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European ccTLDs To ICANN: "We Won't Pay!"
Thirty European country-code Top Level Domain operators have gotten together and told ICANN
they won't pay
the full amount of dues that ICANN says they owe. (NYT article, free reg. req.) Not good news for ICANN -- when you owe someone $100, you have a problem, but when you owe someone $1,000,000, they have a problem. The
domain-name operators
see
ICANN
as a U.S., not international, organization, and worry that their "tenuous and largely undefined" relationship with ICANN allows the latter to reassign curatorship of their domain-name databases -- as has already once been attempted.
How so? The small nation could fill its own domain with whatever crap it wants, but what could it do to the rest of the world?
the "United Nations Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers" - then the US can refuse to pay also!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Welcome to the *real* world. The 'Internet' isn't a utopia where everyone get's along.. Technically, the internet doesn't really exist. It's a bunch on indipendant networks that all interconnect with eachother.
You don't understand what the Internet it. It's an international network. It doesn't matter what it is technically, or who invented it. The non-US internet using population is exploding. It connects people all over the world and belongs to the world now.
We can have the wonderful situation where everyone tries to set up their own root servers.
Or the US can let go of it's hegemony.
And try to stick your head out of the narrow American sandpit.
Yeah, the moderator system is kinda weird that way. The first two marked it as "funny", which of course was my intent, but the last marked it as "insightful", and the most recent moderator description is the one that shows up.
I guess he/she thought I was being deep or something...
You've got to be kidding me! I can't believe that a group with this kind of authority would presume to charge for country domains!
What are they gonna do? Give ".fr" to someone else?
Maybe I'm just understanding this wrong, but, man. The audacity of some American institutions never ceases to amaze/disgust me. (I am a US citizen)
-JimTheta, jimtheta@beer.com
My stupid web site
Just one more proof (along with the generic TLD namespaces) that the Internet was not well thought out (from an administrative standpoint - technically it works great) at its conception. Someone decided, by fiat, what to do, and that's what we're stuck with now. No wonder people get ticked; I would too if my online presence was being handled in a willy-nilly fashion.
Until the Internet has a governing body that fairly represents all interests, there are going to be problems. Didn't we just have a story about the ICANN board being stacked in favor of corporate interests? That's what I'm talking about here.
(I also think that all TLDs should be cc's, or .int for truly international concerns, with the other 6 existing and 7 proposed TLDs as standard 2LDs underneath them. No grabbing your trademark in all other available 2LDs either, leave them for others that also have a valid claim to the name - but I suppose that can be left to the individual country's trademark laws. But that's another issue.)
Constitutionally Correct
It could provide a haven for people to run their own domains without being sued by the likes of Mattel. What a disaster that would be.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Damn you Europeans and the Vespas you rode in on! Don't you know we're the only ones allowed to not pay dues to international organizations!
I need to switch to decaf...
That is right - You cannot register a domain because ONE American corporation is updating their systems. ICANN are powerless against the might of NSI, and most people think that NSI (those people that value your domain so much that they will take it back at the drop of a hat and don't have any security over changes to any domain name) should be banned from being a registrar.
The Internet might have originated in America (probably designed by people all around the world though), but it is now a world-wide phenomenon, and should be treated as such. Countries shouldn't have to suck up to an American company or organisation to manage their TLD for them - the TLD should be owned by the people of the country it represents, and a non-profit organisation should administer all domain names (i.e., charge people for the admin charges and running costs for a domain name, but not any more - like Nominet in the UK). People can then resell these domains for profit, but provide services with them.
NSI are the bad boys at the root of this all.
++++++++++
Eating the Earth beneath our Feet
You: What the F*@K for?
TD: Oh, you know - stuff. Petrol and bits of wear and tear.
You: Let's see the meter.
TD: Er... I forgot to put it on.
You: Look, here's £10, give me a call when you've got an itemised bill.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Always look to the contract. I'm sure ICANN is obligated to honor previous contracts before it existed. What does the contract say with respect to fees that need to be paid?
Or, if they've signed a contract with ICANN already then they've probably already agreed to the prices. If they signed a contract that stated the prices would be arbitrarily set by ICANN without advanced notification, then maybe they should have thought a bit before signing it.
Or, they could attempt to form a new organization that promotes its own root level domain names and convince the rest of the world to point to them for them. The choice is theirs.
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
(This is the way that the IPv6 name service was run, for a while, before ICANN and other big names pushed their way in.)
