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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.
The words: obstructionist, rude, arrogant, overbearing (and others that are unprintable) have all been used to describe Elz.
Whatever people may like to think about Elz and his policies (some of which were good), the fact of the matter is that the Internet is not (and hasn't been for several years) a private little network which can be run by an academic with no connection to the real world.
Whether we like it or not, the Internet is an essential tool for many businesses, organisations and people - it is completely unacceptable that it could take months for register a
As far as I am concerned, and I'm pretty sure anyone who has had to liase with Elz would agree - it's a case of good riddance.
ICANN said that as Internet names increasingly had commercial value, decisions could not be made on an ad hoc basis by individuals that were not formally accountable.
Well if that isn't the pot calling the kettle black. What was ICANN's reason for now allowing the TLD iii? "It looks too difficult to pronouce." And who exactly is ICANN accountable to? Well...oh yeah, that's right no one.
Give me a break. When was the last time there was a problem with the way this guy was running things? When was the last time you read a story about some lame cybersquatting issue from AU? I don't think I've ever seen one. And, to close with another adage...if it isn't broke, don't fix it.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
I think if you link to old slashdot articles you should link to the part with all the comments.
h tm l
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;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