Slashdot Mirror
Cracking the Verisign Monopoly
ag writes: "Paul Garrin is on a crusade to break the U.S. stranglehold on the Web. Access to the "root zone," the master file listing the so-called top-level domains--.com, .org, .net, .gov, .edu, .mil--and some 244 country-code domains, is currently in the hands of the privileged few. Through Name.Space, his own root server, Garrin is hoping to 'reterritorialize the Net, bringing it back to its original ideal of virtual space without borders or hierarchies.'" The article brings out the conflicts between Name.Space and the Open Root Server Confederation.
The concept of the internet included that it should not have a single point of failure. It has grown to a point that it clearly now has a single point of failure i.e. the US. I do not think that this idea will change a lot. It is just one guys idea to take control from one group and give it to another. If the problem is to be tackled we need a system whereby each region is self dependant and connected to each other region by a common infrastructure, i.e. an enlargement of the original concept.
.com and .org as US TLDs and have never heard of .us. The whole system has been bastardised and cannot be brought into line by people whose own self interest is part of the problem. The system does need to change and there needs to be a regional control as well as international TLDs (i.e. .com and .org). The problem comes from getting those that have already entrenched themselves in the old ways, to change.
Most US users see
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
it is a provable theorem of computer science that all systems have at least one single point of failure.
Unfortunately, a google search for "all systems" and "single point of failure" did not lead me to such a theorem; simply to a bunch of marketing guys contradicting it.
And since I can think of dozens of mechanical and electrical systems without a single point of failure, I'd appreciate a link to more information about why this is impossible in computer science.
Subject: Important Information: .BIZ .INFO Domain Extensions
The new top level domain names with extensions .BIZ, .INFO, .PRO,
and .NAME have just been approved by global internet authorities
and will be released soon, but don't wait until then to register.
These domains are available NOW for pre-registration at:
http://www.[deleted].net on a first come, first serve
basis.
Yeah, so now I have a dilemma. Do I throw some money at these people and get a groovy .biz URL, or do I give it to this hippie guy who wants to heal the world with domain names? Or do I just think how lame and petty the net is getting and go back to publishing stuff on paper...
Baz
What I don't want is to hear any more commercials with the words dot com in them ever again. Come to think of it I'd rather never hear the phrase ever again under any circumstances.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
That's simply not true (with the possible exception of ".us"). The local CCTLD is the number one choice in most places I know.
I disagree. Why shouldn't a domain name like "slash.dot" be valuable? In a system with 'free' gTLDs we could move to a situation where you wouldn't have to add ".com" to a company's name to find it, but simply type its name into the Location:-bar. I don't see why that couldn't work.
Did you know that there are companies who specialize in registering your name in as many of the approx. 250 existing gTLD's as possible? This is happening on a big scale, and is quickly rendering gTLDs useless as they no longer satisfy their goal of data distribution.
So why not just get rid of them?
This man wants to stir things up. Got to love it. But he is not the only one doing somethng like this. The only problem if there is not a centralize operation we will just end up with a islands of domains that can not see each other. He needs to break and join the system at the same time in order for this to work right. I wish him all the luck in the world.
An observation by Douglas Adams:
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
As for the second paragraph of your rant, if you want to be able to immediately edit your domain files, then get a dedicated line or lease a dedicated server and host them yourself. Noone's stopping you. As long as the world can get to your domain through the TLD system, you can do whatever you like within it.
Fortunately, I was able to get a .org (et al.) for only $11 there.
I still miss my country code, just because the .com (et al.) really
needlessly obfuscates the Internet beyond reason.
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Politics: Democracy, Fascism
Economics: Communism, Capitalism.
To be honest, Capitalism more closely aligns with Fascism.
Right up to there, you had a pretty good analysis. Mr. Garrin's motivations do seem to be to collect a chuck of the pie for himself, using something he built and can get other people to pay for. That's pretty capitalist.
Your two lines about the differing systems in politics and economics is very simplistic, but generally correct (there are *lots* of shades of gray in-between, but that doesn't really matter).
