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We should all be using OpenNIC. I know that I've converted all DNS servers that I run. (including one at a large University)

Is everyone really this completely unaware of OpenNIC!?!

The answer is switching to a user-controlled DNS provider like OpenNIC to shift power back where it belongs. I have been using them on all my home computers for six months now and I have never had a DNS related problem.

Resolving the largest TLD's on the Internet is a great responsibility and a corporate monopoly like VeriSign just can't handle it. Please don't entrust them with it.

Due to ICANN's past behaviour, this is already being done. See OpenNIC, AlterNIC, and The Pacific Root. Now, if more ISP's would support them ...

To really apply negative reinforcement to Verisign, the ISPs need to block not just sitefinder.verisign.com, but *.verisign.com, and drop the Verisign controlled root servers from the root hints file.

Verisign is the root domain authority. This is them overstepping bounds and trying to get into the search engine game, something which is 'forbidden' by ICANN.

Somehow I doubt ICANN really cares that much. I really wonder why more people haven't mentioned OpenNIC (an alternate root authority) yet...

I've been using OpenNIC for a long time, and I would have been completely oblivious to this Verisign silliness if I hadn't read about it on /.

I think the only downside to OpenNIC at this point is that they have different .biz domains (they had them before ICANN created them, and the members voted to keep their own rather than adopting ICANN's -- yes, OpenNIC is a democracy, too).

Good questions.

As for splitting, there are already several alternate roots. In addition to Alternic, there's OpenNIC and Pacific Root. People are using these only voluntarily, and the different roots cooperate to some extent. For example, most will only establish a new TLD if no other root is using that TLD, and most will peer TLDs for the other roots so you can see the entire composite alternate namespace. This is strictly voluntary, however.

It might be that some day the alternate roots cooperate less. We can get a glimpse of how this works through the issue of the .biz TLD. Pacific Root had a .biz TLD years before the official Internet .biz TLD. People had paid Pacific Root for this privilege. Pacific Root decided to maintain their own .biz TLD, such that if you are connected to them you will see their .biz, and if you are connected to the real Internet root servers, you'll see the official .biz. Meanwhile, they peer all the other official TLDs so that you see them. Other alternate roots made independent decisions. OpenNIC, for example, chose to continue peering the Pacific Root .biz and ignore the official one. Verisign et al can be viewed as a non-cooperative alternate root server, and this shows how a group of independent voluntary alternatives can coexist.

As for cost, at the moment OpenNIC is free to use (I don't know about the others). I think most alternate TLDs have free registration, though I know that Pacific Root charges (and apparently makes money) for registering in the TLDs they created. If more people started using these alternate roots and costs went up, the alternate roots could start charging more registration fees, or charge users; people could choose among alternatives based on price, quality, and access to the TLDs they want to see. Competition would be good, though some alternates might have to shut down. Think about who finances the yellow pages: the users, or the people who are registered. Also, it's possible this could be entirely financed through voluntary donations.

It's conceivable we could completely escape from Verisign just through exercising our free will to choose alternate roots.

If your ISP won't switch over or you don't want to run your own nameserver.. there is a list of publicly available tier 2 servers that you can switch to that are offered by OpenNIC members.

Googling for OpenDNS returns OpenNIC on top, because that's exactly what it is. An open and democratic alternate DNS system. You really could at least Google around before coming up with an "original" idea like that ;P

Nothing.

OpenNIC does exactly that.

OpenNIC

Verisign has continued to be the #1 DNS provider (monopoly root control over the internet, supposedly) through intertia.

Not that I don't hate the bastards, given their effective monopoly.

My only point is that very little has to change to eliminate them.

As another person mentioned this already, e-mailing them is a waste of time unless you're a corporation with extra cash.

How do you fix this problem? DON'T USE THE ICANN ROOT SERVERS. Easy as that.

Plug: OpenNIC (for ICANN users) and OpenNIC (for OpenNIC (and its peers) users)

Wasn't OpenNIC created to prevent exactly this kind of abuse? People might just start using them if VeriSign carries on in this manner...

"The OpenNIC is a user owned and controlled Network Information Center offering a democratic, non-national, alternative to the traditional Top-Level Domain registries.

"Users of the OpenNIC DNS servers, in addition to resolving host names in the Legacy U.S. Government DNS, can resolve host names in the OpenNIC operated namespaces as well as in the namespaces with which we have peering agreements (at this time those are AlterNIC and The Pacific Root).

"Membership in the OpenNIC is open to every user of the Internet. All decisions are made either by a democratically elected administrator or through a direct ballot of the interested members and all decisions, regardless of how they are made, within OpenNIC are appealable to a vote of the general membership."

