Slashdot Mirror

The situation with numbers is a little trickier, but when it comes to names, US control is entirely defacto. Anyone who doesn't like the US having the final word, can simply decide the US doesn't, and that's that. Point your resolver at a different set of servers.

Everyone is free to do this. But they don't want to. They don't really want to be free or determine things for themselves; they want to control others. It's not enough that you can use OpenNIC or whatever -- you want to force other people to do the same. Everyone essentially votes on who is in control, and ICANN is still getting 99% of the votes, and that is pissing some people off. But instead of educating the voters, they want to essentially take over ICANN's defacto authority.

This is wrong. Your laziness in this regard, is the very reason your politicians (completely outside the scope of internet issues) suck. You're just like us Americans who are too cowardly to vote for someone other than republicans and democrats, so we try to influence the republicans and democrats and then wonder why our elected leads still do the wrong things.

Voters have to take responsibility and vote intelligently. Quit fucking with the candidates, that's not the answer.

If you register a domain name under a TLD under the ICAAN scheme (com,net.org,name,biz,etc), then you are aleady paying for a "quality" DNS service. The truth is that ICAAN run a cartel for companies like verisign to make money in an artificial economy. If ICAAN was truely about providing a service to all Internet users, rather than a few greedy corporations, then it would include alternative TLDs, such as those operated independently through opennic. But of course those alternatives won't pay the ICAAN extortion fees.

Simply put, if ICANN adopts a TLD that duplicates a TLD that "unofficially" is being registered by another registration system, then we'll have a fracturing in the standards just like in the way that it's almost impossible to tell who the heavyweight boxing champion is.

They've already done it.

.biz was already in use when ICANN adopted it.

OpenNIC, for one, does not recognize ICANN's use of the .biz domain.

I don't see why allowing registration of top level domains would change anything. What could Google do with *.google which they can't do with *.google.com?
This is especially true as most browsers can add the .com for you. (If you think that typing four extra characters would be harder then remembering hundreds of new names.)
Obviously this argument works in reverse and so there is no reason to require all domains to end with .com, .net, .org etc. except that the fight over names has mostly finished and we don't really want to rekindle it. (I suppose you could just remove the .com from the current registrations, but the .org and .net registrants would probably complain).
However, I do think that the article raised some very good suggestions for valuable services. I would love to see a *.wipo.org or *.typo.com but they don't need to wait for their own TLDs.
Btw. Setting up new TLDs is already possible; the Internet is built on open standards you don't have to use the official TLDs: opennic.org

I don't think this is a browser problem ... I don't think this is Microsoft's problem.

You're hitting the nail on the ... (lack of English) here. This is exactly how Verisign is hijacking what it doesn't own.

In the case of Internet Explorer: when you type in a wronf URL, the browser cannot find it and decides to redirect you.

I dunno if you fully understand the scope of what's going here. This is so f*king wrong.

Apart from the obvious EXTREMELY SERIOUS technical issues, what bothers me most is that Verisign is in this way actually STEALING ( and make money on them through ad's ...) ALL THE NON-EXISTENT .COM and .NET DOMAINS.

Well, I hardly ever post on /., but what Verisign is trying to pull of here, is pissing me off beyond (fill in yourself). What Microsoft is doing with Internet Explorer is really nothing compared to this ...

Ever tried OpenNIC ?

http://opennic.org

I've been running off of OpenNic root-originated DNS ever since Verisign tried this stunt the first time. It's only a matter of time before there's a major break in the control and administration of .com and .net.

Maybe now we can all jump tot a alternative non-hierachical dns structure? Dns is by design not hierachical; It's peer to peer. That it has any root at all... well, that's just a historic misfeature...

One alternative is OpenNic.

You'd think someone would have done that by now...

Agreed. All the technical issues are solveable, and in fact have been solved at some level; and the namespace would not significantly change in size regardless of structure (unless it shrinks majorly, as name-squatting becomes far less profitable).

The problems are non-technical. One is the FUD being spread about the technical issues (I am *really* tired of hearing all this nonsense about a supposed technical need for artificially scarce namespace) and another is the problem of rule creation and enforcement.

ICANN and the Department of Commerce control the rule-making and enforcement process (by holding the root nameservers hostage). It seems that they will not allow a better system to evolve.

Internet users' best bet is probably to end-run ICANN. Just as we can use samba and samba-tng to defeat Microsoft's attempt to dominate our networks, we can use OpenNIC and friends to obviate ICANN.

PS: I included the definition of obviate because I got savaged for using it in a post once. I can use the most arcane networking terms imaginable and nobody complains, but use a slightly offbeat non-technical word and everyone's suddenly too busy flaming me to look it up. ;^>

You are correct that this is the biggest problem with socially responsible naming systems; greed drives humans to sociopathic actions.

Some say that this is good, and worship greed. They are typically very shallow people who lack inner peace. Think Donald Trump.

Some say this is bad, and that greedy people must be punished. They are typically even more shallow, and see all things as absolutes. Think Torquemada.

Some people just say "Hey, greed exists, and greedy people will always covet and accumulate power, so let's design a system so that each greedy individual's actions will serve the community as a whole". Since that is where's I'm coming from, obviously these people are correct! :^P

Eventually, the cost of maintaining spaces like pepsi.com and pepsi.org will outstrip any profit garnered from their existence, because it will be more cost-effective to advertise http://pepsi rather than the others and people will get used to it.

However, in the short run you are right. They won't give up their redundant names for decades unless forced to.