However, when you say that capitalism better lines up with fascist politics, you're wrong. The choices in econimics are between political control of the economy (communism, socialism, etc.) and private control of the economy, with political action limited to enforcing basic rules and adjudicating contract disputes (capitalism). Political control of the economy requires a police state, because otherwise most people won't cooperate enough for it to work. Democratic politics doesn't require people voting money and control out of each others hands.
I agree that search engines are the key - if you can get search engines to start returning results from alternate DNS, and if there's something there that people want to see, and if it can be made easy enough for people to update their network settings to do so (on the order of "lynx -source http://go-gnome.com/ | sh" for example, or maybe just "click here and then select OK when Windows asks if you want to update your settings") then there will be a mass movement to alternate DNS. In the long run I don't see DNS being that useful for finding things on the 'net anyway, though. It's never been a foolproof plan to just type in widget.com and get WidgetCo, and it's getting tougher and tougher as more similar domain names are registered (two that I find difficult to get right: Loki games and Mandrake Linux).
It would be far better to use a collaborative net of search engines to query for stuff, like a combination of hopped-up Google rankings and those ghastly "AOL keywords". Really, just finding the right domain doesn't help you find stuff anyway, as anyone who's tried to find technical documentation on a product's web site and instead found marketing crap can tell you. Since we'll have to depend on search engines anyway, why not just cut out the DNS middleman? This would require a vast advance in search engine ability, but I think that might be possible in the fairly near future.
Plus, then you could have a neat feature in a web browser where you select some words, right click, and select "search for this" (or "I feel lucky!").
Come to think of it, to really make this work a search engine would almost have to be run distributed.net style. No single big search engine comes close to indexing the web, but if I've got a great collection of Linux USB links (just for example), maybe my computer could share those with Google from time to time. If my machine had a semi-autonomous agent or spider that was constantly searching for my interests on the web, and I sync this info with Google from time to time, then Google stays up to date better, more of the web gets indexed, and anyone else can benefit from my contribution to the whole. The more I think about this the more I think it's a good idea.
I also found it interesting that China has broken free of ICANN too. That may have the biggest long-term effect - once all of those people are online there will have to be a way to access their part of the network, or else the world's networks will be effectively partitioned in half (at least from a DNS standpoint). With all of the U.S. business interest in China, this may have been the unkindest cut that ICANN's received yet.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Getting ISPs in on it, is the one and only way to overthrow ICANN.
The current root monopoly is not due to millions of internet users pointing to ICANN's servers. 99.99% of those millions don't run any resolver (e.g. dnscache, bind) at all, and never directly talk to the root servers. They just use their ISP's recursive resolver, and the people at the ISP are the ones who decide which root to use.
Change the ISPs, and you change the users.
I think your idea is great. Getting someone like AOL interested in their own tld would be a good thing. They would want to add it, ICANN would not let them, so they'de join OpenNic or something. Then, suddenly, a few million internet users would be using a new root.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
For some purposes I don't care what country I'm dealing with. For some I care which city I'm dealing with (well... usually which metropolitan area). For some which state will do.
If I order something, Cheapbytes is one day away by mail, but LinuxCentral is 5 days. That counts. And if the merchandise were coming from Europe or Japan, time delays would be longer still (though I am usually warned of this by currency conversions).
*.com is nice for pure information exchanges, but for other things, localization would be better.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
--
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Ideologically, yes. The whole point of domains is supposed to be so people don't have to remember IP addresses; it's supposed to reflect organisational and network topology.
It currently does not, and is primarily used as a 'web lookup service' and as a flat database (yes it's heirarchial, but few use it).
I'm a proponent of independent lookup systems for filing information/websites, and leave DNS to do what it's good at.
Should all those companies that have paid registration fees have their domains taken away? No... not immediately, but no new registrations should be handed out, and none should be allowed to renew. It should be phased out. They didn't buy domains; they paid registration fees for someone to put an entry in a database.
Whether it's geographic, or some new system, I maintain it has to stay heirarchial, that's how it was designed.
But that's the point, exactly.
Web URL's should be using a lookup service other than DNS, if simplicity is what we're after.
slashdot.andover.ma.us is *perfect*. It tells me where a machine is.... it's great. That's what dns was designed for...
Though I have yet to see a solution to the problem, we all know (or should know) the problem exists.
.com was for commercial, .net for network providers, and .org for organisations that don't fit into the other two. .gov for US Government sites, and .MIL for us military sites. .edu for official US educational insitutes.
