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Afternic Sues ICANN, Claims Unfair Treatment

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the have-you-seen-my-goose-sauce? dept.

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.

3 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. With good reason by XneznJuber · · Score: 5

    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

    1. Re:With good reason by DNSjunkie · · Score: 5
      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.

  2. Re:Domain registration & distributed DNS by Plasmic · · Score: 5

    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.