Afternic Sues ICANN, Claims Unfair Treatment

gfoyle writes: "The NY Times is reporting (free registratration required) that the cash strapped Icann is being sued by Afternic for being denied entrance into the domain registration market. This is believed to be the first suit challenging Icann's authority over domain registrations." The NYT article points out that both Network Solutions and Register.com now offer domain resale services -- services on which basis Afternic says ICANN rejcted their application to be a top-tier registrar.

Comments

Re: International .tld's

[Asgard]

Well, there is a ".us". For example, there is the State of California site. Many US .gov-type sites arein the .us hiearchy. It is true that you don't see too many US .com's in ".us" though.

Why are we still dealing with these loosers ?

[RGRistroph]

I don't see a clear reason why my machine has to use a particular method of resolving a text address to an IP address. Why can't we add our own top level domains by making our machines use a different DNS server to resolve, say, *.fsf or *.slashdot or even *.natalie ?

If someone with a machine that can be a DNS server just appoints themselves head resolver honcho, then everyone who chooses to use the service can. Of course, perhaps Bruce and Eric might both start resolving *.communityloudmouth, but people will choose whose service to use individually, and I think that's the way it should be.

What would be needed is to set up the whole plan carefully, so that it was easy for users to assign different DNS servers to different blocks of domain names. This continuous annoyance would be fixed as people simply voted for the DNS servers they trusted. I for one would be delighted to point my DNS requests at a server that pledged to resolve etoy and etoys correctly, and ignored whatever judicial injuctions that the "official" top level DNS's choose to respect.

What has to be set up carefully is the tool which allows users to do this. If we make it easy for people to do what they want instead of what an incompetent committee rules, then the right things will happen. If you put useful information on machines with .fsf names, and make some simple java plugin that will cause the browser to resolve those correctly, then people will use it and these recurring domain name stories will become pointless noise.

Do the math: peer to peer DNS will not work.

[Simon Brooke]

I am amazed at the degree of ignorance that Slashdot readers show on this subject. Do the math! Suppose I want to visit a website I've never visited before, in a GTLD domain. My client makes a call to my DNS server. If it hasn't got the name in it's cache, it queries my ISPs DNS server; if it hasn't got the name in it's cache, it queries a root name server. The root name server issues it the NS record for the domain, and my ISP's DNS server then queries the authoritative name server for the domain. That's a maximum of four lookups. A CCTLD domain adds one, and each level of delegated subdomain adds another. But you're looking at a very small numbers of lookups.

By contrast in a peer to peer DNS network, in a world with many hundreds of thousands of DNS servers, to find an unknown, not commonly accessed domain would require tens of thousands of lookups if it were possible at all. At a tenth of a second per lookup, it would take about two hours to resolve the average domain name. In the mean time, because the load on DNS servers would have increased by three orders of magnitude, either far mor powerful servers would have to be used, or the DNS system would grind to a halt.

It's a technologically illiterate suggestion. Anyone who made it, go back and do maths 101.

With good reason

[XneznJuber]

According to the court filing, ICANN just doens't want to give reseller privledges to Afternic because of past violations of domain registration policies. While Register.com and Network Solutions are themselves not very customer friendly, Afternic went as far as massregistering domain names under made up names of people and companies, squatted on them, and then resold them. ICANN is is worried that if they let Afternic become a reseller, they'll take thier list of 5000 or so choice domains (and their equivants when the new TLDs become available) that ICANN obtained from afternic internal documents and set them aside in a higher priced area. It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out in court

Re:With good reason

[DNSjunkie]

You are nothing but an ignorant troll. Have you ever been to afternic.com? I've been a member of afternic for a long time now. Afternic is an independent third party exchange for domain names -- they merely provide a platform whereby owners of domain names can auction them; afternic the company itself does not auction any names; they are an exchange, not a broker or domain owner. Afternic has never violated any ICANN policy.

Where is the court filing that you speak of? I find your claim to be outrageous, and completely un-found.

In an completely one-sided advisory, which is clearly propaganda, ICANN states:

"In investigating Afternic's application for accreditation, ICANN discovered that Afternic's web site presented many offers to sell domain names based on other company's names, some with remarks reflecting the abusive nature of the offers. One company name, for example, was offered with the remark that it would be an "Excellent domain for a reseller, owner, or competitor of" the company (this example was offered at a starting bid of $125,000)....Currently, Afternic's site is offering many other domains incorporating well-known business, celebrity, and government agency names..."

