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Legitimacy Of ICANN?
"ICANN is really a government no matter how much they deny it. They create laws that affect people internationally and levy taxes in the form of fees for doamin registration. It can control anyone's presence on the internet by taking away your domain name and your IP address as they see fit.
The popular opinion of ICANN seems to be that they serve to exclude people rather than include them. This was exemplified by the fact a the most recent election that only 5 seats were up when there should have been a lot more (apparently some members self-lengthed their terms from 1 to 4 years)...
So as I understand it, ICANN was just sort of created by the Commerce Department without regards to any outside opinions. It seems like the Commerce Department is extending governmental rights to ICANN since the Commerce Department pretty much goes along with whatever they say. Why should ICANN receive so much weight in the mind of the Commerce Department? Perhaps we, as Internet users, should petition the Commerce Department for changes we want to top-level domains and other naming issues. To this end, I think we should question the foundation of ICANN.
I am not saying that the Internet shouldn't have a governing body, but perhaps it should have been created through a system that drew on input of Internet users, instead of shutting them out."
Suppose AOL created new TLDs (.biz, .kids, .fun). The new AOL run "TLD registrar" would have an instant HUGE userbase. Further they could open their DNS servers to let anyone who wants to point to them. It might be a successful coup of the ICANN czars.
Under current copyright law, once a private company controls a DNS, with their own special modifications, they can copyright the database, even though they do not own a copyright on the individual pieces of data. See the database formerly known as CDDB for an example infamous to slashdot. Therefore if this private DNS service becomes corrupt, there can be no smooth transition to another.
No one forces anyone to use ICANN for DNS resolving. I can forsee some large ISP, say AOL, offering its own internal TLDs (.biz, .fun, .kids, etc.) This would not impact the net outside of AOL. They could, though, allow anyone to point to their DNS servers. If enough do, we will have a new controller of DNS. Then, if they become corrupt, people will move again. There is a chouce here, people. Don't like ICANN? Don't use ICANN. Use ALTERNIC. There are maky others out there too.
Of course, this probably goes over about as well as a dead duck.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Your primitive Earth equation is too simplistic.
Movement will take time.
You only are calculating two dimensions rather than taking the whole thing into consideration. Any movement requires slight movement on all dimensions.
You need to remember that there is nothing as 'true rest', only relative rest. You put a rock on the ground. It is a rest in relation to the planet itself, but the world is spinning, while orbiting the sun which is rotating around the galactic center, which is moving outward from the big bang point.
Totally sense-making it is. If you move from point X1Y1Z1T1 to X2YxZxTx, everything has moved. Your primitive equation does not take that into effect. In a universe which permitted a state of true rest, your supposed loophole would, in fact, check out. But in our universe, it leaves out reality.
ICANN is just like a third-world, third-rate countries with tinpot despots screwing their fellow citizens for their own financial and power gains.
And like those despots, the only way things are going to change is for the people to revolt. If you want change, ICANN must be overthrown.
But a revolution requires mass public support. Despots don't typically get dethroned by a single person, nor even by a few hundred rabid guerillas.
And if there's one thing there ain't on the Internet, is a mass public that's informed enough to understand why it's necessary to overthrow ICANN.
Heck, there ain't even a mass DNS-controlling population that's got enough of a clue to understand that they can get root name serving from an alternative source.
Which basically means y'all are fscked. No revolution is going to happen until all the domain controller guys are educated as to why they should abandon ICANN name resolution, and go with someone else (OpenNIC).
And given that most people don't ever want to have to think, I think educating them stands a snowball's chance.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Since the poster apparently continues to think that the internet-drafts story means something, I'll repeat my comment from that story.
Simon Higgs is fighting ICANN, and using the internet-drafts process as a tool.
There is no fight between ICANN and the IETF as such. Not to say that all IETF members like everything ICANN does (we don't), but Simon Higgs' opinion is his own, even when expressed as internet-drafts.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is part of the Commerce Department. There are a lot of smart people at NIST. They have been involved in computer and network technology for many years.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Ever use Gnutella before the advent of the new routing system? Thats exactly why.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
ICANN will remain legitimate as long as the Dept. of Commerce lets them stay legitimate. .whatever and everyone wants a .whatever address. We're sort of fucked as long as the DoC keeps rolling over to the whims of ICANN (which they created anyways). In a nutshell blame the DoC, they're letting this turn into a huge mess and it's going to shove a giant stick up the ass of all internet related commerce in the future.