It sounds a whole lot better than the current system to me...

Done.

Ask and ye shall receive:

OpenNIC

Don't worry, it resolves on verisign's servers (for now).

Do not use Verisign's root servers. The zone files for .com and .net are available. (requires significant resources, but I am sure someone out there, such as larger ISPs will do this)

OpenNIC performs this very service with volunteer labor, a globally-distributed set of root servers, and several other alternative roots as well. Don't continue to be a slave to the machine.

I realize it has little to do with the topic at hand, but a random link to openNIC(http://www.opennic.unrated.net/) is neccesary anyway.

is anyone actually surprised? Nope. Not at all. But you don't have to play there game, (well you do still kinda, but you can at least play it on better terms) with OpenNIC. (Yes i'm plugging OpenNIC again so mod me down) Kinda like an Open Source ICANN replacment. It's not a seamless replacment and you have to use their DNS (naturally) but it does work.

You can use one of their TLD's like
.geek
.glue
.indy
.null
.oss
.parody

Or start your own (OK that is work, but at least it can be done.) and everything is done in a democratic and open fassion.

set your DNS to... 66.227.42.140 and click here to see what is there.

Remember the more people that use the system the better it gets.

There are GREAT ALTERNATIVES

OpenNIC has matured into a rather great truly democratic DNS Registry. I would highly recommend everyone support them. You can still support OpenNIC and have ICANN registeries, well everything except biz, but that's a whole nother can of worms ...

OpenNIC is also opennic.glue:
OpenNIC but the trouble is that you have your computer configured to use their domain servers, or you can't see any of the .glue, .geek, etc. TLDs.

OpenNICg t; (which was born out of a thread on k5) already has a .geek TLD. There's no registration charge -- the administrator of the domain will even host your .geek DNS for you if you ask nicely.

OpenNIC is a long way from Aunt Tillie-type mainstream exceptance, but I'm surprised the /. community isn't more conversant with it, with all the ICANN hate and all.

Just a quickie to plug OpenNIC. It's nifty, like www.yournamehere.geek. Or even create your own TLD altogeather. Someone should tell LA about this. I already emailed the mayor of Long Beach (just south of LA) but she is an idiot. Talked to her a few times, then helped another canidate with his campagne aginster her. I'm just getting off topic hre aren't I. The point being I am having a tough time getting any local govt to listen to reason to open source/alternate IT/anything not sole by a big name crop.

Drives me insane. Sorry for the rant.

OpenNIC is your friend.

This doesn't pertain to whether you should use DSL or Ethernet, but rather is a few things I've always thought ISPs should do. (I've had this almost life-long goal of starting an ISP for some reason...)

I own a domain, and use it primarily for the unlimited mail aliases. Every site I go to gets sitename@mydomain.com, which just forwards to my main address. If they start spamming, I can tell exactly who it is, and redirect (or block entirely) the mail. Why not give each customer a subdomain (customer.condo.com) where they get, say, 5 POP boxes, but unlimited aliases? Used effectively, this could *really* fight spam. (This is venturing more offtopic, but Cpanel seems to be the most popular web-based control panel; you could provide customers with some webspace and e-mail access. It's easy to use, but even great for geeks. You can get licenses for like $40/month, or possibly less.)

Another thing I've always thought ISPs should offer was NAT access. Rather than getting an external IP, they'd get an internal one and use your proxy. It'd save you from needing as many IPs, and it gives them great security -- unless you go out of your way to set it up, no one can connect to them. Of course you shouldn't force this upon people, but some people might *want* NAT. Offer it as a 'privacy' plan. (Heh, you could probably even charge extra, lol)

Something like Squid could really speed things up, especially if you only have a T1.

The last "If I ran an ISP..." item regards DNS. Maybe it's because Adelphia is so crappy (they have like 5 DNS servers, and whatever you have as primary ALWAYS goes down, so you're re-ordering the nameservers several times a week to make it work at all...), but I ended up using OpenNIC, which essentially is a 'democratic' TLD assigner; they have a lot of new TLDs not supported by 'real' DNS. (And, of course, lookups for regular TLDs work, too.) Not sure if you want to make it standard, but I'd be way impressed if an ISP gave me the choice of 'regular' DNS or OpenNIC DNS servers to use.

Oh! Don't forget to do your part and setup a good firewall. Another seemingly uncommon thing I've always thought ISPs should do was to do *good* egress filtering: filter traffic *leaving* your network too. I start to rant about this idea every time I read about a big DoS attack; if ISPs were more careful about what leaves their network, a lot of DoS attacks would simply get dropped at the attacker's ISP.