Any suggestions for a solution? The obvious one is to cut a deal - tell 'em they can't have any other names with "pepsi" in them if they want .pepsi, and arrange for a few years of forwarding. But that solution means the creation of another powerbroker like ICANN to enforce these rules... then we're back to square one.

I personally would be willing to put up with the short-term problems for the long-term good... but what I do now is encourage people to use OpenNIC. If we all use OpenNic, ICANN's power-trip becomes unimportant.

Errr... But how would you find the IP address of PepsiCo's nameserver? This sounds like a boot strapping problem.

This is actually an excellent idea and one that people who use opennic do already. The root zone "." at OpenNIC is setup to be slaved so my DNS server downloads a copy of the root zone which has all the information for all the top level domains. If the root zones get DOSed I don't care because I don't use them anymore. Everyone should use OpenNIC. It is the Internet friendly thing to do. :)

The problem with your idea, the reason it wouldn't work, is the word MANDATORY.

Make it PROFITABLE and DESIREABLE, not mandatory, for the porn sites to be clearly and appropriately labeled, and the system will work without massive subsidies or millions of pork-barrel government employees.

Free the domain space. Open the TLDs. We have the technology to have nearly unlimited naming, it's just the entrenched powers like ICANN and Verisign preventing it. Let the "invisible guiding hand of capitalism", so beloved by Republicans in theory and abhorred by them in practice, do the job of categorization - it'll shake out in less time than we've already spent arguing about it.

FREE THE DNS!

But in this specific case j.root-servers.net doesn't really seem to do anything important other than serve up "." so I would say that nobody should really care. At least the other root servers [a-i].root-servers.net serve up other things like .mil and .arpa. Opennic doesn't even have a mention of it in its root zone file because it is soooo unimportant.

There are already a number of ways to get OpenNIC set up to resolve. All you really have to do is to change your DNS servers (your resolvers, in resolv.conf, for you Linux geeks). There are already a BUNCH of 2nd-tier name resolvers you can point to listed at OpenNIC. They also resolve regular ICANN domains, so you don't have to do anything funky to get access to OpenNIC domains as well as ICANN domains.

For those of you behind a proxy, you can still get out to the OpenNIC domains via a proxy they have set up. It's a little awkward (as I think it is a host-name hack, which may not work if the site uses absolute URIs to itself), but only as long as you are forced to use an ISP who makes it awkward; email your ISP and ask them to include OpenNIC in their DNS forwarders/servers. If enough people bug them about it, they will eventually cave to the pressure and just do it. It is FAR too easy to set up for anyone to complain about that.

For those with name servers, they have a simple set of instructions on their site for the most popular DNS resolver software (BIND 4/8/9, Windows NT/2000 DNS, etc) to get your name server set up in a hurry. It literally will take only about 5-10 minutes to set up, and most of that is testing. YOu only have to edit one to four lines in your named.conf file, restart named, and you're surfin'!

I would offer my name server up for access, but they already have plenty of official 1st/2nd tier name servers in several countries, and I am not quite ready to go official with mine yet. Of course, it isn't hard to guess what it is, but I would ask that people use it sparingly; it is for my customers, and if it gets choked, it will stop serving opennic (if I can't pay for it because of loss of customers to abuse, then it will go away anyway).

Well, maybe it is time to move over to OpenNIC. It is pretty small, but since the Titanic seems to have hit the iceberg, I think it is time to make a break for the lifeboats.

I joined and set up my primary NS to resolve their domains for me, as well as the normal ones. Took about 15 minutes to get working (forgot the forwarders, so it took 10 minutes longer than expected :P).

Yeah, I know; I have heard it all before. "But nobody else uses it, so it's worthless!". Not. Everything, and I mean EVERY DAMN THING starts out SMALL. That's not a reason to ignore it or otherwise dismiss it out-of-hand. It's even democratic right out of the box, so it is exactly what *we* want it to be.

Join it now. If you are an ISP, set it up for your customers. Help out. Set it up for your friends and family members. Make it a REAL alternative to the monopolized mess that the US Gov't has made of the current DNS system.

Don't argue. Just do it. It CANNOT HURT!

What prevents somebody from starting their own TLD and just claiming it for use?

The 8 [I think, or however many there are] big fat hot root servers sitting around the world at various hush-hush locations, the big hard doors they're hidden behind, and the fact that you are not authorised to go and fiddle with them.

Are there laws? Not exactly, AFAIK, but see above.

Trust issues? Yeah, we could never trust people to just make up new TLDs whenever they wanted. Oh, and we don't trust ICANN.

Or is it just that everyone's DNS server would filter out/be incompatable with it? To take a effect across the internet, it would have to be introduced by the root servers, then over the next few hours it would filter down to all the other DNS servers. They could be at ISP's, Uni's, or wherever.

With all this trouble that ICANN('T?) seems to cause, I guess my real question is, who needs them? We do, the same way we need governments. The DNS servers we use [that usually means the ones owned by our ISP's] update their info from the root servers. They could just as easily set their servers to update from somewhere like OpenNIC as well as the usual servers, but generally speaking, they just don't.

Ali

Anyone who pays attention to this stuff has to know by now that ICANN is seriously flawed. What's it going to take for a large number of people (or just a few very recognizable and important ones) to ditch them and go with something like OpenNIC?

We really don't need ICANN. Get rid of it, please.

The difference lies in the fact that you can choose what OS/Kernel/distribution you want to use, but you can't choose not to use ICANN if you want to use the Internet.

Oh Really? Are you sure?

If you had followed the link to opennic.org, you would have found answers to all your questions. If you still can't figure it out from there, ill direct you to this page. If you STILL can't figure it out, then you probably wouldnt be interested in any of those web pages anyway.

HTH.