It's fairly easy to see we need some sort of central body or group to designate and dispense internet namespaces. The e-economy worth billions now and is supposed to be worth more billions in years to come wouldn't exactly work if amazon.com only pointed to the correct IP address on some but not all NS roots. But how exactly do you go about that? ICANN is fucking up because they're charging for TLD proposals and letting the proposers run said proposals. This means registrarX is fucked if registrarY gets control of
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
It's about as legitimate as any fiat money. And organized just about as much for the benefit of the users.
The only legitimacy that ICANN has is that DARPA funded the invention of the internet. Period. That's it. There's no logical connection, but they are both creatures of the US Govt. (ICANN a bit more on the sub-rosa side... it pretends to be a private monopoly.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yes.
IPv6 TLDs are the same as IPv4 TLDs. There is no difference whatsoever for the end-user.
At the name-server end, the only difference is that IPv6 name to address mappings are an AAAA record, instead of the A record used for IPv4.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
The last thing anyone should be doing at work is watching movies on their PC or playing games on Company time.
If they're bored, they should take a friggin' walk outside, or barring that, do everything they can to GET AWAY from the damn computers. Give your mind, eyes, and wrists a break.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
For two legal views on ICANN's Legitimacy, see Jonathan Weinberg, ICANN and the Problem of Legitimacy (.pdf), and my (long) article, Wrong Turn in Cyberspace: Using ICANN to Route Around the APA and the Constitution , available in HTML or .pdf formats.
I have a blog.
DNS is a system to change verbose, human friendly names into IP addresses (and the reverse). Bind (the software that does this) version 9 supports IPv6 (Bind 8 is probably the most common version in use right now, but then, there is no real need to upgrade; plenty of Bind 4, etc. servers are out there). The DNS system, root servers, etc, all technically support IPv6 (well, in theory: there needs to be some upgrading of software and maybe a bit of hardware), they were designed to work together.
Now, having said that all, comes *my* question: has anybody seen a host registration form *anywhere* that can accept a IPv6 address? I'm moving my servers (the colo ISP is dying out from under us), and I have to reregister my nameservers anyway, so it might be cool to have ns3 be listed on a IPv6 and see what traffic it gets. It's a belt and suspenders host server anyway; it runs mostly my hobby stuff (personal mailing lists, etc).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
whever two or more people have conflicts (or at the very least differing social goals) then there has to be a resolution process. The IETF have refined their RFC system for multiple vendors to nominate technical "solutions" in a fairly transparent process. The courts have another one for resolving property rights and criminal behaviour.
The problem is that a statutory authority (effectively the address of IP resources) is also trying to act in a commercial role. There is a reason why regulatory/investigation arms of sharemarkets are separate from their operational arm. Another is that when Postel passed away, there wasn't any impartial authority with vision trusted by everyone for an alternative to evolve. For example, in a practical sense there is no scarce resource in the names (once IPv6 comes along). What is missing is someone smart enough to nominate a sensible name scoping extension to the BIND. When the new technological frontiers are interpreted by old rules, there is a serious disconnect with reality. In this case whoever was flogging street addresses for a namespace saw an opportunity to become a virtual real-estate agent. In the quest for an easy buck, the politics was probably not carefully thought out and now you have a situation where enough people are unhappy that mud is continually flying.
Is there a better solution? Well the AARNET was originally isolated islands trying to communicate. There's no reason why the same can't happen when you embed IPv6 subdomains within the wider scheme and have a suitable killer app.
LL
Claiming that sheer numbers give legitimacy is as idiotic as that old bromide about lemming hordes going over cliffs. . .
Serious programmers don't need games, free soda, movies, etc. to "keep them happy."
What next? Bus drivers complaining their bus isn't good enough, airline pilots only wanting to fly supersonic aircraft, etc, etc?
The point is that unless these programmers are programming games they don't need fancy graphics cards with more memory than the CPU...