It used to be that all the ccTLD's and such were not paying 'fees' to have their domains, they just had them. THey administered them as they saw fit.
Yes, this is because the root servers were sponsored by the american taxpayers.
Now.. the thing is, in this world, if you control something, you can make money off it. As long as this system is privatised, it will be run as a cash cow, period. What wee need is an international taxpayer-funded coop, so that big business can't get involved. We need to do away with *all* generic TLD's, and get back to ccTLD's.
-henrik
This coverage of the same story presents why Paul Garrin's efforts aren't productive or well respected.
You are solving the wrong problem. The problem is not technical. A single zone will scale to millions of entries: the .com zone is an existance proof of that. The problem is political: NSI has too much political power.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Now, you just restart your named and try pinging name.space!
HEre in the UK many companies want them a) to avoid the stigma of a dot.com address - in the current environment and b) for sound marketing reasons. If Im looking for a car to buy in the UK, which is the better bet: www.cheapcars.com or www.cheapcars.co.uk?
More to the point any company selling something has an identity in the real world. Customers want companies they can contact other ways without such things as international phone calls or issues of legal jurisdiction if things go wrong.
Another thing about .uk is that they are doing the RIGHT thing. If .us was reorganized, you could put most of the .com's in .com.us, and stop forcing the rest of the world to put up with 100% All American BS.
.edu .gov and .mil
There is also a set of second level domains for US states. Doing this would also eliminate
HTML and HTTP were created at the expense of the European Union.
No they where created at CERN an international organisation based in the highly independant Switzerland.
So we take the root space away from one group and hand it to someone else. I fail to see any change other than the fact that he has about five bazillion tld's available (Or gTLD's, whatever). Sounds to me like he just wants to stir up trouble more than anything, or he has his eyes set on the distant distant future, this isn't something that big bussiness is going to adopt, anytime soon, if ever. Massive fast spaced change just doesn't happen, otherwise dos legacy support would have been gone a decade ago.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Give them a TLD, and tell them to point at your new root servers. There's your critical mass, in one fell swoop.
.aol TLD, and every AOL subscriber can refer to every other AOL subscriber as luserName@aol, then you know there's going to be an immediate rush for .earthlink, .demon, .panix, .msn, .psi, .uunet, and so on.
Once there's a
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Someone please remind me again why we even bother with fixed TLD's and don't just break out the international domains across root servers distributed by the alphabet?
I shouldn't matter what your root is if all domains starting with 'x' go on the 'x' server, all domains starting with 'y' go on the 'y' server, and letters that are used more often just go a few characters deeper (instead of just 's', we have 'sa'-'sd' on one server, 'se-sg' on another, etc.).
We'd have to rewrite the lookup routines on everything, but it seems it wouldn't be all that hard to transition to this.
I looked at this, was impressed, and have begun using the name.space servers to resolve DNS. truly a better way to go.
.2000 :)
I did, however, find it silly that there is a
Pax,
White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
HTML and HTTP were created at the expense of the European Union.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't HTML and HTTP (and most other internet technologies) predate the EU?
I can see it now, TBL back in the 80's thinking to himself "What can I do to screw the nonexistant EU? I know! HTML and HTTP! And furthur, I'll use DNS to pile an unfair domain system on top of that!"
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
Well, we don't need another Vint Cerf. We need a way of operating our namespace which is accountable and cannot be held hostage by monied interests - as has certainly been the case with ICANN, and would probably be the case with name.space and others as well. Hell, new.net IS a monied interest.
For this reason, I am a member of OpenNIC. Membership and full voting rights are available to anyone with an interest and internet access.
Claim your namespace.
This relies on your audience having set up DNS to query their servers for these additional TLD's. Naturally, 99% of the net won't have done, so you're seriously missing out on a lot of potential visitors. It won't be indexed by any search engines, as they most likely won't be searching alternate DNS, and unless people are running their own mailservers with support for the domains, you won't be able to count on getting mail from people.
It's a nice idea - just a shame it's unworkable until it's accepted by the current top level authorities, which of course it never will unless they can screw money out of it...
