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

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

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

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

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.