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.

Comments

ICANN should have been gone long ago

[afidel]

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.

Re:ICANN should have been gone long ago

[room101]

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.

Re:ICANN should have been gone long ago

[Bonker]

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.

In Ghana?

[Coward Anonymous]

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?

Re:In Ghana?

[Alkaiser]

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.

an issue of fault tolerance...

[dj_whitebread]

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.

ROFLMAO

[Dr Kool, PhD]

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

Uh...Ghana?

[waldoj]

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

Re:Uh...Ghana?

[qslack]

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!

Re:run you r own nameservers

[Snootch]

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.

My biggest annoyance with the ICANN

[Kiwi]

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

"NCC?"

[Guppy06]

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

Re:run you r own nameservers

[Aanallein]

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.

Spank!

[jcr]

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

Well said, indeed!

-jcr

It doesn't scale

[keithmoore]

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.