Back when Internic was run by Network Solutions for the Commerce Department, there was opposition to their control. Alternic was proposed, with alternative TLDs if users (or ideally, ISPs) would switch their DNS over to support it.
.com. They don't want country codes, and they don't want the other minor ones.
This crashed and burned fabulously, but that may have been influenced by hack attempts on root servers, etc.
Still, this seems unlikely. People want
When $100 was the registration fee and nobody was doing business online, people cared about cheap alternatives. Now that the costs of doing business on the Internet are huge, nobody is not going to shell out $70 (or $30/2 years with some of the cheaper services) while maintaining a presence.
Additionally, people want a good domain name or a generic one. As nobody is going to try to guess these random TLDs and assume that their ISP supports it, this names provide no value.
Give it up, "The Man" 0wns DNS and won't let go.
Alex
Their web server (http://name.space.xs2.net/) is already slashdotted... Are we sure that their root DNS will be available all the time?
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
But as long as name.city.state.us is enforced as the only legit use of the .us domain, it's probably remain that way.
If somehow Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, and Alaska would give up the "city" requirement, you would get .co.us, .ne.us, .or.us, and .ak.us as alternatives to .com, .net, .org, and .edu (patterned after .ac.uk).
Will I retire or break 10K?
They own the patent for that stupid GIF image format
No, that's Unisys. Verisign owns a monopoly (not court-enforced but MS-enforced) on trusted SSL and Authenticode certificates (having bought Thawte), even though VeriSign isn't doing a good job of checking its facts.
Will I retire or break 10K?
At this point I won't be converting. In order to access a Name.Space server, you have to download an app to use it.
Not necessarily. If you're running Linux, you can always add their root server to resolv.conf. There are also ways of doing this in BSD, BeOS, and pretty much any other OS that can access DNS.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You nailed it... This guy is simply trying to make a buck (a big buck) by forcing people to use his system. I'm not against his idea of tons of gTLDs I just think that some non-profit organization, possibly funded by the government should control it and manage it. That is the role of ICANN, however ICANN still does not manage the registry, that is where Verisign comes in. I think ICANN's role should be extended and they should replace Verisign as the manager of the system, that way no one monopolistic company will have control of the domain name system. The money from registrations should go towards maintaining the registry and all of the infrastructure, which is tightly audited by a different body of the government. Some people argue that the US should not control the internet, I see some validity to their argument however remember it was the US that created the Internet in the first place, it is our baby and if the world wants a piece of it then they need to play by our rules.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
Domain Names for $13
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
If only for the one problem with the root zones. If those (six? ten?) root DNS servers are cracked, the whole 'net is in shambles as soon as the TTL expires for each site.
I'm not sure what the answer IS, but it cannot be to have the entirety of the internet dependant on a relative handful of base servers.
It's like the 'Jesus nut' on a helicopter. Single point of failure means catastrophic failure for the machine. The difference is that the 'net has the capability of double/triple redundancy.
The more spread out the base servers, and the more there are, the better off we are even with the increased work load of maintaining the new rash of servers required.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
HTML and HTTP were created at the expense of the European Union. Granted that the web doesn't need these as such, but it would be a damn sight less popular and useful without them.
Yep right, although it's still European countries funding it, so I wasn't too far off.
Just to repeat myself - no the internet doesn't need those protocols, but it wouldn't be anything like as usable without it.
Chris Ambler of Image Online Design, which runs the .web registry, is even more emphatic. "The problem with Name.Space is [Garrin] wants something that no one else has: 500 top-level domains and the ability to create new ones at will. He's trying to claim everything! He makes lofty claims about having a shared system, but it requires people to use his system, and he gets a piece of every new registry! In my book, that's called communism, or socialism at best."
This is slightly off topic - but the quote from the article above needs clarity, and it passes very close by my personal politics and a gripping pet peeve.
Chris Ambler: In this regard Mr. Garrin may be interpreted as acting as a capitalist and NOT a Socialist or Communist
He is refuting to be interested in a shared, libre and community owned/operated system - but instead he is trying to take a "piece of every new registry" for himself; you would really be accusing him of trying to REPLICATE Verisign. This is clearly a CAPITALIST motivation.
