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RIPE NCC Responds to ICANN CEO's Proposal

Posted by michael on from the playing-for-all-the-marbles dept.

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.

23 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. ICANN should have been gone long ago by afidel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:ICANN should have been gone long ago by Knightmare · · Score: 3, 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. No, you are out of your idealistic mind if you truly believe this. If you don't and were trying to be witty, then I look to the moderators and ask why oh why is this rated 4 (at the time of my post)

    2. Re:ICANN should have been gone long ago by thesolo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Hear, hear!

      Jesse Berst first began talking about the ICANN and the .XXX domain proposal back in the spring & summer of 99. I remember thinking to myself, "Man, that is a great idea, I wonder why no one thought of it before."

      And yet, nothing came of it. Moving adult content to a .XXX server would be ideal for so many reasons, I fail to see why they wouldn't do anything with it. Is there any way to get that movement started back up?

    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. 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.

      --
      The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
    5. Re:ICANN should have been gone long ago by Zeinfeld · · Score: 3, Insightful
      It doesn't have to be ICANN, they could give out the contract to run the TLD to a couple different registrars who would actually do the policing.

      The mind boggles.

      It appears that you would have the .xxx registrars carefully check the sites in their domain to make sure that they all had sufficiently pornographic content. While I could see that VeriSign could probably find a willing army of applicants eager to perform that task at minimum wage I cannot see what purpose would be served that could not be served by a quality control association such as the Germans set up in response to complaints of insufficiently hard core porn.

      What I suspect you mean is that companies in the dotcom domain should be scanned to see if they have porno content up. That is a considerably harder prospect and you would not find registrars willing to do it without a substantial increase in the registration fee.

      Maybe we could simply move all the porn sites presently in .com into .xxx space. Something like that will have to happen if .com is going to return to any semblance of organization.

      Why on earth does there have to be any semblance of organization in dotcom? There is no technical reason for having the namespace partitioned at the toplevel. The DNS could be run perfectly well if registrations were offered into the root directly. It would require considerably more resources than it does at present but it is certainly feasible from an operational point of view. There would still be hierarchy but that would happen below the name you registered. So slashdot could use www.slashdot as their web address if they chose, or they could use just slashdot and a NAPTR record.

      --
      Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
      Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
    6. Re:ICANN should have been gone long ago by Archfeld · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So...what qualifies as a pornographic site ? Nudity ? Does this include medical sites ? Art sites with nude paintings ? How about sites that just tell obscene jokes ? What if "jenny cam" gets a bit racey some night ? Might as well call for a board of censorship to judge the content of all web pages. While I can see your point, I think you've failed to think through some of the consequnces of being human, frail and ultimately corruptable.

      --
      errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
  2. 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:In Ghana? by SubtleNuance · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

      Um, they are going to Ghana hopefully because* ICANN is meant to serve as a World Body, the International Congress of Nations. Which the honourable and respected nation of Ghana is a member.

      Holy-f'ing-christ, do you two (this and a post below) not realize just how myopic and jingoistic your posts are(!!)?

      *PLUS the Plutocratic-whore$ of ICANN love a good boon-doggle, Im sure it wasnt hard to sell to themselves (who would probably align with the mindset/thinking, with-regards-to Ghana, as the two of you.) a fun trip to that backwards-3rd-World Ghana.

  3. Oops... by Schwamm · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...

  4. an issue of fault tolerance... by dj_whitebread · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Binding them contractually to one entity, ICANN, would create a single point of failure, possibly subject to capture.
    This is a fabulous point. From a technical standpoint, one of the fault tolerance features of the internet is its inherent sense of "multiple backups." Abstracting this to the organizational side, it becomes clear that to put all of the power into one group's hands is a weakness. There should be one standard way of doing things, but several different groups doing it.
  5. ROFLMAO by Dr+Kool,+PhD · · Score: 5, Funny

    FOUR acronyms in the story title. Compared to three non-acronyms. That's some kind of record, IIRC.

  6. Uh...Ghana? by waldoj · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

    1. Re:Uh...Ghana? by qslack · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Maybe it's to foster the growth of the Internet in Ghana?

      Imagine how much richer the Internet would be with a whole new set of opinions from Africans and members of other countries that are currently too poor to offer their citizens the Internet.

      Not everyone in Africa is starving, some live like "normal" people. The Internet might just bring in commerce to end the starvation in Africa, too.

      It's not completely pointless to meet in Ghana!

      --
      qslack.com
  7. 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.

  8. My biggest annoyance with the ICANN by Kiwi · · Score: 5, Interesting
    My personal biggest annoyance with the ICANN is that they have been dragging their feet with regard to support for internationalized characters in domain names. The problem is this: Domain names traditionally only had English language letters [A-Za-z] and the '-' symbol as part of domain names. (The '.' character signifies a delimiter in domain name labels; it isn't there in the DNS packet sent over the wire.)

    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.

    1. Re:My biggest annoyance with the ICANN by Merry_B.Buck · · Score: 3, Informative
      My personal biggest annoyance with the ICANN is that they have been dragging their feet...
      Well, the RIR's (APNIC, ARIN, and RIPE) can certainly handle policy without dragging their feet. Check out ARIN's last trustee meeting:
      >John Curran called the meeting to order at 10:20 a.m. EST.
      [new officers elected]
      [multihoming and address space issues decided]
      >Scott Bradner moved to adjourn the meeting at 10:40 a.m. EST.
  9. "NCC?" by Guppy06 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Am I the only one that thought of Star Trek when they saw that acronym?

  10. Re:run you r own nameservers by Aanallein · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  11. 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."
  12. Hold the meeting on the Space Shuttle... by dpbsmith · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...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!

  13. 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.