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Open-Source Pioneers Make Bid for .org
wdb writes: "A NY Times article (free subscription required) describes the competition surrounding control of the .org domain, which Verisign coughed up in order to keep .com and .net from going to the highest bidder. Open source and Internet pioneers Paul Vixie and Carl Malamud have entered the fray; central to their bid is their announced intent to place all the software necessary to manage a TLD in the public domain. 'This shouldn't be a dot-com opportunity,' Mr. Malamud said. 'There has been a lot of smoke and mirrors, but what we need is actually a public utility that is well managed in the public interest.'"
It would be one way to make sure that it only goes to fitting organizations. It si meant for non-profits. For example, take this very website. Slashdot.org has not been non-profit for a very long time.
would this mean that the open source community would have dibs on .org domains that become available??
People who have witty things here blow.
I think Vixie and Malamud are good guys and have their hearts in the right place, and would do a very good job of managing
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I stll wonder if we would be any better off if we had gone to a system that would have allowed an infinite number of TLDs.
But this is not my primary area of expertise, and I am sure there would be some difficulties along the line.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
.mil and .gov are run by the US government. .edu is run by a group of Universities.
While
Here's a link to an script that automatically generates a subscription, so you can see the article without hassles.
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/ (The .org story can be found through the Technology link on the left).
Works for me under IE 4.0 and Moz. Doe it work for anyone else?
Am I the only one who first thought TLD = Thermoluminescient Dosimiter?
I know it doesn't fit the context, but, well...
----------
We all live under Monkey Law.
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Diputs, inc. will always bring you the story first.
Sorry, jumped the gun. The link only gets you into the front page. You get kicked out when you try to access an article. :(
DNS may have to follow something similar to what I believe has happened to the internet over the past few years. In the "beginning" of the popular Internet, everyone visits a small set of gopher sites, soon followed by first generation web sites. Then came search engines. The number of site people spend visition skyrocketed. You might never see the same site twice in a month, even though you were ssurfing all day. This doesn't include yahoo. This is phase two. Soon people realized there were just too many bad useless sites on the internet. Phase three is the portal. A portal is any site that collects information from other sources, giving a single site to visit for information. Slashdot is a good example, although what you normally think of as partals are good too. Now adays, you probably only visit a few sites on a regular basis. Phase three complete.
Here is how I see DNS going.
Phase 1. Domain names just made it so you didn't have to remember IP addresses. Think sunsite.unc.edu. That was a "site". It didn't need to be sunsite.com. My email address is a perfect example. "ix.netcom.com". Nobody thought better of it.
Phase 2. Today the "ix." throws all non-technical people off. They just don't understand or see the reason for sub domains. A domain IS the site. All site are thesite.com. Hell, most people don't even use the www anymore. You ever tried to explain the difference between ftp.server.com and www.server.com to anyone who has not been on the internet for many years? No, ftp.myserver.com doesn't mean that is the ftp site for myserver.com (although it may.) ftp is the name of the server. Server they say? Isn't there only one? How can myserver.com have more than one server? Try explaining it sometime, is was harder than I thought last time I tried.
Phase 3. The commercial dns. There are not enough words for every website to have a name unique to it ".com". Regardless of who runs it. The commercialization of DNS registars only makes matters worse. I predict in a few year, if it even takes that long, subdomain will be back in vague. There will not be any choice in the matter. Try finding a unique domain recent less than 8 characters? Tough, huh? Soon the public will learn "search google for keyword slashdot" to find slashdot. Dare I say "AOL Keyword whatever" in ads. Bookmark it if you like it once there, or go through the same process next time.
Where the internet went few-many-few in terms of sites you interact with. I predict DNS will go many-few-many for DNS subnames you see, and all this DNS stuff will do is make it so mere mortals don't have to look at IP's, just like the good old days.
wow, I just wrote a book, sorry. Anyway, I see DNS going through the equivilant of the web portals movement, but backwards. Then Verisign stock will plumit once investors realize DNS is dead.
DNS is dead...long live DNS.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I would really want to check out Paul Vixie's intentions on this. I remember MAPS and how it went to a pay system after Orbs went bye-bye. I also remember Vixie being one of people who started the members-only bind group (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/02/03/16562 43&mode=nested&tid=95).
He has a history of taking a community thing and then kicking the community out of it.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
Of course! Why didn't I think of it before? Who better to serve the best interests of the public, than private enterprise? After all, I'm sure that they can be trusted to put civic duty above profits, in the extremely unlikely event that the two should ever conflict...
I completely understand when people talk to me about how they don't trust big government. They totally should. But then these same people talk about turning around and putting the administration of this country (my country being the U.S.) in the hands of for-profit corporations. To which I can only muster a "whhhaaa?"---------
We all live under Monkey Law.
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Just curious why the NYT insists on spelling it "Icann". It's a set of initials and therefore should be spelled "ICANN". Odd that a publication as prestigious as the New York Times would make a 3rd-grade spelling error.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Just as we have recognised that our current TCP/IP protocol has become outgrown by the online populace, and started to move toward IPV6, perhaps it is time for a full review of the entire TLD set we have on offer. IMHO the current system does not provide a wide enough taxonomy of the sites hosted under them. A .com is not necessarily commercial, .org no longer means non-profit - so why continue with this nomenclature?
How far we choose to take this is an entirely different debate - perhaps a .gnu is in order for open source projects, for instance. And even if we all agree that the system needs bringing up to code, the commercialism will still stand in the way of any changes.