Mr. Ambler, you seem to know nothing of Communism or Socialism outside of the McCarthy inspired dogma and disinformation rampant in the United States. Please before you attempt to slight someone for being a "Communist", as if it is a naturally 'bad' thing to be avoided (which betrays your bigoted pre-disposition), you may want to understand what the hell your talking about. Further, it is almost amusing when describing an anti-social, selfish, introverted and greedy act it is labeled 'Communist' when really it is the exact antithesis. The act you accuse Mr.Garrin of committing would perfectly exemplify Capitalist principles.
Communism is NOT about control - that is Fascism - and usually Americans confuse the two. Communism promotes Democracy. Communism does not require nor desire Fascism.
Politics: Democracy, Fascism
Economics: Communism, Capitalism.
To be honest, Capitalism more closely aligns with Fascism. Communism more closely aligns with Democracy. One set of principles rely on Control (Fascism) and Ownership (Capitalism), while Democracy (Equal Right to Participation in Governance) and Communism (Community ownership of capital, controlled by consensus) are really a more natural pair. American political discourse is so perverted by propaganda that a real understanding of the contradiction of their community - the epithaths and principles - is outside the scope of the normal person.
Start by reading this: Fascism @ Dictionary.com, Democracy @ Dictionary.com, Communism @ Dictionary.com* and Capitalism @ Dictionary.com. You are also invited to read: The Manifesto of the Communist Party. written in 1848 by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
You will find that Communism is NOT about oppression and control - but freedom from the Ruling Class and true democratic principles. You will find that most people who would be opposed to corporate control also have some maintain some ideas that could may rightly be labeled as Communist - but the collective political mind in America is so polluted by Capitalist Dogma against even the simple word that Communism's many merits cannot even be rightly discussed.
*Its very interesting to see that dictionary describes Communism with words like "scheme, authoritarian, claiming, theoretical" which are themselves charged and purposefully chosen to berate the idea.
McCarthyism set back American Culture by 300 years.
This statement irks me - Consider that the Internet is over 30? years old, originally a creation of the United States Department of Defense... Yes... That's right, the US DOD. Therefore, the entire premise of this guy's statement is blatantly false. How can this system, a creation of the US Military, which was originally built to support the US military's computing needs in a nuclear war, have as its original ideal of "virtual space without borders or hierarchies"??? It didn't. Yes - the current domain naming system needs to be reevaluated, and possibly scrapped. But do you really think that will happen? At the very least what we need is a Fair naming arbitration system, and a limit on domain holdings.
In exchange, Name.Space or whoever could give, say AOL their own TLD. Rather than give out http://hometown.aol.com/Bob27484947, they could give out http://Bob27484947.aol.
Just a thought ... dunno if its feasible or not.
I can see the pro's and con's for new domains. Obviously the con's have been spoken for by the previous posts so I won't bother posting them again. (waste of time). The Pro's on the other hand is that whenever there is a .com .net .org domain, their easy to find. The average american and others in the world knows those three. You start adding into the mix too many others, you'll never be able to find what you're looking for.
.com's for commercial, .org's for organizations, .net's for personal, and make one especially for the porn sites... maybe .ooooooh .com name shouldn't mean they should automatically have the rights to a .org name too....
A prime example: a kid in grade school wants to look up the whitehouse for a school project. There's all ready too many domain names, he doesn't know..... he types in http://www.whitehouse.com and WHOA... What do we have here? Little did he/she know that you were supposed to type in http://www.whitehouse.gov. To me, I think that this is wrong. Domains should remain easy and simple to remember.
If they plan on having 118 new domains, then someone out there better find a better way to search then yahoo and google... The web is getting to big to cataloge.
By creating a better searching method, new domains are possible. Until then, keep
And then police them. Just because McDonalds is a business and has the rights to a
My $.02
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
DNS lokups return hardly any information - Just the name or IP address.
..... This would stop people registering loads of addresses for profit.
Maybe a new protocol is needed. This proposed new protocol (Based arround P2P networking probably) will allow searches on not only IP address or Name, but other attributes -the type of server (Web, Email, Telnet, Etc) , locality (UK,US,Etc), Interest (&0001=Computing,&0002=TV,&0004=Porn, etc), and return not just an IP address(as DNS does), but if requested to, the Email address of the host owner, a brief description of what the host does, etc etc..