The problem is that .com, .net and .org are still seen as belonging to the US. They don't. ".us" belongs to the us, just as .fr belongs to France. But .us has been very poorly designed and administered, and that's why nobody's using it.
So poorly administered that a certain US city wants to hijack another country's TLD.
Without such an authority, we will inevitably have disagreements between various root servers and inconsistencies between the meanings of some DNS names.
You only need this for non geographic TLDs. With geographic domains this authority is obvious and likely to be delegated to an appropriate level of government in such places as the USA.
You can't get this without a single authority for a zone that can enforce some discipline about how the zone is maintained and resolve disputes when there are conflicts.
But this does not have to be the same authority for every zone.
Numbering within the United States is supervied (area codes given out) by NeuStar (nanpa.com), under an FCC contract.
.com should be better compared with psudo contry codes such as 87x or 800.
Complicated by the fact that the USA dosn't actually have it's own country code. So must coordinate numbering with neighbours, most especially Canada.
It's not a model for the Internet, with its textual names, trademark claims, etc.
Not really sure that texual names actually really make a difference. Though maybe the likes of
As for tradmarks these are governed by geographically specific laws anyway.
No, it doesn't. ICANN was created precisely because the United States Government (under pressure from the rest of the world) wanted to get out of Internet governance. ICANN derives it's legitimacy (such as it has) from the IFWP.
Amen to that. Jon did the job a lot better, a lot more efficiently, at far less expense. And if he made a decision you disagreed with, he'd listen to your arguments about it. However, Jon was more or less unique, and truely benevolent dictators are in very short supply.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
That is, unfortunately, the most sensible response to this story so far.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
This is untrue. There was an extended process of consultation, involving meetings in Geneva (which I attended), Singapore, and Buenos Aires.
Well, and what else are they going to do? If the United States Government tried to control Internet governance, the rest of the world would not be very pleased, to put it mildly. Face it, the Internet changes things, and makes national governments less and less relevent. We have to develop new ways to govern the Internet, and ICANN is an experiment. Personally I preferred it's predecessor, and I agree that the current lawyer-driven ICANN is a bit of a mess. But we're learning.
What has the government of one nation got to do with it? How can the United States government change things? If you want to change things, join ISOC and come to Stockholm next week. If you come to my tutorials, I'll even stand you a beer!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I was using the Internet with a .uk address in 1985, which is to say seventeen years before ICANN was founded. It was created (as I've detailed in another post) following an extensive open international consultation process in which I took part - and you could have, too, if you'd been bothered. Certainly it's a mess; certainly it needs to be changed. Join ISOC and campaign!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Unlike the Internet, telephone networks are strictly regulated, having been largely developed under government-imposed monopolies. Country codes are assigned by the ITU. Numbering within the United States is supervied (area codes given out) by NeuStar (nanpa.com), under an FCC contract.
It's not a model for the Internet, with its textual names, trademark claims, etc.
ICANN dates back all the way to 1998 or so. Before then, the generally-accepted authority was Jon Postel at IANA. Jon died suddenly. Shortly afterwards, a lawyer with IBM connections named Joe Sims showed up, claiming that Jon had hired him to create a body to oversee Internet names and addresses.
Sims set up ICANN, giving the top job first to newsletter writer Esther Dyson, and appointing the "interim" board. Most of them are still there, "boardsquatters"! ICANN made a deal with Ira Magaziner at the White House, who got DoC to accept them as the new authority.
Thus Joe Sims is the Melvin Dummar of the Internet. (Mel had a forged Howard Hughes will, giving him a share of the late zillionaire's estate. His phoney story made a funny film, "Melvin and Howard".)
Legally, their authority is only what you believe in. Anybody can set up a DNS server and anybody can set their resolver to whatever server they want. ICANN replaced Dyson with MCI Worldcom's Vint Cerf, keeping its UUNET (the largest ISP) on its side. But a grassroots movement can, in theory, give power to an alternative root. New.net is the latest one to have some credibility.
Vint himself, of course, is the Chauncy Gardner of the Internet. (Chauncy was the retarded protagonist of "Being There", whose simpleminded mumblings were confused with brilliance.)
For more info, you all might enjoy http://www.icannwatch.org/
.. is unacceptable.
