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RIPE NCC Responds to ICANN CEO's Proposal
An anonymous reader sends in: "RIPE NCC (the European IP address registry) responds to the ICANN proposals for reducing their own accountability even further whilst spending millions of everyone else's money." ICANN will be meeting next week in Ghana - ought to be a feisty meeting.
Finally, let us say that we are quite surprised by the way this proposal was published. The document contains proposals for change of such fundamental scope, in a field that is of utmost importance to our community, that we wish that you had discussed these with us beforehand.... Seeing that you are proposing fundamental changes to ICANN and the principles behind the ICANN - RIR MoU, signed in 1999, we believe that in the interest of our members, we have to thoroughly re-assess our relationship with ICANN.
We are looking forward to discussing these issues with you at the earliest possible opportunity.
In general, it's a good idea to let the people you're working with know things before you make them public.
ICANN can't like how the note ends... The tone makes it sound like it's buh-bye for ICANN...
People are actually running their own nameservers outside of ICANN in a quite ordered way - there's a host of .ocean, .dot, .children, and similar top level domains out there - all you need to do is use one of those nameservers.
Go take a look at OpenNIC - through which you can also use the top level domains from PacificRoot and AlterNIC.
Well, the RIR's (APNIC, ARIN, and RIPE) can certainly handle policy without dragging their feet. Check out ARIN's last trustee meeting:
RIPE was one of the parties pressuring ICANN because they couldn't guarantee the root servers.
/8) blocks of IP addresses, or blocks of AS numbers. This would take about 2 hours a month to administer. Nowhere near enough effort to justify the huge piles of cash ICANN wants from the RIR's, which are all not-for-profit companies.
I don't think this is true. I worked at ARIN and now at the RIPE NCC, and frankly neither organization has ever really tried too hard to influence ICANN.
The reality is that ICANN wants for the Regional Internet Registries (RIR's - meaning APNIC, ARIN, and RIPE NCC, and soon LACNIC) to sign an agreement with them. Currently, only a Memorandium Of Understanding (MOU) has been signed, to the effect that the RIR's agree that in principle a contract with ICANN would be a good thing. ICANN would benefit from a contract in two ways.
First, they would get money. ICANN is always slavering for extra cash - something that should set off warning bells. This is a sticking point with me because the only thing the RIR's get from ICANN is allocations of big (/7 or
Second, ICANN would get increased legitamacy. Having support from the RIR's, which are inherently bottom-up, would go a long way to making the top-down ICANN palatable to the ISP community.
There is a genuine place in the world for something like ICANN, but the lawyer-driven, power-hungry organization we have now is not the answer.
I was on ICANN's original internationalized domain name committee. We pretty much decided to do whatever the IETF says to do. That still feels like an appropriate answer and is consistent with the notion that ICANN ought to merely coordinate rather than dictate technology.
/" as a DNS label!
Although DNS is defined to be 8-bit clean, there are ancient relics in the standards about how some names have to be in a reduced alphanumeric plus hyphen character set.
What scares me is this: There are a lot of DNS engines out there that might be surprised to suddenly find characters outside of that character set. And some of these engines are in surprising places - firewalls, NATs, web caches, etc. I had an experience in which someone was tunneling audio via DNS UDP packets and for some reason a mongo sized Cisco in the middle was parsing those packets and crashing IOS.
And internationalized names can creep in even when it appears that standard ascii is being used - imagine an ascii name that maps to an internationalized CNAME.
I tend to agree with John Klensien that the best way to deal with things is to push for new things to be layered on top of DNS, thus making DNS largely invisible, and to try to get people to start being blind to the semantics of the DNS character strings. Sounds impossible until one realizes that the method adopted by the IETF - ACE encoding - will mean that we start seeing DNS names that look like bq--3kdhyekjayy.org floating around.
Just wait until gethostbyname() sees some of these things - imagine a domain name that contains things like dots, nulls, asterisks, etc inside each of the DNS "labels". I'm dreding the day when I see see "rm -rf