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ICANN Releases Reform Plan
If you've followed the history of ICANN at all, you know that it was originally set up to have substantial representation from the general public (known as At-Large representatives) - 9 of 18 board members. The original unelected board immediately set about undermining that, only electing 5 members and keeping on four "board-squatters" from the original unelected bunch.
The elections of the five At-Large members had two flaws from the point of view of ICANN's unelected board:
- There were assorted technical issues with the voting process, due apparently to incompetence from the contractor who handled it.
- Two of the five new board members who were elected did not represent the same corporate interests as the rest of the board.
Of these two flaws, the second was by far the more severe. The board risked losing control of ICANN to people who might run it for the public good rather than for the good of the corporations represented on the board. They started backing away from having any sort of elected representation whatsoever. In February 2002 ICANN President Lynn floated a reform proposal which would eliminate the At-Large representation - or rather, it would keep something called "At-Large", that would no longer be elected by the general public but instead appointed by the Board itself. Instead of the general public picking new ICANN Board members, the ICANN Board would pick new ICANN Board members. This was followed by a vote which confirmed ICANN's commitment to eliminating elected representation.
Now the reform proposal is out. There would be two classes of board members:
- approximately eight ex-officio members (members holding the board seat due to some other title or position they hold)
- approximately five to eleven members picked by a Nominating Committee (the Committee to be chosen by the current Board) and perhaps confirmed by the Board
It is important to note how thoroughly captured this process is. Many of the ex-officio seats accrue from positions that are selected by the ICANN Board. So the ICANN Board picks someone to be chief dogwalker, and the chief dogwalker gets an automatic position on ICANN's Board.
The seats selected by the Nominating Committee are also extremely vulnerable to capture. Let me use a real-life example of how nominating committees work to show what I mean: my credit union.
My credit union has a board structure very similar to the one proposed for ICANN: several ex-officio members, and a number of seats elected by the general populace (everyone who has an account at the credit union). This structure is actually more flexible than that proposed for ICANN, since ICANN does not plan any direct elections at all. However, the credit union membership picks from among candidates selected by a Nominating Committee. Every year or two, I get a ballot in the mail. I can choose from among all the candidates selected by the Nominating Committee, and I can check boxes for the candidates that I prefer, up to the number of open seats available on the Board.
I never return these ballots. Why, you might ask? Because the number of candidates is usually identical to the number of open seats. Three empty seats, three candidates to choose from. Six empty seats, six candidates to choose from. I think one year they might have had more candidates than open seats, but it was an aberration.
This system apparently works well for credit unions: would you believe that they pay interest on my checking account? What it does guarantee is that all future Board members will represent the same biases that are present in the Board at the instant the system was instituted. In my credit union's case, this guarantees "fiscal responsibility" or "fiscal conservatism".
For ICANN, what it would do is institutionalize the biases currently present. Whatever biases are there right now, will be there forever, as the system becomes a self-reinforcing feedback loop with no external controls.
The Board's current biases are toward:
- expanding ICANN's mission from a purely technical body to one that is willing to govern the Internet - taking on assorted social/political issues as it sees fit
- running ICANN for private profit rather than public benefit
Neither of these two traits needs reinforcing. Karl Auerbach, one of ICANN's At-Large directors, has his thoughts on a possible ICANN structure.
Domain Names are obsolete! Just type what you are looking for into google and hit "I'm Feeling Lucking"
saves letters too, slashdot is 4 letters less than slashdot.org
bling bling!
-- OMFG = Oh My Floatse Goatse
I find it sad that the internet, which first started out as a place to -share- information has now turned into a place who's sole purpose is to -sell- information. What next? I guess the Golden Rule strikes again 'He who has the goal, makes the rules'
-- p06 "On religious wars: They're essentially wars over whoo's imaginary friend is better"
I know this sounds terrible at first glance. This can only lead to corporate bias in the Internet.
But then I reconsidered. It occured to me that corporations have one thing that the Internet lacks: stability. Because the growth of the Internet relies upon widespread standards, there needs to be a central, solid body on which to base new technologies and policies.
If ICANN goes the "open" route, then we risk introducing the volatility of the Internet into its heretofore pristine foundation. And that, my friends, is not an action that will be easily undone.