Governments want the ability to shut off the net at will. Sorry, but I flat-out don't trust *any* government when they say they have compelling reasons why I can't talk to you.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.AOL have?
.aol tld. I can easily see them
.kid tld. You could then apply to AOL for a .kid domain
.kid sites and they have an instant
t io d5WIuhUMoAnAlA
Hash: SHA1
>WHY would AOL want it's own tld?
>What's wrong with AOL.com ?
>What clear advantages does
I kind of doubt that they would use a
going for a
name and if they approved your site you would be issued a domain name
that would be accessable only to those who used AOL's DNS servers.
AOL would then implement a search engine (pretty easy, they already
have one) that only indexes
nicely censored subset of the internet to offer to over protective
parents.
This is actually starting to sound like a half decent idea, maybe I
should buy an book on Bind
after work and set it up on my box at home. If anyone tries to patent
a business plan for this. You saw it here first.
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________________________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
OK.
I propose (as if this will surprise anyone) that the Internet doesn't need a central governing body, ICANN or otherwise. Anyone should be able to start their own TLD (even with the same name) and any network should be able to choose which TLD's root servers they recognize.
--
It's obviously a ploy by Network Solutions/Verisign to legitimize their new offer of the .BIZ TLD. They want to get as many users as possible to send them money, and build thier legitimacy at the same time. They want to prod people into action. In my case it worked, but I did the opposite of what they wanted, and you should too .
It appears that the legitimate holder of the .BIZ registry is biztld.net, and that NSI saw this as too much money to let someone else take, and is in the process of a coup d'état to grab it for themselves.
Instead of acting like a sheep to be fleeced, I took the following actions:
- Replied to their email with this:
.BIZ domain, what agreement have you reached with the current holders of that domain??
- Set up a new db.cache, for our companies name servers, which lists all the roots for each domain, including countries, and now I determine who is the legitimate registrar for every TLD
The blatant agrression on the part of NSI finally got me to act, and it was easy, only about an hour to research, implement, and test. Now I've taken back control and put government back in my hands for our companies part of the internet.It's my understanding that Network Solutions is NOT the legitimate operator of the
In my mind this is a stopgap measure, as my choice was arbitrary, and I really don't want the maintenance headache of having to keep a few hundred TLD entries up to date. I've taken our 30 users out of the ICANN/NSI pool, and will now seeks a better authority to trust in the long run.
It'll be interesting to see what grass roots efforts evolve from this, and what a democratically run Domain Name System looks like.
I strongly suggest everyone else do the same, and vote with your bits.
--Mike--
ICANN's legitimacy has been questioned from the get-go by policy wonks. I am frankly suprised that the left wing doesn't get more upset about this, or the hard right for that matter. There are other private corporations organized by charter with the imprimature of public agencies, the old HEAF (Higher Education Assistance Foundation) comes to mind, as well as organizations administering certain HUD programs and mortgage resellers. They all raise various degrees of stink WRT accountability, responsiveness and monopoly power.
They are, nearly all, the fruit of the small government movement championed by Reagan and Bush pere. Ironically, they are held up as exemplars of quality public/private partnership by free market moderates (Clinton, Dole, et. al.)
illegitimii non ingravare
If you get rid of ICANN, you still need an authority to resolve disputes about the root zone. Without such an authority, we will inevitably have disagreements between various root servers and inconsistencies between the meanings of some DNS names. People want and need DNS names to be consistent across the entire Internet. You can't get this without a single authority for a zone that can enforce some discipline about how the zone is maintained and resolve disputes when there are conflicts. You can and should try to give that authority the bare minimum control that it needs to do its job, but you can't get rid of it entirely. This is what ICANN tries to be - a single authority for the root but one that exercises no more control than necessary. It's not perfect, by any means, but that's the idea.
If you were to set up an authority from scratch, it would need to be organized much like ICANN - with representation from various consituencies, including folks with technical clues about the DNS protocols, the registries, and so forth.
ICANN is a mess but it's not at all clear that you could do better by tearing it down and starting over. Too many people want control of the DNS root, because too many people see it as a way to extort money from people, or to exert control over people, or to gather information about people. Others want to do away with the DNS root because they see an opportunity to make money from a land grab of new TLDs - never mind that the DNS doesn't scale well to large numbers of TLDs (cache effectiveness goes way down, for instance).
