ICANN At-Large Study

perp writes: "ICANN has published the draft of its At-Large recommendations. It's long, but it looks like they're trying to raise the bar for at-large membership by requiring at-large members to a) pay a fee and b) be a registered domain holder. Their comments about all the non-committed at-large members who "enrolled only because it was easy" gave me a laugh; it took three days of trying for me to register." The draft also proposes slashing At-Large board members from 9 to 6. But there are some good points in there about organizational issues.

Comments

Re-evaluation of domain names

[mcelli]

I think that the issue of domain name registration is very problematic and needs to be completely re-evaluated.

Here is the issue: I wanted to visit classicgaming.org, spelled it wrong, and ended up with so many ads that I had to kill my browser. What does a million banner ads have to do with classic gaming?

Everyone has stories like this, and the issue here is deception. There has been no reprimand for deceiving people with domain names. If I create a website like www.guinnessucks.com, Guiness sues me, but there is no consumer watch organization that looks out for situations that clearly interfere with usage of the internet.

This consumer watch organization should be the ICANN. No more of this "do what you want with it" philosophy. If I create a website called clasicgaming.com, it better have something to do with the words in it's title, or lose my domain name. Registering a domain name should be like registering a Trade mark or a radio station, but just more streamlined.

In the name of civil liberty and through obscure definition of Free Speech, people are letting serious violation of a user's rights pass on the Internet. We are even defending this in fear that they'll come after us. It's time to realize that communities need policing, and usually the cops don't bust your door down if you're not breaking the law. It is time for regulation.

A Self Perpetuating System

[webmaven]

The reccomendation that the at-large membership be comprised of domain-name holders rather than the broader internet user population is setting up a conflict of interest.

Domain names are primarily valuable currently because they are a scarce resource. By creating an at-large membership comprised entirely of domain name holders, they are setting up an entrenched interest that will oppose the proliferation of gTLDs, as Karl Auerbach has been pushing for.

Clearly, they hope that this action will not lead to his re-election, but will place someone more 'reasonable' in his place.

This is just another tactic aimed at maintaining an artificial scarcity of domain names, and sharpening ICANN as a tool to manufacture and maintain this scarcity. ICANN is looking more like the diamond cartel every day.

For the record, I currently own 35 domain names.

You, sir, are full of shit.

[Inti]

Some of the alternate roots did establish an 'all.your.base.are.belong.to.us' domain as a joke, around the time of the ICANN Melbourne meeting (March?). OpenNIC did not. We discussed the matter, decided we had no authority over the .us TLD, and decided not to do it. You have us confused with another root, apparently.

We are not breaking the old DNS. We agree completely with ICANN on the importance of the stability of the inclusive namespace. We absolutely will not touch a TLD or domain that is outside of our purview.

Our root.cache file is here (or here). See for yourself. There are no .us domains in it whatsoever.

The OpenNIC claims only 5 TLDs. We have over 500 registered members - growing fast - and many more users.

Finally, pointing resolve.conf at ANYONE gives that party control of what you see. I think the OpenNIC is more worthy of user trust than any other root, including ICANN/VGA. This is because the entire organization is governed by the vote of its members, much like the Debian people. So nobody's cutting deals behind the scenes.

Get it straight, Cleatus. You're embarassing yourself.