I love the Internet. And I don't want to lose it.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
It's been said on here before: the only force that can really act against spam is the government. "There oughta be a law", in so many words. Every day our inboxes are packed to the eyeteeth with ads for diplomas, penis pumps, and vitamins from Korea. No technical solution has proven itself, so it's obvious that we need outside help. I think we're all agreed on that.
But our individual governments can't do anything outside of our borders (some exceptions apply, of course). We need a governing force capable of applying unilateral legislation consistently, without possibility of loopholes, in order to stop offshore spam. Who better than ICANN, really?
I'm with you that we need a couple of seats to represent our interests, but unfortunately we need the entrenched interests to have power to stop the net from collapsing into a puddle of anarchy and unsolicited commercial e-mail. It's not your father's Internet anymore.
http://www.domainhandbook.com/Images/postel.jpg
Google uses webcrawlers, which use DNS, which gets its names from this "board". If they restructure the naming system, how will the search engines deal with the old content? I doubt that they will successfully set up SSP chains for the references they have already built, so all the ranks will be dead. Some content may be lost, and others 404-ed.
Ok, so why is this "non-election" issue a problem when it comes to ICANN, but when it comes to the non-elected people that decide what's part of the Linux kernel, then it's ok?
Both are deciding things for a community, and none are elected. Hypocritical to complain about one and not the other, don't you think?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The "reform" is a rather heavy-handed play to force popular representation off the system entirely, leaving only the corps and the govs in charge of the name system. It is, in my own cynical opinion, specifically aimed at Karl Auerbach, who is currently suing to get access to ICANN corporate records.
The fable of the "independant ICANN" is getting awfully threadbare, what with DOC and Congress claiming ownership. I expect the UN to announce their control at any moment...
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
"Outsiders could file complaints with an ombudsman, or go to an independent arbitration forum if they believed the group was violating its bylaws."
What is an ombudsman? Is it something slashdot, as an organized body could file complains to?
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
:-)
It's kind of sad that, even on Slashdot, the first comment on a story about the dismantling of the free internet is a pun. Hopefully, the rest of you are too busy crying to reply quickly.
--
E_NOSIG
If you'd like a domain name without having anything to do with ICANN, look into OpenNIC.
.glue, .geek, .null, .indy, .parody, and .oss However these are not official ICANN domains, so you need to setup different DNS roots for your dns server, and obviously a dns server that supports these domains for users.
You can get free domains, on their tlds,
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
so shut the fuck up you rimjobbing filthy gnu troll!
Should have been:
so shut the fuck up you rimjobbing filthy Gnu/RMS/Linux troll!
Please make a note of it.
The
It is strange how the Internet was considered to be the place where the great idea and the little guy could beat the old, hulking, mega-corportation, but now the tide has certainly turned. Losing total control of the ICANN is certainly not the end of the world, but more a symptom of what is happening on the whole.
Someone needs to remind me about how ICANN was sanctioned and what its intended purpose is. I'm kinda lost about why the general population is being elimitated in favor of very specific business interests.
If ICANN is no longer supporting its original intent, then it's clearly a rogue organization and should no longer enjoy its position granted to it by the powers that gave it power.
In short, what would it take to revoke ICANN's powers entirely in favor of something more fair and impartial?
I know this has been discussed before, but it seems that now is an appropriate time to bring it up again. It seems high time for an overthrow of ICANN.
Yes, we have alternate registrars with alternate TLDs, but I don't mean that. I mean that there isn't anything stopping anyone from setting up an alternative to ICANN, with all its constituent committees and groups. Give the new organization several key features, such as a charter that can't be changed at the whim of the leadership of the day, a clear method of representation for Internet users and a straightforward method for choosing reps, and a progressive method for selecting new TLDs that doesn't take decades to work through. Make it everything ICANN isn't, and then make a play for control of the root nameservers. If the new organization can't get them directly, then it could set up its own. The best part of this strategy is that if the alternate organization starts to gather support, ICANN, the DoC, and Congress would be forced to acknowledge it or risk breaking the DNS system as the two organizations take divergent paths.
This may not work, and it'll probably be messy as hell, but it'll be fun, and it'll scare the hell out of some people and groups who desperately need the hell scared out of them.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
You know, all you folks can find 50,000 things to say about Microsoft's OS, but when it comes to the hard core, backend, technical issues, ALL of you dry up. You aren't informed! Well, now is the time for you to get over it. Microsoft is going to quietly sneak in the back door and take over the internet, if we don't get off our collective behinds and put a stop to it. ICANN was supposed to represent the users and it's been hijacked by corporate interests, Microsoft among them, who intend to use DNS as a means to "own" the interent.
