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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.
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
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
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!
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..
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..
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.
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.
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
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
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)
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)
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
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