When Worlds Collide: The New Dot-Biz And The Old

angkor writes: "It seems the new dot biz domain conflicts with domains registered in an alternative root system." This is where all the alternative root servers conflict with the (ahem) interesting name choices made by the ICANN board.

Comments

uh...so?

[kaisyain]

You aren't paying for some global .biz...you are paying for a .biz served up by root-servers.net or whatever. That other guy charges you money to get served by a .biz that his servers push out. I could create my own .com hierarchy internally on my network but no one is going to be ludicrous enough to write a news story suggesting there is some kind of monumental conflict.

ICAAN should feel free to ignore whatever anyone else does. After all, this guy ignored what NSI/ICAAN were doing.

Causing a collision anywhere on the Internet is ethically wrong.

a. He presumes his ethics are the same as everyone else's.

b. The collision only occurs when you use non-standard root nameservers. Which is pretty much what you expect to have happen when you try to have two roots in a hierarchy.

Let's DO something!

[the_tsi]

Instead of talking about this, let's get our act together and move.

The collective of geeks and what-have-you that are here on slashdot probably have, at their control (or at their influence), a large enough portion of the DNS system to make this kind of thing either a significant issue or a moot point.

Personally, I say those of us who can push for adding the alternative rootservers to our root caches. You don't lose any functionality from the current TLDs, and you gain lookups in the "alternative" ones. Enough people following "alternative" makes it mainstream.

I was pissed when InterNIC started charging for domains -- as were the folks who (unlike me and most of us) got off their asses and started the other registries. Now is when their work is going to pay off or go the way of Beta videotapes. :)

Just from Internet "precedent," ICANN shouldn't be able to push around the existing .biz registrants/registrars. So what if they're "the" governing body? The thing that goes on the internet is what works and what is used. Look at DNS itself! One of the biggest hack-jobs in the history of the net. Now it's one of the most necessary protocols/services.

ICANN obviously has pissed us off -- look at how many headlines there have been in the past week on /..

Tomorrow morning I'm going to ask my supervisor (the owner of a regional ISP) if we can adopt the other root servers. Get out there and ask your boss or ISP or company's net admin or your father or whoever to make the change for you, too.

-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...

Don't do it!

[davew]

You're right, there's a fair amount of power wrapped up in the various slashdot readers. And this slashdot reader sure as hell won't be joining you in your protest.

I know it's trendy to slag off ICANN. I know everyone has their problems with it. I know everyone feels like the only thing they can do against this new authority is to shout about it, or to "rebel". And in that context, splitting the root seems like a fantastic idea.

Don't do it, guys.

Internet "precendent" says that we've tried to work out problems through consensus building. Seriously! We get together in groups like RIPE and NANOG, present our ideas, and try to build consensus. We can fork, yeah, but we fork as little as possible, because when we fork, we split the user base and we are all weaker because of it.

But that's not the worst of it in this case.

Ever since domain space became valuable, there are so many special interests circling it that it's not funny anymore. It's pretty ugly, actually. Consensus building has been pretty impossible because people with dollar signs flashing in their eyes shout louder, and the people who are just plain kooks shout the loudest. That's hurt a lot of the development of DNS in the last few years. The one weapon we've always had against this is caution, and a recognised authority.

All those special interests are sitting, eagerly awaiting the day when a significant majority of admins reject ICANN and switch to another root. When that happens, they'll turn on each other, and that's when it gets ugly.

You think you have user problems because people think that "The Internet" is the thing behind the button on their Windows desktop? That's nothing compared to what we (all of us) will have to deal with if we split the root.

I'm speculating now, but here's my guess. See what you think:

1. ISPs will start advertising which of the conflicting roots they prefer: "We serve ICANN names!" "We follow AlterNIC!" etc. etc.
2. Users won't understand a word of this
3. Users will complain "Why can't I reach mysite.biz!"
4. Lawsuit free-for-all over misleading advertisements and broken SLAs
5. Lawsuit free-for-all over conflicting trademarks
6. AOL, Microsoft and some others will remove DNS access from the user (URL bars, email addresses, etc) and replace it with a directory system that they manage (keyword searches, address books). One of these will gain a monopoly. No one but slashdot readers will care.

Don't be fooled into thinking that everyone pushing for alternate DNS has the good of the internet at heart. Some of them mean well, I'm sure. Some of them are sound guys. I'm equally sure that some of them are out to grab a piece of the gold mine that is DNS, and are willing to damage it in the process. Believe it or not, ICANN is the one thing standing between us and a corporate takeover of the internet.

Yeah, I just wrote that with a straight face. I mean it.

To drag this back on topic? We're seeing the beginning of this now. Everyone's been bitching at ICANN to hurry up and introduce some new TLDs already (watch for buzzwords such as "artificial scarcity" in other slashdot posts near you!) What happened? Someone tried to preempt them and lured a some-thousand userbase to give themselves some credence. What do ICANN do here? Reject potentially better-prepared proposals for favour of this one? I don't think that's fair.