Perhaps you aren't familiar with DNS, which I find hard to swallow on in a community this technical. DNS says that your site exists and this is how people find you. It also controls email via the MX records in DNS. If you like to surf and read email, then you have a stake in this. When you start tinkering with the very basic addressing of the internet, you start exercising a LOT of control over what is allowed and what isn't allowed. Who wants that in the hands of a bunch of corporate sell-outs?
This is going to shape the internet for generations to come. We are laying the ground work for all kinds of things. IPv6 is coming, which will replace the current internet addressing scheme. What about voice over IP? How's that going to work? Will it work for cell phones? New routing protocols are coming that will be purely optical. Do you really want the implementation of ALL of this in hands of the corporations who stand to profit out of finding extra ways to make you pay to use all this?
Let's take a trip down memory lane about previous ICANN policies. Rememeber with Internic (now Register.com) was the only name registrar and they screwed up EVERYTHING!! There were so bad, in fact, that Congress stepped in and made ICANN allow other registrars. If you have a domain name that's registered, look at your inbox and how much spam you get related to your domain name(s). That's another fine ICANN policy in action. Don't fool yourself, these people are not there to look out for the public good.
Well, unless you want a lot more of the same for the next few decades, I'd suggest that you all write your representatives (here the the good old usa - http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/) and start squealing now. You need to get your family to write. Get your friends and co-workers to write - even if you have to write the letter and get them to sign it.
You know, you have to fight the fight while it can still be won. We are still within our window of opportunity, people.
HDGary secures my bank
"Reform!"
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
I don't like this sort of extremist, hard-line approach to stopping spam -- you're just setting up a different sort of Net Police that we can't monitor, and discriminating on top of that. I don't own any domain names, and maybe I'd feel differently about ICANN if I did, but in my book they're our best chance of fighting spam and I think a lot of people agree.
Slashdot has sold out! It's one thing to see ads for IBM, Sun, etc, but I just got an ad for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET! Why would slashdot advertise for something that it stands 180 degrees against?!
If you don't believe me, here is the link it gave, and here is the image that poped up. I know it links to ad.doubleclick.net, but if you look in the URL you will see OSDNSlashDot. Slashdot has it's own image which is just a 1x1 image I'm guessing to count times it shows up, of course it could also be this other image that it displays with the ad code.
It's an abomonation! I can't believe that Slashdot would have an ad for Microsoft, or that Slashdot would even have any official dealings with the evil empire. I know they're hurting and all, but I would think they would still have some respect for the Open Source community they represent. Even if Slashdot themselves didn't do it and it was managed by OSDN, still, the Open Source Developers Network is on the opposite end of the Microsoft Developers Network.
*sigh*
Okay, I'm done ranting.
Moderators: Please don't mod this down, it was only posted on the story that happened to be at the top of the page when I got the ad. If anything, mod it up so the truth can be known to all readers.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
ICANN was "blessed" by the US department of commerce to run the DNS.
If you want to get something else, then you'd either need to convince the DoC that ICANN isn't doing what the DoC wants, or convince the people who use DNS that they should use another body to make policy for the DNS.
Alternic is trying, but IMO they are shooting to low, trying to organize the end users.
The end users are ultimately the deciders, but they don't for the most part care about network issues.
Much better is to try and reach the ISPs and network administrators.
That's a difficult group to define exactly, but a reasonable approximation is anyone with an autonomous system number.
ISPs are in the business of running the internet.
If you convince enough of them to adopt a different root, you win.
For that, you only need to write some reasonable policies that would make the internet a better place for ISPs if they were followed.
Note though, most ISPs care a lot more about stability than about correctness.
Any policy that means making a change is going to be bad in their eyes.
You want change, so you're going to need to overcome that.
One solution would be straight cash bribes.
I.e. Force registries to pay them.
This could be justified by calling it a fee for the ISPs DNS service.
Another possibility is greater control.
Democracy is a great system for giving people the illusion of control - One AS, One vote.
-- there are no real email addresses here
ICANN is completely unnecessary. There's only one reform we need to make to the domain-name system, and then it never needs to be changed again.
.com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov, and .mil.