DNS requests, once sent, don't follow a simple trail, but rather spread out like ripples, through a web of DNS servers, as far as is needed to get a response.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I can see their point. The creation and behaviour of ICANN has been, um, more than a little weird. Does anyone have a suggestion as to an appropriate place where the countries of the world should have met to discuss the creation of an ICANN-like body?
Does this mean that we're going to see nationalization of the net, where we'll go through border checkpoints when leaving the country? Or DNS entries for outside our country won't work?
Does anyone have a suggestion as to an appropriate place where the countries of the world should have met to discuss the creation of an ICANN-like body?
I would recommened Denny's, they are open 24 hours, have great coffee, and you can order breakest, lunch or dinner at any type of the day or night!
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
ICANN certainly did have the authority, which was assigned to them by the US government, which also, BTW, had the authority, as the whole DNS system was based around a US based government orginizations. How can you possibly say 'You have no right'. They have the right to do whatever they what. Don't like it? Kiss off and make your own name resolution system. Period. End of story.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Yeah, but its killer app is undoubtedly the World Wide Web. The reason internet connections are so commonplace today is cos people want *web* access (and, also, email). Without such a hypertext system, there wouldn't be half as many domain names to manage.
Ok, I hear you say, but if it hadn't been for the www, other hypertext systems such as (the US-designed) Gopher would've prevailed. Quite right. But the same is true of the Internet. The point is, the way things are in *this* reality, all this Internet money is sloshing around because people want to use this European-designed system.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
It's sickening that they now have to 'pay' so icann 'non-profit, of course' can 'manage' something that they have no reason to interfere with. Those TLD's were set out a long time ago as THE WAY IT WAS GOING TO WORK.
Why should icann collect a fee from these people? Just so it can force them to pass those fees on to their users, for somethign that should be free in the first place?
Registries are not required in order to maintain the other TLD's. A small handful of DNS pointers that have really never changed, and are no different (other than being TLD) than any other are all it amounts to. .com, the whole network solutions fiasco. Both think their way is best.
Starting a new TLD, from a technical point of view, is EXTREMELY EASY. I bet most poeple have no idea how easy it really is. It's the politics that make it hard.
One side sees an ideal, whereby geographic names were picked, and countries left to do what they want beneath them.. another sees profit and greed, as in
That is patently rediculous. They administer 100% of the cost of registering those domains themselves... why should the amount the domain is used cause more or less to be paid? what ever happened to honor?
Actually.. ditching .com, .net, and .org, and getting back to ccTLD's, (even .us.. it's there you know) and having strict registration types (ie: 1 domain per network, period...) and then setting up ANOTHER lookup system for the WWW would be JUST FUCKIN GREAT!
Actually, although these are not your run of the mill pc-based servers, they *are* standard unix boxes (albeit large ones, but not million dollar boxes probably) running standard BIND.
And afiak, they are not all run by netsol... they are running in several different locations, run by netsol as well as several universities and such, spread around the old internet. They are big machines.. but should not cost millions a year to run.
See the problem though? If I was running a root server from *my* big corporation years and years aog, (or from the research lab I head), i would have been honored to do it. But.. if some compnay like netsol is making DUMPTRUCKLOADS of money off what I am providing for free..w ell.. I want CASH!
See where this leads?
I'm pretty sure there's a lesson in there somewhere that international committees should be listening to.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This is going to be a long rant, but I think people are really forgetting what the internet *really* is, down at it's core, and how it was formed.
DNS was simply a system to provide an english name to an IP address. It was a convienience. Other countries wanted names. So the powers that RAN it at the time where nice enough to give them some top level domains for them to use. The internet wasn't some utopian design by an international committee. It's a gigantic hack. The wonderful 'World Wide Web'. It was MADE UP? Who has rights on it? Do you? Do I? Does ANYONE?
Right now I can make up my own naming scheme, create a protocol to implement it, and run it. Even hack it into a web browser, so it resolves via my naming system. Can any international orginization now demand I run it a certain way?
HECK NO.
As far as I'm concerned, any country who doesn;t want ICANN to run their domains, SET UP YOUR OWN DARNED ROOT SERVERS. Period. It could very well run this way. Now, ICANN most certainly, for their own sake, point out to these external servers, but that's common sense.
Yes, this also means that other countries could pull stuff out of their rears, and perhaps even have domains that don't resolve outside of a given country. That's great. I have phone systems in countries that cannot be reached by the outside world, becouse they simply don;t talk to eachother.