1) let's clean up ftp. real security options, performance options, etc.

i really believe that a little key management at the isp level (if enough isp participated) could really make a difference.

3) dns. i would drop .com, .org, maybe even .edu and .net. use the ccTLD with other localizations below that.

4) more ip addresses. ip6 would be nice, but if i'm starting over from scratch, just increasing the ip address from 32 to 48 or to 64 would help.

5) the ability to do a number of things in a slow, throttled-back fashion to run nicely in the background.

6) better printing protocols. lpd is a mess and the other printing protocols seem to problematic.

7) snmp. this seems to be getting better via v3. the real problem seems to be the software, not the protocol.

But that isn't a REASON.

Go back far enough, and the USA is British. Should UK government be in there too?

He asked "why should the US get TLDs to itself?". You haven't answered it, and everyone I ever hear try to respond has said the same you have.

Or, you can just go here and log in if you're already a member. (If not, see the first link and learn how to resolve the second one.)

The mass additions of TLDs, the hacking up of DNS to fix short-term problems...the Internet's changed a lot, and the new target audience is the web-only, Windows-using, Internet Explorerite. Other uses of the Internet are secondary at best, and need not be catered to.

Fortunately, as long as the backbone ISPs don't screw around too much, we can still use alternate DNS roots (like OpenDNS) that hopefully make better decisions.

Seems like any time a company gets big, it gets mean, evil, and totally unable to make the best technical decision.

I hope and pray that Red Hat never ends up there. So far, so good...

...wasted inquiries from DNS servers that don't know .elvis is not a TLD.

hey, with opennic, .elvis could very well be a tld someday. ;)

Someday's, I think that might be a good thing

Then again, there is OpenNIC and Freenet, so this may be already be happening in a minor way.

I hit .biz's from time to time.

How do I know? I use OpenNIC which voted not to support ICANN's .biz TLD, as it conflicted with Pacific Root's prior implementation of the .biz TLD. Therefore, any of these .biz's for ICANN registered sites get me a nice unresolvable domain error. Granted, I don't think any of those .biz's were actually being used properly, but I still found them.

All the info you could posisbly need about the .biz dispute

Sorry, that was a typo. Go Here.

You can get a .geek from OpenNIC.

To get a .indy domain, go to http://www.opennic.glue/tlds.html (or http://www.opennic.unrated.net/tlds.html for those without OpenNIC set up), which'll provide a link to http://www.opennic.indy/, which should have all the info you need. In short, mail the hostmaster. Policies are available there too...

Unfortunately, if you DON'T have your DNS set up to deal with OpenNIC, the .indy links above won't work, but it's fairly trivial to do so. I've been running with OpenNIC for months now, and haven't seen any DNS problems at all.

To get a .indy domain, go to http://www.opennic.glue/tlds.html (or http://www.opennic.unrated.net/tlds.html for those without OpenNIC set up), which'll provide a link to http://www.opennic.indy/, which should have all the info you need. In short, mail the hostmaster. Policies are available there too...

Unfortunately, if you DON'T have your DNS set up to deal with OpenNIC, the .indy links above won't work, but it's fairly trivial to do so. I've been running with OpenNIC for months now, and haven't seen any DNS problems at all.

To get a .indy domain, go to http://www.opennic.glue/tlds.html (or http://www.opennic.unrated.net/tlds.html for those without OpenNIC set up), which'll provide a link to http://www.opennic.indy/, which should have all the info you need. In short, mail the hostmaster. Policies are available there too...

Unfortunately, if you DON'T have your DNS set up to deal with OpenNIC, the .indy links above won't work, but it's fairly trivial to do so. I've been running with OpenNIC for months now, and haven't seen any DNS problems at all.

http://www.opennic.unrated.net/

It's a democratic, non-national set of dns servers that sit above the regular root server and offering additional top-level domain spaces such as:

• .glue for mutual peer root servers
  .indy organiztions and individuals of the independent media and arts
  .geek Duh!
  .null non-commercial and natural persons
  .oss Open Source Software projects
  .parody non-commercial parody work
  .bbs (bulletin boards, pending...)
  

By altering where you point your DNS, you get everything you always had, plus the above, plus more redundancy.

The two I know of are OpenNIC and AlterNIC, but there are probably many more.

If your DNS admin has some savvy, this link should work for you.
If not, visit
OpenNIC and then ask your DNS admin to support OpenNIC and erode ICANN's dictatorial regime.

I'm curious as to what exactly would happen if ICANN vanished off the face of the earth or everyone simply started ignoring them. As far as I can tell:

We'd need alternate root servers. This, at least, is easy, as OpenNIC and others provide excellent, alternate systems (OpenNIC in particular is *extremely* democratic -- nearly the opposite of ICANN).

