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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.

7 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. In Ghana? by Coward+Anonymous · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And this is because Ghana is a world Internet power, right?

    For kripe's sake, just look at their "meeting" calendar - it looks like a travel agency billboard.

    What additional proof do you need that ICANN is into frittering other people's money for their own entertainment?

    1. Re:In Ghana? by Alkaiser · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They reason they meet in obscure locations is because everyone who signed up to vote and stuff gets to vote at meetings. If they have them where you, me, everyone in the pissant public can't get to, then they pretty much eliminate the possibility of people discussing pertinent things at their meetings, and instead get to wonder, "What the heck do you call people from Ghana? Ghana-reans?"

      Then they'll vote on it and go home.

      --
      Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
  2. Re:run you r own nameservers by Snootch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Screw ICANN. DNS itself is a bad idea, anyway, recentralising a decentralised network...

    Hmm...and how exactly would you look up a web server's address? I know, remember an IP for each host you'll ever visit, and get that IP in the first place from...well...good question, isn't it? Even the old HOSTS.TXT file was centralised, and, by your logic, a Bad Thing.

  3. Re:ICANN should have been gone long ago by room101 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Sorry, I don't think so.

    1. the porn sites aren't going to switch just because there is a .xxx tld.

    2. the ICANN can't/won't enforce any kind of consistency for consumer/civilian based tld. (that is, you won't be able to know for sure that a XXX site didn't try to "slip in" with a .com tld)

    The ICANN has been asked to create content-based tld before and they have refused because they don't want to play policeman. I for one agree, I don't want them to decide what goes on the web and what doesn't.

    --
    room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
    (they always break you eventually)
  4. Spank! by jcr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IOW, "Do your damn job, and quit trying to become a bloated government agency."

    Well said, indeed!

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  5. Re:ICANN should have been gone long ago by Bonker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    To put it simply you are wrong. You mean to tell me that if they had approved a .xxx TDL that all the porn sites in the world would just change their domain names and live happily ever after quarantined in the .xxx TDL.

    And you're an idiot.

    Pornographers were the ones arguing hardest for an XXX TLD during the TLD proposal a while back.

    First of all, you fail to make a distinction between real porn sites-- individuals and companies interested in selling explicit material to consenting adults-- and scam sites who are interested in trying to get as many eyeballs as they can, frequently with pornographic material.

    Real pornographers know that they are running location-independant businesses. That's why in the real world the best strip clubs and adult bookstores and novelty shops will always be outside whatever city limits you happen to live inside. They have less to worry about in the way of police interference, angry neighbors, and intolerant church groups.

    The intelligent ones *want* to be segregated. Because it is considered a 'vice', Porn is a unique business in that its customers will come to it rather than the other way around. Pornographers are interested in making money, not corrupting your children or your neighborhood's youth, regardless of what your religious leaders. They don't make money unless they sell to consenting adults. They make money off people who know what they want and know where to find it, and not people who 'browse' like you would in a department store.

    By creating an .XXX or .adult TLD, Pornographers get all the benifits of opening a store five miles outside the city limits while at the same time giving those who are intolerant to porn every opportunity to shut them out of the 'communities'. Parasitic scammers who try to lure people to illigitamate sites would quickly find themselves without the stronger, legitimate pornographers to shield their activity, and fade away.

    Now, I'm not saying that Porno is not a dirty, manipulative business without a lot of problems. Most of that, however, is due to the same kind of neglect and intolerance that ICANN showed during the TLD fiasco. Look at the state of Nevada, which has legalized sex work to a great deal. Adult actors, models, and prostitutes in that state not only make more money than sex workers anywhere else in the world, but are also better protected from rape, STD's, harrassment, and abuse. If ICANN had approved the XXX tld, I can't help but think that would have had a little of the same effect on internet porn.

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  6. It doesn't scale by keithmoore · · Score: 4, Insightful
    This doesn't cause too many problems on a small scale. But if everybody picked his own root, it would be a disaster.

    If you want domain names (and URLs) to work reliably and consistently from one location to another, there needs to be some mechanism to sort out conflicts over the meaning of a name. That job is inherently fraught with controversy, because it will pit people with vastly different interests, cultures, and expectations against one another. I don't particularly like the result of UDRP, but the bottom line is that dispute resolution is a difficult job no matter how it's done.

    On the other hand if everybody picks his own root (or his own root search path) then URLs won't have the same meaning from one client to another, and instead of having ICANN handle disputes about who owns a TLD or SLD, we'll have the same disputes being handled by people trying to tell random users to change their root servers. or by interception proxies forced on users by ISPs. In some parts of the world there will be government edicts insisting that a particular root be used, with different roots required in different parts of the world.

    Granted that ICANN is seriously screwed up and that its current proposal is not a step in the right direction. But having one authority responsible for dispute resolution at the TLD level makes a lot more sense than inviting wide variation in the meanings of DNS names.

    RFC 2826 still says it pretty well.