Welcome to the *real* world. The 'Internet' isn't a utopia where everyone get's along.. Technically, the internet doesn't really exist. It's a bunch on indipendant networks that all interconnect with eachother.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
What confused me about the "ICANN is an American effort, thus why should we put our money into it" ideal is that the majority of people on the ICANN board of directors currently are FROM Europe. Thus the majority of interests represented are from there, not from here. Odd...
Todd
Listen to me Peter, I want this bench. You go sit on that bench over there, and if you're good I'll tell you the rest of
You say that as if it was a bad thing.
I think "disaster" is perhaps the wrong word.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Interesting link
The catch: "Free login required"
Not that curious
> The Internet was invented by scientists and engineers in the US
No, by scientists and engineers around the world.
They don't want to pay what they own the UN - funny old world
Looks like someone else needs to read the article. It said nothing about Private Companies registering TLD's without permission. It talked about Companies who are (or were) registering TLD's for Countries with permissions. In some cases those Countries wanted control back.
If the Countries legally gave up the TLD to the company, then tough. ICANN shouldn't do anything about it. If the TLD was given to someone other than the country and they are proving to not be acting in the countries interests, then perhaps some intervention is needed.
forgey
And the US doesn't need to provide DNS resoltuion for Europe either.
You *DO* know that they own and RUN the primary DNS root servers, right?
Hrm, suddenly they do matter, as long as they want someone else to provide the root DNS entries for them.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
The basis of your post is that there is centralized control over name services and that if that centralized control is lost, then the centralized control over the physical network will be lost. The premise of the latter part of this statement, that there is some centralized physical network, is entirely incorrect. For example, European Internet traffic probably doesn't pass through the United States en route to South Africa (not to say that it couldn't; I'm just pointing out that there's no friggin' global backbone, per se). Decentralized name services could be designed in such a way that they would be just fine and the Internet is already decentralized, physically and logically, for the scope of this discussion.
Conclusion: This isn't setting a precedent for a chaotic global communications breakdown. It's just the next logical step along the road to virtual nirvana.
For related discussion, see this Kuro5hin story about it...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Really now. I never knew that DARPA was an internation orginization. :-P
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
That was what ICANN proposed in a meeting recently. .fr is run by INRIA, the french government's network research agency (l'Institut National du Recherche en Informatique et Automatique). It seemed a logical choice when Jon Postel handed out control of the TLDs. INRIA is a mix of altruistic university researchers and profit seeking business interests, but they are overseen by the government's research and economy ministries, and operate for the good of french citizens.
.fr administered by a british or american company, but do we really want that? The french sure don't.
But now the ICANN is proposing yanking TLD control from not-for-profit and government agencies, and giving it to any private company who will sign a binding contract ensuring for-profit operation with a percentage going to ICANN and Network Solutions.
It would be a wry bit of poetic justice to see
This issue is one of control, in the absence of any formal agreements. There has been an informal agreement since Jon Postel created the whole domain system, which has been to promote the usefulness of the internet. Now commercial interests would like to destroy that informal agreement, and create an inflexible formal one which promotes only profitability with the flow of money heading back towards whoever controls the root of the DNS tree. Freedom be damned, and ignore sovereignity of other countries to do what they please.
This should lead to a breakup of the current system in the next few years. With any luck, the commercial internet will collapse into obscurity, and the freedom craving internet will flourish with new, open, technological innovation. So get hacking!
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
So let me get this straight. ICANN need US$4.3 million per year to do what Jon Postel used to do in his spare time, for free? Nice work if you can get it. I see we're going to have some fun in Yokohama this summer...
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Yep, who invented something which ended up being used in a manner it *WAS NEVER INTENDED TO BE*. I'd say that the creation of such things as Mosiac and email would have more to do with the surge in popularity of the internet more then the advent of HTTP and HTML. They could just as easily be implemented using one of *MANY* protocols that existed at the time, including gopher.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
If you won't read the material that the posting is about, then don't bother trying to comment on it. It just annoys people who make the effort to learn what the conversation is about.
It's good to see that these people are using their natural senses.
If I had just recieved a bill for $1 million USD from a company I had no contract with and no agreed pricing scheme, I'd sure as hell do the same.
ICANN will get their money once they offer up some sort of pricing scheme, and the nations have offered enough to let ICANN meet the budget, so it's not a 'I hate you and I'm not paying'.
What is interesting is the idea that they may want soverign control of their domains. While it does allow a country to do what it wishs with said domain, all it would take is one small whacko nation going for it to screw it up..
.sig: Now legally binding!
You may flame now.
Just replace the www with partners and viola... instant access.
Try this link
Eric
You can't do this anymore. The .com zone is not available for download. FTP to rs.internic.net. You simply can't download it without a login id.