One of the main reasons that ICANN is a mess is because folks from NSI (now verisign) worked hard to make it that way. For all practical purposes ICANN was created to keep NSI from controlling things (because they were treating the DNS root and the major TLDs as their monopoly). Since NSI recognized ICANN as an obvious threat to that monopoly, they lobbied in various ways (for instance, by having influential Congressmen attack it) to saddle ICANN with an unwieldy organization with significant clue dilution. They also encouraged those who, for reasons of their own, wanted to attack ICANN. Those efforts were largely successful. NSI will still control .COM for many more years despite providing really lousy service and subjecting their customers to unreasonable and unfair business terms designed to maintain NSI's control over the major TLDs, and ICANN has been hobbled by tremendous amounts of naive and uninformed criticism (along with some that they deserved) that was encouraged by NSI.
If we tried to tear ICANN down and start over, the same people who worked so hard last time around to make it ineffective would also work hard trying to make the new organization ineffective. For instance, Verisign would see this as an opportunity to regain control of the root and the major TLDs, various folks in the US government would assert (once again) that the Internet belongs to the US and should be under US government control, and ITU would probably insist that they should control it by virtue of international treaty. None of these represent the interests of Internet users.
It may not be possible to "fix" ICANN to the extent that we would like. There are too many politically powerful folks out there who are bent on destroying it, or controlling it, for their own greedy or power-hungry purposes. Right now we have a tentative agreement to work with the ICANN structure, and an uneasy balance of power between the factions that would like to control it. Folks are trying to make it better, and I think it's slowly improving. It's far more likely that we can get better results in the long run by making small incremental changes to ICANN than by tearing it down and starting over.
Then I'll have to tweak my statement, and simply say. "Be careful what you do, because it may get worse." So often the call against ICANN is, "Throw it away and start over!"
I assert that where we see a vacuum of competence and fairness, others see a vacuum of power and revenue. In any throw-it-away-and-start-over model, the 'others' will most likely win.
Sure, ICANN needs to change. Perhaps the way to change it is through government intervention, perhaps by inciting industry leaders. Perhaps boycotts. But bumbling incompetence is better to deal with than raw malevolence. That's my point, not that we shouldn't try to change.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I know people get upset over ICANN, but things could be a LOT worse. At least ICANN pretends to be doing the right thing.
.org anyway, when we're talking about commercializing the Internet and can't make anything but pr0n pay? Bunch of freeloaders!
.... cubicles.
Instead, how about if domains were handled like frequencies, or any other semi-commercial venture. You know, auction off domain names to the highest bidder, trademarks be #$%&ed. Who needs
As bad as ICANN may be, it can clearly get worse.
The Guys At Work were griping about their offices and furniture a few weeks back. I suggested they not gripe too hard, because the OBVIOUS solution to their office/furniture problems would be
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
- The (undefined) ammount of money lost because of the (undefined) number of people that left the company earlier than expected because of the (undefined) decrease/lack-of-increase of happyness due to not having DVD players and 3d boards
- The cost of X DVD players and X 3D boards
Saving/gaining money tends to be chosen instead of non-measurable things like employee satisfaction.<RANT>
Unfortunatly most managers tend to think in the tactical sense (immediatly justifyable actions) instead of the strategic sense (looking at the bigger picture)
</RANT>
Your point misses the point, and is not in line with the facts. It does NOT cost $35 / year to keep the slashdot.org dns entry working. There are Massive economies of scale involved, and everything is automated. ICANN has given NSI the ability to rake in massive amounts of cash for delivering VERY little. The registrar business is VERY VERY profitable.
.com space hierarchical?
.biz and .info will fix this how?
.restaurant .music .games .news .personal will screwup the hierarchy and efficency in what way? What "technical" barrier in DNS limits TLD's to 200 instead of 20000? Why is it OK for 20,000,000 names in .com?????
