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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.
It seems to me this could be a good thing, to open up the full flood gates of complaints towards ICANN. I mean seriously, I think almost every organization affiliated with them, plus many of us (cough /.) is just about fed up with them and some of the not quite brilliant things they're doing.
Let's just hope this gets something rolling, because obviously our voices are next to unheard.
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
When they refused to create the .XXX TLD they showed complete disregard for the future of the net as a self regulating entity. If they had created an .XXX TLD then we could banish net nany, cyber sitter, government intervention "to protect the children" and many other anoyances in one easy swoop.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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?
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...
FOUR acronyms in the story title. Compared to three non-acronyms. That's some kind of record, IIRC.
This is a country with 8,000 Internet users, 110 hosts, 82 domain names, 4 ISPs and a 2,048bps connection to the outside world. They don't have much going on.
So, why are they meeting in Ghana?
-Waldo Jaquith
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.
The problem with this is that this has a western-centric point of view which does not take in to account the writing systems that foreign languages use.
Now, the ICANN was in a position to officially push forward some specification, any specification to allow international characters in domain names. Unfortunatly, they were too busy spending million of dollars on international conferences, staying in five star hotels, to actually do anything about this problem.
International domain labels work right now with current DNS servers and DNS client software. One can type in, say español.example.com in Mozilla, and MaraDNS, not to mantion DjbDNS, will correctly resolve this domain name. The trick: Mozilla uses UTF-8 to encode international characters in domain names, and both MaraDNS and DjbDNS can handle domain names with UTF-8 characters.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Am I the only one that thought of Star Trek when they saw that acronym?
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.
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."
recentralising a decentralised network
And where would you start to look for information?
Right now there are 13 globally spread root-servers which know all the locations of the ccTLD and TLD servers. Without this piece of centralisation it will be hard++ to add new (cc)TLD, because everybody has to update their root.hints (or equivalent) file.
Centralisation an sich is not good, but distributed centralisation is good.
bash$
...THAT should prove an effective barrier to those pesky would-be participants that don't have barrels of corporate money behind them...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
In fact, tosser, you will realise that I did not write the subject! It is a reply, and the subject is intact, as all good replies should be. Have a nice troll.
i hate pansy republicans
RIPE was one of the parties pressuring ICANN because they couldn't guarantee the root servers.
Now in this response they say "The so called "volunteers" operating the rootserver system are well funded and very well co-ordinated. Binding them contractually to one entity, ICANN, would create a single point of failure, possibly subject to capture. The current form of organisation works well, and is resistant to capture through the multitude of different operators and organisations housing and operating the servers. This system has been stable for many
years. We think that to change it in the way you envision would introduce risks more important than any co-ordination benefits.
Furthermore, we feel that you would do better not to burden ICANN with the task of financing the Root Server operating system. Rather, ICANN should
stick to the core mission of coordinating them.
"
Interesting
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
No way pornographers want XXX. Why? They enjoy legal battles?
.xxx from its network. So would AOL. they do NOT want to be seen as porn advocates. Porn would suffer HEAVILY. Sure they would win their court battle, but it would be LONG and protracted and the whole world would be against them.
:D
Why? because now religious groups would leave porn sites alone and go after Comcast and AOL, etc. And you know DAMN well comcast would comply and block
They just dont need it. Well unless it came with guarantees that it would not get blocked.
Dont get me wrong, its stoopid, especially since comcast has porn channels anyway. But you know how hyped the net is. Come election time, they would get roasted
...how this is either a troll or redundant--since it was modded as both. I've never posted that message before, and I was defending myself.
Go ahead and mod this one down too. How bout Offtopic?