;)
I'll agree with you that the US-running the root-servers is alarming to some people. But equate that to cdlu, Emmett and CowboyNeal running #slashdot on OPN... It's not that bad, now is it?
Still leaves you w/the problem of individual entities having control over other people's domain names.
We need a system where people can publish the information about their own domain names, but with enough authoritative info. attached to it as it is distributed so that it is easily distinguishable from info. published from anyone else.
Oh, and, by the way, I don't think cheap jibes at Jon Postel's expense do anyone any credit. Jon was (in my opinion) a thoroughly nice guy, and, more to the point, did a tremendous amount of work to get this network we all use up and working. OK, so some of the decisions he made years ago long before anyone realised how commercially significant they were going to turn out to be need to be revised, but that's a fairly normal thing in fast growing technologies.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
It seems to me, that in many cases decentralisation of TLDs would be a good thing. At present, everyone in the world shares root DNS servers for the top-level. These have pointers to other servers, generally different for each TLD, so that other naming entities can divide up the namespace as they see fit.
.uk, Nominet could tell every ISP here to use their nameservers for TLD resolution, rather than the root nameservers, and those TLDs that aren't UK based can have pointers to the relevant countries nameservers.
.int could have different resolutions depending what country you are in. Obviously, this would again need a centralised naming system for .int, but would allow companies to have a universal name that maps to different hosts depending where in the world you are performing the lookup. No more having to guess the closest mirror to you - it would all be taken care of behind the scenes by DNS.
But it isn't really necessary for everyone to use the same root nameservers. For instance, here in
This requires that all countries running TLD servers (or the new root servers) work together to ensure that each TLD in their space map to each others root servers, but it does mean that each country is then responsible for their own DNS completely.
This could allow several nice effects, for example a TLD for
Also, it would lead to a more logical ability to have national URLs. For instance, within the UK, I might be able to refer to mega-pizza.ltd, and have this available to non-UK users (and of course, UK users) as mega-pizza.ltd.uk. This simply requires that each company avoids TLD codes in their own TLD.
The only problem I see with my idea is that every user is then at the mercy of their country's root nameservers to resolve to the correct nameserver for each TLD. This could possibly lead to governments denying access to nameservers in other countries for political reasons, but I can't really see this being a problem in practice. And in any case, if you feel really strongly, you could always choose to resolve from other countries domains if you choose. And I can see some governments preferring not to trust US companies for their nameserver backbone.
Sure I can. It's a pain in the ass to wade through the postings of people who are playing catch-up with the conversation, because they don't use the URL out of principle.
The tools to be an informed part of this dialogue are in front of the guy. He's refusing to use them. I'm justified in telling the person that that's irritating.
If I walked into Calculus class and asked the professor to teach me how to add, the prof would get pissed off. There is an appropriate level of conversation, and that ain't it.
ICANN wanted the money now, and would make an agreement later. Is it just me, or is puting money down before you know what the product is just bad business sense? What the hell was ICANN thinking?
Ciao
nahtanoj
They don't seem to be up to doing much else. The best rant I've seen about what ICANN are planning for our future is at:
http://www.yelm.freeserve.co.uk/dns/
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
ICANN: Pay up!
ccTLDs: ICANNT!
And if the systems were set to block domain transfers to Europe? Suddenly, European businesses would re-discover the European markets, and the US can go to hell in a handbasket.
The US name servers only have power over Europe IF:
- Europeans want to visit US sites
- The European name servers can't obtain the mappings for themselves (legally or otherwise)
- A central European name service can't out-compete ICANN in pricing
- The IP numbers can't be re-mapped effectively to a new set of names (this would require a translator, at one of the transatlantic gateways)
- The US Government puts economic pressure on Europe to comply with internal US decisions.
If a single one of these fails to stand, then the EU will be liberated from US influence and be free to run their own nameservers without interference from ICANN and with no regard to historical power bases.It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Nope. When I ran my own mini-ISP, I simply did a domain transfer of the US domains I was interested in visiting, and ran the entire name service on a local basis. It's not exactly considered "polite", and DNS transfers are certainly high on the list of "dubious" activities, but given the choice of causing a few milliseconds of totally mis-placed irritation (repetitive DNS accesses are, after all, much heavier on the bandwidth and the DNS server), or having to depend on potentially cruddy admining, then I'll choose personal freedom, quality I can REALLY be sure of, and independence from morally suspect organizations, and you'll just have to go and be irritated.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Being able to do something is not the same as having the right to do something. Might does not make right. Blinking idiot American.
