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.au's Reclusive Administrator Elz Deposed
Disco Stu writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald has the following story: 'The reclusive programmer Mr Robert Elz has lost control of Australia's domain name system to a private-sector body after the Federal Government rejected his request for the Government to take over the custodianship instead.' I've had to wait months for this guy to get around to approving domains in the past ... but I still can't decide if this is good or not." Sounds bad to me -- or at least Elz sounds good, principled and unconventional.
After reading Timothy's comment, I realised that he has no idea why Elz is detested by people who need to register or transfer .org.au domains.
.org.au transfer to occur ... if Elz felt like it ... sometimes it could take months. And if you got into an argument with Elz, you could forget about anything happening to your domain request for months and months.
.org.au, it is his responsibility to provide a certain level of service - he didn't do this and is therefore a hinderance to the further development of the Internet industry in Australia - good riddance Elz.
Let's face reality, the Internet is no longer a simple little network which is a curiosity. For many business/organisations/people, it is an essential part of their operations.
The problem with Elz is not so much his policies, but his attitude and response times. It often took a couple of weeks for a
And if it was a once off case, people could turn a blind eye to the problem - but it wasn't a once off case. Ask anyone who actively has to deal with Elz on a regular basis and you will most likely hear a story of frustration and irritation.
So, ignore the high moral ground that Elz has staked out by refusing to profit from the IPO of MelbourneIT - frankly I couldn't care if he did or not - the real reason Elz is detested is because as the domain administrator for
I always thought Melbourne IT controlled .com.au anyway. Elz controlled the other domains in .au like .net.au, .org.au.
I think if you link to old slashdot articles you should link to the part with all the comments.
h tm l
9 24 8
;P
so instead of linking to:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/19/0729248.s
you should link to:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/12/19/072
This makes it easier for those of us without karma to copy and paste one of the +5 insightful comments to the current discussion and thereby gleaning a little karma for ourselves. Or instead the insightful comments, someone could link to this comment and get modded +1 funny.
I'd suggest you read IANA's report which is a lot more comprehensive than the media reports.
.au at heart and I think this is a very positive move.
.au are already available on the Internet and were formed through open public processes earlier in the year. The primary result will be competition in the domain registration area. Currently the domains under .au (com.au, net.au) etc are run by parallel monopolies, but this will be opened up to a competitive environment under the plan. The competition report is here.
The news article says it is a private-sector body, but it is an open body formed of stakeholders including domain registrars, users, and Internet organisations (e.g. the Internet Society and Electronic Frontiers are on the board).
I am on the board of auDA, elected as a user representative. I am not from a registrar or any commercial interest. I can say that everyone has the best interests of
auDA's plans for
But, then, does it really matter much anyway? .com.au doesn't seem like prime internet real-estate anyway and there are more TLDs on the way, as well as numerous "slightly used" .com domains.
It matters a whole lot in the courts when it comes to trademark protection etc. As happened with the etoy/etoys saga, what would you rather be? An Australian company going up against a US company in a US court, or an Australian company going up against a US company in an Australian court?
'sapientia potestas est'
No, the problem is that he is, as others have noted, extremely tedious to deal with.
.org.au -=> why do you think linux.conf.au has not been registered?
He rarely responds to email and no every problem is with a
I put the initial request in during March. It is now August. You do the math.
No, Melbourne IT was granted a 5 year license in 1996 to run the registrar services. It is currently controlled by auDA, previously by Robert Elz. You can see the delegation of authority for .au on page 7
.au technical report.
of the
Canada had a similar arrangement as Australia it would appear, with registrations happening through a guy at Simon Fraser University. Things could be very frustrating registering .ca domains; many people just gave up and went .com. Anyway, eventually they shifted control to a .com arrangement (more deregulation, really) and things are now very easy to register .ca. So I think the Aussies will find that this is a good thing.
Not one post has bothered to note Elz served the Aussie internet for FREE for many years without credit.
.org.au nazi like policies and repsonse times upset a lot of ppl, it did get the job done.
.org.au domain, then hiring Melbourne IT students to sit outside Elz's door day after day demanding it be done NOW, till he delegates the domain. What would you do? Where does it stop? These are the ppl/orgs he has had to deal with over the years on a regular basis.
.org.au namespace in responsible hands. auDA will never be able to provide the same service Elz has. Sure they claim to be non-profit, but that's also how the .com.au space started, which has now degraded into a $ driven "if you have enough money, you can get any domain regardless of the policies" domain.
.org.au was managed in the way it was.
While his
You too would have the same attitude to idiots who go full-house into an advertising campaign only to forget about securing a
Anyone who took the time to realize this was a free service, showed a little courtesy and got their nameservers setup correctly the first time got there domain delegated on time.
It's a real pitty Senator Alston and his Liberal government cronies have failed to keep the
So before anyone else decides get on the "BAG Elz wagon", take a minute to think why the
Rob.
www.area51.org.au
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