.com, etc. to .com.us, etc. Second, allow any .com domain created before 1 January 2003 under the old system to redirect to the new .com.us domain. Third and finally, provide for the dissolution of ICANN as of 1 January 2003, though it can stay around in a limited form to handle redirects until 1 January 2005 (after which all .com, etc. domains will stop working).
.int. And there's really only two groups that would use .int; the UN, and the EU. Both of those groups can be given country codes of their own. The new domains, including .museum and (chicken).coop, are useless anyway should be scrapped along with the other 6.
Eliminate all TLDs except those for country codes.
There is no such thing as a global web site. Every website is headquartered somewhere. The BBC's website is www.bbc.co.uk. The Toronto Globe and Mail's website is www.globeandmail.ca Only the United States, by default really, has no strong country-code, so US websites are run at
ICANN's reform proposal only needs to accomplish three things. First, provide for the immediate migration of
The only three-letter TLD not owned by the US is
All of ICANN's old responsibilities can then be transferred to the owners of the country-code domains.
You can still see the same ICANN-approved .com, .net, .org., et cetera, but with (the original) different .biz and .info, and with an additional thousand or so TLD's that the Open Root Server Confederation supports.
It's important that we all remember that the internet is capitalist and cooperative -- we each pay our own way, and behave in a civilized manner to avoid gumming up the works. If enough of us opt to use the Open Root, then we can marginalize ICANN and take control for the public, the very same public that pays for the thing in the first place.
I like the Open Root Server Confederation because they don't want to rule the internet, but to simply place control of the DNS into the hands of someone who will have the public interest at heart.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
Here are my thoughts on how the internet should be governed:
I think there should be an internet "congress" with two bodies...a "senate" and a "house of representatives". The congress would be selected by the governments of each country of the world that has a public internet presence. The senate would have equal representation for each country, and size of the house would be based upon each country's population of internet users.
The governing bodies would meet several times a year to discuss and resolve various issues and creating mandates about how the internet should be implemented. Each country would be individually responsible for enforcing these mandates at their local level.
Something like this is highly unlikely, but I do think that the internet is a global entity that should have global representation.
Take it easy on him, subby, dictionary.com is probably still down.
In the old days, every netcitizen had a vote.
Those days have finished!
Cheers...
P.S.- I know that the plans haven't been aproved yet... but they will because money (and power) talks too loud for the common citizen!
Since recorded history began, it has been extremely unusual for a new organization, technology, or way of thinking that threatens the status quo to not be eventually co-opted and monitored in some way to support the status quo. (Examples: Democratic party (or any political party), the printing press, protestants, broadcast media, telephones, art, music, software -- there's probably thousands of examples).
/.ers) are still gonna find ways to come up with enough weird info to stay there.
Governments may be voted out, revolutionaries may take over, wars may have victors and losers; the true historians reading this know that regardless of political outcomes, the extremely wealthy have generally managed, behind the scenes, to preserve the majority of their assets and power network (i.e., political) connections.
Even the super-rich industrialists and bankers that had their (worldwide and national) assets seized by the NAZIs, quietly had those assets returned to them after the war.
Really the only thing that ever threatened the long term status quo (until now) with immediate breakdown was the threat of worldwide communism, i.e., nationalization of all property -- and of course we all know about the sillinessess the fear of that threat felt by the super-wealthy resulted in during the 20th century.
But now a new, and very serious threat has emerged: forums. They can be web based -- they can be usenet, they can be IRC, and other formats I can't recall right now or that havn't been invented yet. The older crowd here may remember that the speaker of the house sent home in disgrace because of a usenet campaign (defoleate congress). In forums, unlike the traditional letter to the editor, an argument that starts out with lots of holes and easily refuted, is refined, very quickly via criticism, to perfection. By itself it means a single perfectly refined idea means nothing, but if there is a strong possibility that "bad" ideas might start circulating widely (to the unwashed) and catching on (with the unwashed), it is quite worrisom to the powers that be if they cannot see some way of eventually co-opting the medium that those ideas are propegated upon.
Even free software plays into part of this threat: if everybody starts running open-source, people's activities become much more difficult to monitor.
But then, perhaps the ICANN types are right?