Also, you shouldn't have to pay loadsass for the privilige, or having to contact some party to update their servers. Just adding a name in a configuration file in your PC should be enough enable people to start doing lookup's on your server. There should be a way of getting rid of unwanted sites - Maybe using a distributed moderation, whereby somtimes, while browsing a particular host, another host which was queried during lookup might at random send a request to you to give the site a rateing. - Hosts with a rating less than a certain value would be purged from the framework,
And maybe, it would be possible to have a demon running in the background that will function as a fake DNS server, and reroute DNS lookup requests through this new framework.
Not a bad rate of pay eh?
So ICANN killed the business by refusing to give the guy 115 root level domains. And so in time honored US fashion he goes crying his eyes out to a senator or two to ask for a handout.
The quote from Ambler is somewhat amusing, he is the guy who has been trying to sell .web names for a few years now.
The Internet's is the first revolution whose pioneers believed they could create a better world while making themselves rich.
Absolutely nobody got into the Internet in the early years thinking they would get rich. Even MarcA didn't work out that he could make a lot of money claiming credit for other's work until 1995 or so. And to be brutally honest most dotcom millionaires got rich persuading the great american public to invest their retirement savings in companies that will never show a profit rather than building companies that were intended to last. And the folk doing that tended to be opportunists rather than 'Internet Pioneers'.
The only value to a domain name is if anyone anywhere can use it to send you an email. Vanity domain names are just that if you can't use them reliably. If you have the email address master@timelord.galifrey, that is real cool but if only 1% of the world recognise it, much less usefull than 48129@ieorhw.net.
There is a commercial advantage to having a generic business name, however if only 10% of the buying public can see a particular name the interest in marketing it is likely to be small. Why spend $2 million on a superbowl advert for a domain name that only 10% of the population can go to? Why deal with lost business because people can't find the site?
The domain name system is only fought over because it is massively usefull, it only has that utility because it is a single coherent system. Balkanize the root and you remove the incentive for people to bid up the prices of domain names.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
For the past five years, he and his company, Name.Space, have been seeking to overthrow the U.S.-sanctioned monopolies that govern the Web.
So are we to leave one for profit company, and jump to another? I could see if this was a non profit complaining and campaigning, but you have a domain registrar bringing this up, which begs questioning about the true intentions. So this company would stand to profit from a break up, which doesn't impress me, so his gripes are bascially he can't make any money with Verisign in the picture, hardly worth My Rights Online.
Why should an aspiring artist have to scrap to be www.sculptor.com when she could just as easily be www.erotic.sculptor or www.heavenly.form?
I noticed how this turd is obfuscating politicians knowledge about technology with some of his gripes such as the above. For one its not up to any "root" servers to determine these naming convetions its up to ICANN, so why doesn't he gripe to them. The article to me is sort of a bit of snake oil written to beg for sympathy, by an author trying to get a nice sized bite of what he calls the enemy (Verisign).
Should Verisign be the sole holder of root name servers, probably not, but at least aside from occassional issues of domain squatting, the net isn't out of control with fights from domain registrars attempting to introduce tons of new names daily, simply because they're registrars. Here's a solution, create a body to handle it, but make those in charge professors at the most prestigous universities around. This way there can be no commercial control of the domain naming system, nor root servers. Maybe things will be handled ethically instead of morons bringing out suit after suit claiming infringements, unfair play, etc.,.
Ghost in the Shell
360 degrees of Karma
"We're reterritorializing the Net," Garrin boasted, "bringing it back to its original ideal of virtual space without borders or hierarchies."
When in reality Name.Space has by far the most to gain in this movement. What they've been doing for years is selling alternative tld's, with the idea that they would have to be grandfather'd in once the world was ready to use nearly unlimited tld's. All Name.Space is selling to it's customers is a risky bet that Name.Space will get the domains because ICANN feels that there is enough adoption that the conflicts will cause real problems. From the looks of things, ICANN doesn't buy it.
In my book, Paul Garrin is essentially participating in massive domain speculation, with the idea that he can hold ICANN and the roots hostage on the day they decide to open them up to the public. How is this different than domain name squatting?
Someone should tell him that the boom is over and everyone is moving on to new get rich quick schemes.