Guys, you really should know better than to measure something's worth through the count of its [slashdot|newspaper] headlines. Jon Katz had this one nailed down years ago. A lot of the criticism against ICANN is genuine; a lot of it's crud; and a lot of it ignores the best interests of the internet.

Think for yourselves. Don't be afraid not to fork.

Dave

Posted with mozilla 20000112721

--

ICANN: server only computer-illiterate folk?

[Masem]

Given the number of DNS articles in the last few weeks, anyone here on /. should know of the existance of a few alternative name servers and may already be using them. The tentative hold that ICANN has over the DNS is weak, in the fact that most computers by default will point to a DNS server run by computer-literate people, and default installs of DNS software point only to the ICANN root servers. Anyone with enough knowledge can easily use additional root servers or the like. But that basically leaves 95% of everyone else, who runs Win98 happily and could care less as long as they can get to amazon.com.

So this implies that all ICANN is doing now is making sure computer-illiterate people can surf the net.

Now, there is more to this. Look at the EM spectrum; as to prevent pollution of one signal into another, the band has been divided into several segments and 'rented' out appropriately. Sure, there are a few times where ham radio people can get into teh wrong band that's typically used for air traffic control, but for the most part this works. The internet domain space is the same way, when you consider that there is only a good number of limited 3-or-more letter words that can work as a TLD. Pollution from one 'domain' into another is very easy to happen here, as the .biz case is demonstrating. So does there need to be an organization that divides these domain air waves appropriately, which is what ICANN can do. But if you continue the analogy further, two things show up:

- The TLD spectrum is practically infinite, bounded only by length at n^26 possible domains. While some are more desirable than others (as it's generally easier to broadcast over certain ranges compared to others in regards to power consumption and signal quality), all are effectively possible.

- ICANN is maintaining an artifical sarcity on TLDs. Because the spectrum is infinite, and we've only scratched a tiny fraction of the spectrum, ICANN's role should be evaluating proposals for any new domains at *any* time, not just when they feel like it. As long as the domain register is faithful and trustworthy and there isn't conflict with a previous domain, then ICANN should grant the new TLD. The only thing that should be restricted here is that any new TLDs should have some charter that all sites within it should abide by (ie, regulated domains), and if too many abuses of this are reported to ICANN, the register will lose that TLD to a default register (NSI most likely) or another register if appropriate. This will prevent the need for trademark owners to spend thousands to 'complete the set' because there's more than enough domains to effectively protect the trademark in them all, and in some, trademark protection may not even be possible.

But as ICANN stands right now, they are merely a grinning government appointed panel making sure that Joe Q Public can read his stock quotes every morning and his porn every night.

Re:Alternative root systems

[Osty]

And how is that much different than using subdomains? Rather than

ross.com ross.ross ross.cool ross.yeti ross.irc ross.sil ross.silly

you'd have ross.com, ross.ross.com, cool.ross.com, yeti.ross.com, irc.ross.com, sil.ross.com, silly.ross.com, and so on.

IMHO, one of the major problems that eat up so many domain names is people and businesses thinking they need a foo.com for everything, when bar.foo.com and xyzzy.foo.com would work just as well as bar.com and xyzzy.com. Movie labels are awful about this. Do we really need somemovie.com/.net/.org? Why can't we have somemovie.sony.com? or someothermovie.newline.com, and so on?

Other markets are just as bad, however. Why do we need a playstation.com, when playstation.sony.com would work just as well? And don't even get me started on crap like all the planet*.com sites. How about quake.planet.com rather than planetquake.com?

As much as I dislike themes (not that themability is bad, just that most themes are poorly-designed, pixmap-heavy, vomit-inducing eyesores), themes.org got this right. You want blackbox themes? Try blackbox.themes.org. You want themes for IRC clients? How about irc.themes.org? And so on.

If only dot-commers would pull their heads out their asses just long enough to see what the hell is going on, we might not have any need for new TLDs (well, yet, anyway).

Just my $0.02.

.pro

[jheinen]

I'm concerned about the .pro tld. Who gets this elite status? I can see doctors and lawyers, but what about other professionals? Does a computer consultant qualify for .pro? What about security consultants? Investment bankers? Supposedly you have to have credentials. What credentials count? An MCSE (god-forbid)? A CS degree? What if you don't have a CS degree, but nevertheless get paid $250 and hour for computer consulting services? Having a .pro site strikes me as being potentially very lucrative, in that it could be seen as a credential itself. What about people who may not have the "accepted" credentials, yet are still respected practitioners in the field? Seems to me like a lot of potential for abuse and unfairness is built into this one.

-Jeff

-Vercingetorix