Most people PREFER that status quo. The everyday Joe just wants to wake up in the morning, go to work, come home, have a beer and pass out in front of the TV and look forward to the weekend when he can hang with his buds and drink beer and go nuts in front of the TV. I kind of agree. I *like* things to stay the same. It's better than war/revolution. War SUCKS. Really. The only people that want war or revolution are always idiots who havn't actually seen it. There is nothing worse than war.
If the ultimate result of some modicum of control over the net is more peace and less war, then fine: Do it, control it.
All it takes to have a war is to piss enough people off. There may be a nuclear war soon between India and Pakistan. As far as I can tell, they are all going to kill each other because of IDEAS. If keeping some "bad" ideas away from people is enough to keep them from being pissy enough to be violent, then why not?
Would it really be so awful if the great unwashed continue to be fed pablum as usual? Folks at the fringe (i.e.,
Yes, they can play games with the 3ltr TLDs. Big deal -- the only ones who should care are the owners of those TLDs, and they _do_ care bigtime. Some smaller .com owners like EToy might get shafted, but then they should migrate to
more friendly registrars.
IP numbers are a bigger deal, but they are mostly sewn-up by the networks of ISPs. They also much less contentious, but potentially more troublesome.
The Internet is a cooperative structure, and such centralized control doesn't fit. ISP admins will decide what DNS they use, and howthey route packets. Not ICANN.
It may be that the spam problem would be solved if it weren't for the government's feeble attempts at regulation.
Whenever someone takes vigilante action for the good of the Internet, they end up regretting it. SPEWS, for example, or the AlterNIC. Hmmm, on second thought, never mind the AlterNIC, they mean well but they are as ideologically hide-bound as the government, and nearly as incompetent.
If I didn't have a pack of lawyers waiting in the wings for me to make a misstep, I could destroy every single code-red infected, nimda-infected, Microsoft Outlook-infected, or open-relay infected (yes I consider the last two INFECTIONS!) overnight. Then they'd have to be secured by patching or replacement, and a great improvement would have been made.
The one great flaw I consistently see from the Old Men of the Internet is that they are still thinking that DNS is something to be managed as a scarce resource. Domain names and TLDs are NOT scarce! Root servers can't handle another 100 TLDS? Puhleeze!
Instead of trying to invest in all of the political baggage to regulate something, they should be focused on an exit strategy of creating such abundance that regulation is unnecessary.
Reform? Ha. Only in the sense that "America's return to traditional family values (i.e., chastizing teenagers for exploring their developing sexuality)" is a reform.
This is not a reform. This is a throwback, a de-evolution.
How can anyone buy the idea that eliminating democratic elections for the representatives is somehow beneficial?
ALL members of a group deciding domain-name issues should be elected (like congressmen). There needs to be a constitution of sorts to resolve domain-name conflicts. Conflicts should be decided so as to respect indivual's rights and protect the public interest, NOT to benefit corporations. To ensure that the members of such an organization don't violate that constitution, there needs to be a panel which can over-turn any ruling the elected board makes as being unconstitutional.
Really, the problem is that ICANN is private. Private organizations DO NOT work well to benefit the public if they are monopolies and have no competition, as is the case with ICANN. If the government wanted to try a private solution, they should have set it up so that there is competition. Without competition, private solutions to "protect the public interest" invariably degenerate into protecting corporate and special interests, at the expense of the public good and invidual rights.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
If ICANN begins to seriously limit freedom on the net, by some means, it will be a simple thing for a "new" net to emerge, we already have the alternate DNS roots, I can see a dual net going on, one on the ICANN tld's, (corporations, government, universities), and then, another on the alternate DNS roots, (techies, nerds, brains, and also Universities) and it can be like it was in the early days, mainly for research, learning, lol, we should get Internet 2 to run strictly on the alternate DNS systems... Anyway, having this dual internet situation is not bad I don't think, it gives the corporations a place to use the net, and they need it, and it would give us freedom fighters a place to not be bothered by the corporations.
There's one simple (but not necessarily easy) way to get the ball rolling on AlterNIC, OpenNIC, etc.
Convince Google to spider pages on those TLDs. Then, when Joe User searches google, gets a hit, and then has DNS failure he'll complain to his ISP. Enough complaints, and ISPs will support the alternate services just to keep the noise level down.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
I don't think Slashdot has much say over who's ads doubleclick posts on their site. Microsoft probably bought a bunch of ads to place on 'technology' sites. Doubleclick considers Slashdot a technology site, thus doubleclick posts Microsoft's ads on Slashdot.