Nobody likes cybersquatters, myself included, but how is this different from how Network Solutions or any other company operates in this market? You can go to register.com or Network Solutions and register anything you want, no matter what law or trademark it violates. That is between the user and the entity which feels it is being violated. The same thing is true on afternic. Just like EBAY, with almost 200,000 auctions it would be impossible to actively police everything.

Afternic did not encourage these people to purchase these names, and they fully comply with ICANN's dispute resolution process, as wells requests from trademark holders, etc.

It's the whole system that sucks!

[SecretAsianMan]

<IMHO>

Like the subject says, its the whole system that sucks! I say we need an international entity responsible for domain name assignment and dispute resolution, and that each country that wishes to participate in the Internet must acknowledge the entity's authority. Maybe a UN-sponsored organization? Is this too unreasonable in the long run?

</IMHO>

Perhaps good may come of this

[vsync64]

Remember back in the day, when there weren't that many domain names, a .com didn't run out and grab .org and .net as well, and most personal sites were of the form www.someplace.edu/~thatguy?

With the whole issue of the trampled namespaces, plus the many legal issues, I wonder if this may push people away from registering a bazillion more domains. Hmm... Nope. "It doesn't end in .com? That ain't a real Web site!"

Domain registration & distributed DNS

[Rupert]

Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about.

It seems to me that instead of having all this ICANN accreditation nonsense, any authoratitive DNS server should be world-writable, with some form of digital signature required to update an existing domain, but unregistered domains go to anyone who requests them. Billing could be done post-facto, or not at all.

Further, why not scrap the whole DNS heirarchy? Every ISP has at least two DNS servers, and they all talk to the upstream DNS servers until you get to the root servers. DNS should be made peer-to-peer, not top down, and the need for ICANN and it's 5M$/year budget goes out of the window.

At the time of writing, this was a first post.

Re:Domain registration & distributed DNS

[Plasmic]

Do you realize how much DNS traffic is passed over the Internet? If there was no central registry that told DNS servers "go to this IP for info on this domain," all DNS queries would somehow propogate in "peer-to-peer" fashion until the appropriate DNS server heard the query (?). That would be remarkably slow and wasteful, similar to the Gnutella search mechanism. Except, in the case of Gnutella, the whole point of the topology is to maintain distributedness at the cost of response time and bandwidth. One cannot make such a case for DNS.

Okay, so maybe you are picturing an architecture along the lines of BGP (large networks share routing information about each other all over the world with no central "Internet route server"). Well, that's a nice concept, except that every DNS server in the world would have to maintain an entire copy of the DNS database (just as most routers employing BGP on the Internet maintain an entire copy of the Internet's routing table via Autonomous System Numbers). The key difference is that the DNS database is many orders of magnitude larger than a "BGP database." In addition, you can't summarize domain names like you can with IP address blocks (i.e. DNS CIDR = oxymoron).. and remember, you said no hierarchy, which would imply that you don't pull "views" of the DNS database from any sort of central/upstream DNS server.

When you speak so vaguely ("DNS should be made peer-to-peer, not top down"), it sounds good.. but that statement carries no real weight in any discussion approaching technical viability. If you're merely speaking idealistically (e.g. "in a perfect world, we would be able to implement DNS in a distributed manner in such a way that it didn't suck"), I agree wholeheartedly.

This notion can definitely be explored further, but it's safe to say that this is not a simple solution, and I daresay that without some fundamental modifications to basic concepts such as "peer-to-peer" and "no hierarchy," very little progress would be made in seeking a superior solution. I don't see any technical merit in your proposal, so the only motivation is "ICANN is bad, now we don't need them."

The next logical step is to fix ICANN, not break DNS.

"partners" Stopped Working, but "www10" Is Good

[GeekLife.com]

Which you can access through this convenient link.

Of course, this side-steps the issue of whether it's ethical to take someone's content for free that they are requesting you to register for.
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Re:"partners" Stopped Working, but "www10" Is Good

[GeekLife.com]

"free" doesn't always mean "no money". The NY Times gets higher advertising rates by showing off their registration numbers. By bypassing their registration, you are lowering their overall registration numbers and (in principal) earning them less advertising money. So, while it doesn't cost you any money to register, it does cost them money for you not to register.

(and, by the way, the partners link does still appear to be working for me, though it didn't in a previous story)
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Re:Perhaps good may come of this - Different now

[thesparkle]

I wish I still had some of the auto-responders from the InterNIC when I used to be the DNS Admin for an ISP. They went like this..

