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.au's Reclusive Administrator Elz Deposed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the rug-out-from-under dept.

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.

2 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. meta comment. by Error27 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think if you link to old slashdot articles you should link to the part with all the comments.

    so instead of linking to:

    http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/19/0729248.sh tm l
    you should link to:

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/12/19/0729 24 8


    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. ;P

  2. Please read the report by kimba · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'd suggest you read IANA's report which is a lot more comprehensive than the media reports.

    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 .au at heart and I think this is a very positive move.

    auDA's plans for .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.