They see things like .com, .au, .uk and .za and they think becuase it is used in marketing slogans it can be made into something that that belongs to them them - with the site DNS-admin paying them $200 a time he make a change in his own zone files.
But it doesn't have to be like that: there is no reason why anyone should use the ICANN root.
What we need to do is set up independent roots and tld that are out of these people's graspming reach. The prospect of .za disappearing off DNS if the South African government can't accept that it is just not theirs to steal would be a start. But it is more important to start using competing roots now, so their is a diversity of choice for when the government/ICANN rentseekers come to take over your DNS server and pass laws about who you can resolve off. Then they'll have to back off..
Just to make things more clear on what ICANN is, they are "Internet Canonical Names and Numbers" organization. What has been left out of the topic all together is the Numbers part.
ICANN controls every single IP address in the public domain. If you are given an IP address, it was given to your ISP from an upstream provider from a regional deligation company that is liable to ICANN for technical changes in how things are done.
To limit ICANN to just DNS would be shortsighted.
Bye!
By stable, large companies (well, the 300 wealthiest people in the world) will have even greater say in what sites matter and where traffic goes. Please. Google isn't that all-powerful yet.
Almost, not quite.
ICANN stands for "Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers". It is a non-profit set up a few years back to take over the duties of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.
One of these is the clerical duty of assigning /8 blocks of global IPv4 address space and /16 blocks of IPv6 address space to each Regional Internet Registry as needed. The users of the address space decide policy, and it's this policy that the RIRs implement.
Another duty ICANN took over is maintenance of the DNS root (which has been the controversial part), and a third duty is maintenance of the list of protocol numbers (imagine a link to your /etc/services just here - something's stopping me posting triple-slash).
After the many calls for this idiotic Board to step down, they continue to refuse to do this. What gives them the right to thwart democracy? Nothing. Out on their arses, I say! Out on their hairy arses!
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Possibly any legitamate .org would work too.
Google is so cool!
Well now, if the topic is internet monopolies, we should bring up ARIN, the supposedly non-profit organization that has taken it upon itself to sell IP Numbers.
With a minimum cost of $2500 for what was previously termed a "C" block (used to cost nothing) and a $500 fee just to attend their meetings, ARIN has all the markings of a wide range fleecing.
You see, when a company goes bankrupt or scales back their network or fails to utilized IP space, supposedly those IP blocks would be reclaimed and reassigned, however IP blocks are not currently reclaimed in order to justify the huge fees for the numbers because of the apparent IP crunch. (30% of the space is unassigned, notwithstanding)
When we look at ARIN's budget we see a payroll of $2.3 million dollars for 35 employees, with over $1 million in fringe benefits. Their office is in one of the most expensive places in the country in a brand new 2001 built office building.
Despite all this the supposedly non-profit organization budgets a profit of over $1.5 million dollars.
Maintaining an IP number registry is unlike maintaining the DNS root servers, there are no servers, just a list of companies and the blocks assigned to them. While there are many millions of DNS entries, IP number registrants are in the thousands.
How does this affect you? ISPs have to pay these ridiculous "taxes" and pass the costs on to their users. ERIN directors have said, "Users won't mind paying an extra 30 cents a year." Well, I suppose banks won't mind if someone borrows a few pennies from each account right? In reality small time ISPs are denied larger blocks, and couldn't "sell" that many IP numbers anyways, so they end up passing on the $5-$10 fee per IP we enjoy today.
Tell me it isn't true
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
Wouldn't it be:
#define shit RIAA
?
More like 360 degrees. Probably bent over, too.
There IS definitely a shift away from the individual toward mega-companies. Look at what has just happened at ISOC!
A major coup disenfranchising individuals has just taken place in The Internet Society (ISOC) as well. As you may know ISOC is home to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which produces the technical standards for the operation of the Internet, it handles the Internet Activities Board (IAB), the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and it has played a fundamental role at all stages of ICANN.
I am astonished that Slashdot didn't cover this story.
See: http://lrw.net/~rw26/isoc.html
I am astonished Slashdot hasn't covered this story. I trust Slashdot reporters will be at INet2002 and will ask questions and report on this travesty.
If we aren't more vigilant the internet could be lost to a handful of monied corporations.
[Please also not how Microsoft, Cisco and Nortel can also chose how the money they contribute is spent, etc.]