"Thank you for your submission. Currently, InterNIC processes over 600 domain submissions a week. Please be advised, that your registration will take up to three weeks to process. Also, there is a one domain per organization limit. Multiple registrations will be rejected"

Back then, all registrations were done by hand, (I remember Robert used to handle all of ours). Only ISP's or similar networking organizations could have a .net TLD (that was the hottest TLD to get, not .com!). .orgs were limited to provable non-profit organizations. Almost any educational institution could get an .edu now they are limited to four-year or graduate schools only. I remember getting .edu TLD's for a stenography school, a technical school, a grade school and a for profit scholarship company.

It was very different back then.

Oh well, I used to also walk 8 miles uphill both ways in the snow in July when I was a boy... :)

A simpler solution?

[FreeUser]

The political problem is trying to overcome the F.U.D. that will be kicked up by the powers that be when a system is created that cannot be 'sued' and from which names cannot be revoked because they are offensive, or because some stupid corporation is scared of them

This FUD is easilly gotten around.

Hack Mozilla and other browsers to recognize a different prefix as html, but using the new Name Service. Perhaps something like "alt://" instead of "http://" Allow the user to define one or the other as the default.

Then, whenever someone tries to look up alt://fucktheicann.com they'll get the anti-icann site, while http://fucktheicann.com isn't resolved because the ICANN has "reserved" it. (Disclaimer, the previous example is entirely fictional, I have no idea if such a domain exists or how ICANN would respond to it if it did).

One could go a step further, in inviting all of the country code TLDs to participate in both systems, such that the integrity of .us, .de, .uk, etc. remains intact even while .com, .org, .net are subverted and countless new TLDs emerge.

This could probably be hacked using the existing DNS system, or an improved version with better security features. Names could be given on a first come, first serve basis (automated), with no provisions for arbitration whatsoever (take it up with the other party, if you get a court order, send the police to there house, don't bother us).

history...

[tensionboy]

1999 will go down in history as the year your mom found out about the Internet.

and 2000 is the year that attorneys found out about it.

Re:Good for Afternic

[vsync64]

It is now the domain of the corporations that have turned the web from a text-based, dull place into the multimedia experiance that people want to see today.

By "multimedia experiance" you mean "crap".

Icann is right

[falloutboy]

With regards to everyone who thinks we should let anyone have any TLD they can add to their own DNS: anarchy is bad, mmmkay? Practically speaking, it just simply would not work. How many people would try to take Hotmail.com and map it to their dialup linux box (or slashdot.org, for that matter)?

Icann is absolutely right for turning down Afternic. Its companies and people like them that prevent regular people from buying domains with simple, easily remembered names.

A decent analogy would be if a person or company tried to buy all the 800/877/toll free prefixed telephone numbers that spell something, in order to resell them at a later date. Its irritating at the very least, and although IANAL, I suspect it is illegal.

This just isn't working out

[haplo21112]

Can't anyone tell that the system that is currently in place just isn't working out... The Registration system needs fixing and it needs fixing fast.
1. I agree needed are more TLD's, but they need to be logical ones. Sex sites on .sex, Map sites on .map, ISP's on .net or .isp, only real companies as .com's etc.
2. There need to be rules and the registration services need to enforce them. aka if your not a company you don't get a .com
3. First come first served, end of story. If you register xxxx.yyy its yours unless there is a superior claim. ie mcdonalds.com should belong to the company, but if you register mcdonalds.fam because thats your family name no one cna take it away.
4. Trademarks mean nothing on the internet, and should not be enforcable. see above.
5. A new central authority, the current ones don't work.
6. Registration services cannot own domain names, or horde domain names that they do not use as part of their business.
7. Domain names are the property of the person who registers them, the fee is simply for the up keep of the central domain records, so your DNS server can be found.
8.Owners have the right to move to a different service if they so desire at anytime.
9. Anyone can provide registration services, just like networksolutions, register.com whatever.
10. Domain names cannot be suspended or taken away, unless you can provide a superior claim, TRADEMARKS do not count. You must simply have existed longer doing what you are doing on the internet...first come first served again.
11. You have the right to a single top level domain. If you have xxxx.yyy you cannot own xxxx.zzz as well unless it is providing entirely different content and services. This is common sense stuff, that personally i had always thought was just standard practice until I really started paying attention to internet politics.