As for your lecture: how is the flat
And
So the addition of
BTW, I'm QUITE well versed in DNS, thank you. Are you? The taxonomy of the current DNS system is BRAINDEAD. It made sense when there were hundreds of sites on the net. When there are millions, it is TOTALLY BROKEN as it does NOT efficiently organize names. Even if ICANN added 20 new TLD's, it DOESN'T FIX THE PROBLEM OF HAVING A SHITTY TAXONOMY.
http://www.media-visions.com/icann.htm a very good analysis of why ICANN is bad and what we can do about.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Forget everything else. The biggest thing that makes ICANN legitimate is that practically every ISP in the world follows their lead.
I support OpenNIC, but the fact remains is that I am in a VERY small minority. Until that changes, ICANN is "in charge".
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
Heh, I can see it now. Watch out whoever has the numbers that translate to 1800-MACCAS; the McDonalds lawyers are coming, and they're carrying hot coffee.
And for the US, though the situation might look to us, to a USE politician it does at least look like they've annexed the whole shebang: will DoC willingly concede control to something as hateful to (most) US politicians as the UN?
And, finally, that ICANN appears to be playing big coropration / monopoly games is not necessarily anything like anathema - so long as it is an American monopoly.
Sure it needs reforming; its more than amazing that things have got this bad this quickly. But I'm not holding my breath :-(
After all, in a weird way it is trying to impose US sovereignity over other nations. I am sure that someone can make a big stink over this.
I am sure that these concerns should at least be looked at and sorted out by international treaty, instead of ad hoc for the benefit of the members.
Consider the panic if Bill Gates were a member of the ICANN board. or one of his underlings. Obviously Gates would never personally belong to such a low level organization, but you get the idea.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
For that matter, a truly representative ICANN would do it's business in Chinese or some language other than English.
...
Seriously, though, ICANN was created by a few folks back before most country codes were even used, and may have outgrown itself. Supposedly the UN should usurp it's power, but then it will become even more political, and we'll soon have China revoking all Taiwanese registrations, and other such actions.
So, be careful what you ask for, you may get it. And you won't be happy with the replacement either
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
AOL Keyword: BADIDEA
The ITU is now a part of the UN but predates it by a few decades. It is the body that hands out frequencies, telephone country codes, satelite orbit slots, that sort of thing. It exists to do exactly the sort of beureacratic pen pushing that that type of task requires.
The advantage of having the UN control the root would have been that as a treaty organization it would be imune from the onslaught of lawsuits that the trademark owners threatened.
ICANN does not have immunity, nor does it have the funds to fight lawsuits. So it is little surprise that they act as the craven suplicants of the trademark owners.
The ITU is not exactly without critics but by and large it has far fewer critics than ICANN despite performing far more controvertial tasks.
The US invented ICANN to attempt to keep control of the Internet root. However in practice an attempt by the US to do something derranged would simply cause the root to pass out of their control. Imagine if the US decided to drop .uk or .de out of the root, the non-US ISPs would switch to an alternative root very quickly and most of the US ISPs would follow.
The only reason for keeping the root small is that it preserves this ability to switch the root over should that be necessary. If the root had 2,000,000 names in it it would not be possible to transfer it.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
If you can get a reasonable number of people to agree with your proposal, then propose it to the DoC. Even if they don't agree, it's likely that the proposal will start moving things in the right direction.
For example,
We got .biz. We got .info. We did not get .tel and .news. In addition to .biz/.info we also got .name (which I work for) for personal domain names, .aero specifically for the aerospace industry, .coop specifically for cooperatives, .museum specificall for museums, and .pro for licensed professionals (engineers, lawyers, doctors etc.).
Not expanding the potential web real estate?
And throughout your post you confuse registrars and registries all the time.
In addition, the selection process looked at the quality of the registry (because it would be no point choosing a new TLD if the company willing to operate it was incapable of doing so properly and fairly), whether the domain had an interesting concept, to what degree they differentiated themselves from the others (.name for instance is restricted to personal names and names of fictional characters, and only allows registrations on third level).
But yes, the quality of the registry was one of the factors. Would you like to buy a domain name that's only available every other day because the registry chosen turned out to be incapable of running it?
The 50.000 (not 10.000) USD requirement was a processing fee intended at ensuring that only people economically capable of running a registry would bother applying.
