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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.
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 ?
.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.
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
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
<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>
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
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!"
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
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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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..
.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.
:)
"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
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...
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.
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
.us, .de, .uk, etc. remains intact even while .com, .org, .net are subverted and countless new TLDs emerge.
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
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).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.