congress to force ICANN to adopt a better system, then figure out a way to get the government completely out of the picture.

Until then, I think the best way is to open it up 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

AlterNIC

ADNS

Open Root Server Confederation

Name.Space

There's more too.

Chris

Open DNS Technologies, Inc.

In fact, several such alternative root registries already exist. (See, for example Alternic, Name.Space, OpenNIC, and eDNS.) The problem is that there's not a critical mass of people converting to any one of them. These systems also threaten the uniqueness (if the same TLDs are set up on competing root servers), universality (the same URL should resolve to the same site for everyone, and everyone should be able to access all URLs), and technical stability of the DNS namespace. DNS cache leakage is a compounding factor.

The DNS is not like open source software; you can't fork it and make a version of it that you like better, and let people chose which one they like best. It is (at the moment) a shared global resource. Sure, lots of people grumble about ICANN's handling of the expansion process. But the community of name server administrators and owners has consistently recoginized that the dangers of fragmenting the global name space outweigh the likely benefits of doing so.

--Beland

Hmm, having a bit of a poke around those links, I came across the applications for new general-purpose TLDs. There are applications from 14 groups, 7 of whom "merit further review" by ICANN, mostly suggesting a few new TLDs each.

But one of the unsuccessful groups is a mob called Name.Space, who proposed 117 new TLDs! Including such gems as ".nyc" (New York is a country now?), ".jazz" and ".music" (jazz isn't music?) and ".ads" (hmm there's one to avoid).

So I had a look at them - they're a firm that sell domain names in 546 new top level domains! All of the above plus such gems as .cow, .page and .2000 that they presumably thought were too daft to try to slip by ICANN. Anyway, you can register any of these for only $30 a domain! The fact that nobody is ever going to be able to access you via that domain name unless they set up to use Name.Space's rival DNS is tucked away in the middle of their FAQ where they tell you to spread the word, and get your friends and associates to connect to their DNS..

What a bunch of maroons..

The people at name.space have been trying at this for a while. Same with AlterNIC, but they ruined their reputation a while back. None of it is free, but preventing domain squatters going nuts is a good thing.

Try www.name-space.com, an alternate registry with some 500-odd gTLDs already set up. All you have to do is point to their machines as your resolver and you can access the .bicycle, .sex, .shareware, etc. gTLDs. (so if you have that done, they're also www.name.space). Whether that's a good idea or not is something else: they'll let anyone register any gTLD. They're hoping to get enough popular support (people giving out their "new improved" names) that NSI will have to honor their gTLDs; I tend to think that won't happen. But FYI.

...

Flames to /dev/null
christopher

Name.Space, the leading pioneer and advocate of new generic toplevel domains (gTLDs) in operation since 1996 has hard data on what new TLDs are popular and in demand by people on the net at large.

In 1996, Name.Space began accepting suggestions for new gTLDs from public input, and has moderated the list to the present number of 549, from thousands of requests. These gTLDs came into operation between the autumn of 1996 and the present and are currently available for registration.
Register here!

Here are the top 20 new gTLDs suggested by the public and presently in operation by Name.Space:

web .
space.
shop.
art.
sex.
info.
zone.
music.
firm.
design.
media.
travel.
online.
arts.
inc.
x.
mail.
home.
family.
2000.
bank.
usa.
news.
ltd.
world.
fuck.
mag.
corp.
direct.
law.
free.
love.
auction.
sale.
casino.
service.
games.
fun.
mall.
studios.
cam.
market.
asia.
sports.
cafe.
mad.
internet.
hacker.
city.
network.

see Vote for new gTLDs
and Name.Space active gTLDs.

In an early effort to gain the global recognition of the new gTLDs serviced by Name.Space, a letter was sent to Network Solutions on March 11, 1997 requesting the addition of the gTLDs serviced by Name.Space and their associated nameservers into the ROOT.ZONE file (the recognized master list of globally-routed TLDs, controlled by NSI).

NSI refused the request to amend the ROOT.ZONE file and Name.Space subsequently filed an ANTITRUST action against NSI on March 20, 1997.

After more than three years of litigation, the Court of Appeals ruled against Name.Space and in favor of NSI, granting NSI IMMUNITY from antitrust prosecution, for their "conduct in this case". The court's decision was an obvious POLITICAL decision, not a legal one. (see http://namespace.org/law)

In the original complaint, Name.Space also listed a group of "non-party co-conspirators", many of whom, or their associates now make up ICANN and the key influential persons surrounding the ICANN process and formerly known as the IAHC (International Ad Hoc Committee) at the time the initial lawsuit was filed in March, 1997.

Now that NSI has been declared IMMUNE from antitrust prosecution for refusing to allow competitors, including Name.Space, to add new TLDs to the root, NSI presents the addition of new TLDs as if it was their idea in the first place--in light of the fact that Name.Space and others were denied precisely what NSI is carving out for themselves.

Why did James Tierney close down the DoJ's antitrust investigation into NSI and their parent company SAIC without finding any wrongdoing? Perhaps you should all write to Mr. Tierney at the DoJ and ask why the US Government is protecting NSI, while crusading against Microsoft? Is this another case of "selective enforcement"? Who is benefiting financially from all of this? Why is there no oversight into conflicts of interest within ICANN? How did NSI get away with paying public relations "flacks" and other "shills" to disrupt, discredit, and coerce their competitors such as Name.Space, with such impunity?

The addition of new gTLDs to the root is a matter of a simple TEXT EDIT of the ROOT.ZONE file. Isn't it about time that this be done without further delay? Get a head start--if you are an ISP you can run the expanded ROOT.ZONE file today by downloading it and installing it on your DNS servers. For more info, see go to Switch to Name.Space

The .org TLD lost its Non-profit requirement years ago, so it's a bad example. Such a qualification requirement isn't really useful, anyway. The TLD could be used in ways the registry never intended... Some English words mean something else in other languages, for example... The .club TLD could run country clubs and night clubs, but also golf clubs and TheClub(tm). You don't need to specify a holy purpose for a TLD, only that it's useful for _something_. Why stop with 5 TLDs? By following the instructions at Name.Space you can resolve 550 new ones from .art to .zone. We've been operating them for years.

Name Space is already doing something similiar. Pick from any of their 500 top level domains, and register your domain name. The only gotcha is that you have to use their DNS servers, "Until the new gTLDs are visible to the entire internet". They don't give any clue when that might actually be however.

• NS.AUTONO.NET 209.48.2.11
  
• NS10.AUTONO.NET 206.86.247.30
  
• NS1.AUTONO.NET 198.6.71.125
  
• ROOT3.AUTONO.NET 195.11.229.188
  
• NS8.AUTONO.NET 130.242.7.200
  
• ALLADIN.DDS.NL 194.109.21.20
  
• NS.RE-LAB.LV 195.2.100.2