Another thing you've apparently not understood is that this is a proof of concept phase: It is a way for ICANN to see a) whether there's a market for new TLDs, or whether people will just stick with .com etc., b) whether their procedures - both technical and legal - are good enough to handle more TLDs, and c) whether they are capable of choosing registries that are capable of actually running a TLD linked into the global root.
The intent is that once ICANN gets some experience with the seven new gTLDs, that they will open up for more applications, and perhaps even a less stringent selection process.
You may have reasons to criticize ICANN, but at least have your facts straight before you do, or you'll just look like a moron.
(Ob disclaimer: I'm in charge of development at GNR, the company that got .name, so I'm kinda biased :-)
Second, none of the registries get paid 70 bucks to enter anything in their databases. If you go to www.icann.org and look at the posted contracts and contract proposals, you'll find that the prices for the registries lie around 4-6 dollars per domain per year. (Also not that the prices negotiated between the registries and ICANN are maximum prices - the registries can lower prices but not increase them beyond that point)
Now, this is not just for registration, but to cover the infrastructure for modifications, whois lookups and the operating the DNS servers for the TLD under very strict quality of service requirements. The registries may loose their TLDs if they can't provide the level of service required by ICANN.
ICANN also impose restrictions on behaviour, business arrangements the registry may enter into, and requires that the registry gives fair and equal treatment to all registrars. All of this because the registries effectively get a monopoly on their TLD in the contract period.
When you buy a domain, you do so from a registrar. And the registrars, however, does not have any price limitations, since they aren't in a monopoly situation. Thus if you're unhappy about the price you get at a registrar, you can find another one.
(ObDisclaimer: I work for the company that got .name, but the above are personal opinions)
And (surprise), most people use the global root that is under ICANNs administration, because most people only care about being able to rely on a domain name getting them to the same place no matter where they type it in.
Tell that to the registrars - they're drowning in preregistrations.
And yes,you did confuse a registrar with a registry, as you did again in this post. A registrar does NOT run any registries. In fact, there are severe limitations in the ICANN contracts on even cooperation between registrars and registries. Afilias for instance, had to spend a lot of work on ensuring ICANN that it's owners (registrars) would not get unfair access to the registry because of their status as shareholders.
These requirements from ICANN is also why Network Solution operates the registry and registrar as two separate departments with separate employees working on it, and very limited information flow between them.
A registrar and registry can possibly be part of the same company, but they are completely different roles and require clear separation of work and information flow to be accepted by ICANN.
No, you are wrong. The Network Solutions registry and the Network Solutions registrar are two different divisions, for instance. And of the new ICANN approved registries, none are registrars (allthough some are owned wholly or in part by registrars). In the case of .name for instance (I work for the company that got the license for that), we are not a registrar and we have no registrars among our owners.
And since ICANN falls under the UN, which was created by Treaty with the US and other nations, ICANN's wishes override the Constitution by our own Constitutional definition.
Bzzzt!
Sorry, but you are incorrect. The ICANN has nothing to do with the United Nations. From the About ICANN page:
ICANN derives its authority purely from a contract with the United States government. Essentially, ICANN was created to replace IANA (John Postel r.i.p.) and ARIN.
The scary thing about ICANN is that they so quickly became beholden to Network Solutions and the other vested big-money interests, instead of paying attention to what's good for the Internet as a whole.
Recent revelations about secret deals to allow Network Solutions to hang onto the .COM databases essentially indefinitely should have woken up the US Congress to the degree to which ICANN has already been corrupted, but so far, there is no sign that anyone in Congress has noticed, nor do they appear to care.
I've always wondered why ICANN seemed to have complete power.. I mean, if you think about it, they basically spend no money trying to buy products to enhance their business; they just enter stuff into a central system and make sure it doesn't already exist.. and get paid thousands of dollars to do so. How come it costed 70 bucks for somebody to enter a word into a system, instead of 5 or something? I just never really understood why.. maybe it's to discourage interest in domains by people who don't need them, but there's gotta be some other way, you know? Maybe it's just me, I'm not sure :) Just my two cents..
This bit of info was brought to you by the letter Q. Thanks, Q.
Uhh, Al gore introduced the legislation that created NSFnet.
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Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
Just an idle question, but does ICANN also control IPv6 TLDs? If not, then who? If yes, why?