We'd need a new centralized point for distribution of whois server information.

We'd need a new group of people to agree on which addresses should be allocated in the IP address space.

We'd need a new group of people to agree on well-known port numbers (and provide a centralized distribution point for this information) and a host of other numbers related to protocols. MIME types and MIBs fit in here. I've always thought it a shame that there isn't a centralized magic number registry, so if ICANN was replaced, I think it'd be nice to have a magic number database also available.

Anyone see any other problems with just ignoring ICANN?

a parallel namespace run in true freeware style.

You mean like OpenNIC?

This particular problem was brought up in an "Ask Slashdot" this spring by OpenNIC member Dr. Zowie. We put a bit of work into it, and now offer several proxying solutions for folks stuck behind the trasparant caches.

Cheers,
-robin

Nothing. Check out OpenNIC, one of several alternate roots for DNS.

Becuase I use an OpenNIC name server, which loads its own copy of the root zone, I never even noticed that there was a problem.

Another strong vote for distributed name systems.

-Chris

I think I should mention a new project that is in the works. The founder of OpenNIC, Robin Bandy, and I (Nathan Lunt) have been in discussions over the last couple of months to create a daughter project of the OpenNIC project for a democratically-controlled Certifying Authority modeled after OpenNIC. As such, we're looking at a situation where people will be able to get a certificate signed by a third party for, as it stands, free.

Such a project has enormous possiblities ranging from, as this thread discusses, cheap SSL ceritifcates for small websites, to potentially DRM applications as well, as mentioned in Robin's article here.

This project is only in the very infant stages, and has been off to a fairly slow start due to our busy schedules; however, once we are over the hump of policy creation and technical implementation, we should be well on our way to having a system of certification that is fair and within reach to every application imaginable.

HOWEVER, I do like the nothing I spend for dugnet.oss (ref OpenNIC)

While he may be leaving in November, do you really think that he will just go into submissive hiding? Hell no he won't, he'll go on to be one of the biggest advocates against ICANN, you can count on it.

Is this some type of new trend? Hell no it's not, basically it's a revolution, every now and then there needs to be someone to stir the pot up. It WILL happen in congress, it is ALWAYS happening in the supreme court, and well it's a little harder in the presidency, but has happened.

As usual, with anything ICANN related, it's time to plug OpenNIC again. Tired of ICANN, don't support them ... duh :-)

Actually it's already being designed. here ya go... basically it's a plugin for mozilla/later netscape releases ...

The internet was based off of the ideas of intellectuals and academics, and has turned into a world nearly exactly opposite of what it was initially intended to do. No I'm not against any porn sites or anything else that is "wrong" with the internet today, I'll leave that battle for the conservatives.

What we are seeing here is a group who likes the control they have and they will be damned if they are about to just give it up. And why should they, the only ones who are against them are the ones who have no real say in the matter, in terms of numbers. Have I purchased a few of the DNS entries that ICANN holds, of course, it's the only way that is widely accepted as a way to identify yourself on the internet.

So where do we go from here? Stop supporting ICANN and start supporting something worth supporting. I support OpenNIC, a free and democratic DNS root. And not some democracy that ICANN has created, a real democracy where everyone gets one vote and that's it. The most votes, wins. Simple majority rules type of governance. While they aren't widely advertised like some other Alternate TLD's I can say that they aren't interested in doing this for the money. They are interested in doing this to take away ICANN's power/influence on us all. If we stop financially supporting ICANN than there will really be no reason for them to exist, they will be a company without assests, which in the capitalistic society we Americans live in, sucks.

Basically I see it like this, if we can all band together and show that we as true computer intellectuals can become something great. A group that can out do the professionals. A group that is designed to have a fair DNS system. A group that is not ICANN. A group that is truly INTERNATIONAL. A group that knows that not everything has to be about money. Money is nice, but certainly some things are more important than money, and freedom happens to be one of them.

None-the-less ... check out opennic

ummm ... go here that's a link to OpenNic, which is exactly what you're asking for. Hell it goes one step further, everything is free.

All the technology -- and the software, too -- is out there. People just need to start using it.

That's a great idea, and is a service each of the roots should provide to their users.

Actually, we just built a server-side version of that at OpenNIC (which was intended to solve the transparant caching proxy issue, but could be used this way as well). It's set up to let folks who have to use ICANN DNS servers do web browsing in the OpenNIC namespace. With only a minor tweak to the the proxy config files, you could use it as you're describing.

You can see the quick instructions I wrote for using the proxy system st proxy0.opennic.unrated.net

-robin