I think the DNS system needs major help - the namespace is just so restricted it's almost screaming for naming collisions (instant trademark arguments).
Here's my suggestion: you need a multi-dimensional naming system (where the dimensions themselves can be dynamically defined) - essentially, having each site being identified by a combination of keywords & categories that IT presents itself as (title, name, author, reason-for-existing, related subjects, version, etc), and keywords & categories that OTHER ppl assign to it (where hosted, date/timestamp, ratings, etc).
Because of the multidimensionality, you can pick things based only on specific categories (and either exclude or include items which have other categories, at the risk of getting back a HUGE list of items).
This can be taken a little further by marking the SOURCE of the keywords/categories with known identities (so you can ignore somebody's irritating opinions, or put preferences on some "professional" societies's categorizations).
Take all this information, distribute it around ala Gnutella/Freenet/search engine-style technology, where the publisher of a given categorization of data holds the "master" copy of that description.
The existing DNS addresses could be a subset of this type of addressing scheme (category: DNS, value: www.boing.com) and boolean filters could be applied (e.g., find `category'=`regexp' or (`category'=`regexp' and `category'=`regexp').
With this kind of setup, you wouldn't have to worry about naming collisions, since the names being submitted would always be tagged by the entity doing submission, so you would be able to tell the difference between a key describing CocaCola being submitted by the CocaCola company, or one being submitted by a fan or critic.
You also won't have to worry about anyone controlling a central naming point, since each entity would be responsible for publishing their own categorization/names.
Each entity would also have control over which categorizations/names that they make available to OTHERs who ask them to resolv a search spec (which will prob. make for interesting censorship analysis).
Of course, with this kind of setup, the cumulative keys will prob. end up being larger than most of the data they are pointing to :)
Someone else argued that no real "backbone" exists anyway. They clearly didn't look at the NSFNet backbone maps, which show that a single, definable network spanned much of the US and carried most of the Global Internet traffic.
(Actually, I think that the US =IS= the hub for pretty well all international Internet traffic. It would not surprise me if Europeans WOULD have to go via America to reach Africa or Australia.)
Getting back to the disaster thing, though, it would be a freeing time for Internet users if the backbone, as it exists today, ceased to exist and all traffic went via a web of house-to-house connections. It would also be a lot more reliable. The Internet was designed to be invulnerable to a nuclear attack, but piping data through a handful of nodes connected with no alternative paths is not very proof against anything.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I read the article, but didn't catch what agreements are already in place? I assume that the countries are registering domains and are happily using the services that ICANN provides, but don't want to pay the bill when it comes around? Oh, wait, they'll pay a part of the bill so ICANN can meet its budget. Isn't that kind of like me taking a cab to my house, then when the driver says, "That'll be 10 dollars", I say, "Here's 5.75 because that should cover your gas and what the company pays you."
Maybe I'm confused... someone correct me if thats the case...
Run. I like water. Push My rutabaga.
If/when resource discovery makes it into the name servers, centralized control will simply cease to exist. And why limit it to name servers? IPv6 makes provision for decentralized IP numbering.
Then, there's the physical network. You don't HAVE to use the backbone routers to connect to others, or vice versa. Anyone can build their own backbone and provide access to anyone on the Internet.
With a rapid increase in distributed projects, cheap home networking, etc, the very notion of a "backbone" is doomed, in the long run. It's just a matter of when.
All in all, I'd say that ICANN, AT&T and Bell have a LOT to worry about. Either they rule an Empire, as malevolent co-dictators, or they're sidelined, forgotten and broke.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I headed my country's relationship with ICANN for a while and let me tell you, if it wasn't because I've worked with American companies all my life I would have NEVER been able to work with nor understand ICANN. I can see why other countries feel like this is a US organization imposing fees to other countries. Hmm, well, now that i think about it, IT IS!. sure there's the at large. sure, they meet in places like cancun, and sure there are people from all over the world in there, but let's be realistic: the Internet was invented by scientists and engineers in the US, and was spread initially by US lead acedemia at first and by mostly US based companies more recently. it's now used by everyone and their middle class cousins, but there's GOT to be a centralized way of handling domains (eventually resolving will come to this one place, otherwise it would be chaos(was that.com resovled by the australia server? oh but it wasn't synchronized to the gualalunpur server!...)). So now they have to pay. Now, is the amount fair? I dunno...
just my 0.02Kb
========================
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
I was reading somewhere that several developing countries are refusing payment too, partly out of cost, partly for idealistic reasons (rich american capitalists exploiting poor). Of course, the registries could just drop unpaid accounts.