Considering that .org was privatized years ago when it was handed over to Network Solutions/VeriSign, I guess the parent is some kind of troll.
Paul Vixie already runs a number of root servers. Therefore "only if they're best qualified to do the job" is a specious argument. Paul already meets that criteria in spades.
You guys should take a look at OpenNIC, right now it's not under the influence of the corporate world and the open source community could build real and useful domain names (i.e. wine.oss for wine, slashdot.weblog, etc...)
Domain names WANT to be free!
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
Are you on crack? The .com/net/org TLDs have been managed by Verisign (formerly Network Solutions), a private company, for the last several years.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I don't mind paying a few pounds (dollars!) per year to retain the right to 'tthew.org', but I do get worried when I hear stories about .org being taken off individuals and being issued exclusively to non-profit organisations.
I'm not '.net'. I'm certainly not '.com'. And '.name' is just pants.
The more advanced the technology, the more open it is to primitive attack
Why doesn't /. start routing links to the New York Times through the random login generator?
While .edu is run by a group of Universities.
.edu is managed by Verisign, is it not?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The response was not that the proposal was a bad idea, but rather that it had already been implemented. I didn't see any insults.
For it is said in the Book of Tao that it is better to .org than .com.
Aaah, Grasshopper...
Cheers,
Ian
I really hope you are Ronald Utt. The parent stole and edited the text from here.
Mod parent down.
Capitalism does not lead to corruption, lack of character does.
they should just bust out with free from tlds that anyone can setup.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
In reference to giving control of .org to Open Sourced Advocates, Jay Maynard said:
.org netizens. Any control of .org must be through democratic means. Those controlling it should be democratically elected via a 50/50 combination of "electoral votes" and "majority rule". One-time terms of 4 years ONLY will be given to those voted in, with a 2-year phase out while the next elected member if "phasing in". I suggest a system similar to the one in the US, w/ three branches -- the legislative, the judicial, and the executive. This keeps checks and balances in effect. Importantly, however, the number of people in the 3 branches should not total over more than 100, and each persons role should be unique and clearly defined. There should not be so many people in it so that accountability is impossible.
giving it to them just because they're open source advocates is a Bad Idea. Give it to the mif and only if they're the best qualified to do the job."
In contrast to the current system, where control of things is handed over to people paid for and bought by big business, who were given the job simply because they're advocates of business interests?
They may not be the best qualified to do the job -- but they're certainly better than ANYONE who's affiliated with a business or has special business/proprietary interests. Anyone affiliated with business will for sure screw over the netizens in favor of the Raiders of the Lost Net.
A simple rule for this should be that whoever's going to be involved in controlling dot.org should have NOTHING to do with business. The people running dot.org should be people interested in the ideals of the internet -- people like Lawrence Lessig -- not people who want to milk the internet for all its worth.
We the netizens -- and I distinguish netizens from neticrooks like ICANN, BSA, RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations who stand united AGAINST the ideals of we the netizens -- need to reclaim the internet from the corporate raiders.
The corporate raiders have won the first of the Internet-Wars: they already completely control the dot.com's. There are two more wars to fight: the dot.net's, and the dot.org's. The dot.net's seem to be at a standstill, and we the netizen's seem to have the upper edge on the dot.org's.
It was expected that the enemy neticrooks -- the internet-nazi's, the net-raiders, the spamalots -- would win the dot.com's: that's their home turf. Dot.com, as in commercial.
The dot.net's are more neutral ground, where the playing field is relatively level. There are many commercial interests in dot.net addresses, and many non-commercial interests in the dot.net addresses.
But the dot.org's, thats OUR home turf. That's OUR state, our town. That's a battle WE can not afford to lose. That would be as bad as when Al Gore lost his home state to GW Bush. If you have any shot of winning a war, you have to be able to defend YOUR territory. Dot.org is our territory. But the Axis powers aligned against us -- the spammers, the scammers, the net-raiders, the corporate interests, the RIAA's, the BSA's, the Microsofts, the MPAA's -- they have already begun to launch their invasion of our territory.
If we the netizens can't even defend what's clearly OURS, the dot.org's, and have them regulated by people concerned with the true ideals of the net; the ideals of freedom of speech; of privacy, communication, information, efficiency; if we can't achieve at least that, then we're doomed.
The dot.org's are, in short, Our Last Hope.
And we need to stand together in defending them. We cannot be concerned about petty differences among the different factions of the information-freedom movement -- i.e., the eternal conflict between OSS and FS, between Stallman and Raymond -- nor can we even be concerned about the major differences between us netizens, such as those between people at the Christian Coalition and at NARAL. If we're going to do that, we will be defeated from within from internal conflict. Nor can we invite traitors among our ranks simply to help us win the immediate battle -- i.e., RIAA.org, which does not really stand for the ideals of the net, despite being an "organization"; in reality, such "organizations" are really little more than businesses in disguise. What we need, as Netanyahu says in "Fighting Terrorism", is MORAL CLARITY.
We do not stop to ask "why the corporations want to raid and destroy dot.org". We do not try to understand it from "their point of view," nor do we get "touchy-feely" with them. We do not compromise with them, for any compromise with them would not be worth the paper it was written on; a compromise with such net-nazi's would be little different than the "treaties" signed with Hitler that said "ok, he would stop expanding now".
What these net-nazi's want is breathing room. And the more breathing room THEY have, the more difficult it is for US netizens to breath.
What we need to do is treat these Net-Raiders like what they are: parasites, virus', infections, plagues. And we are the host; we, the netizens; and the home we built, the Internet. And like parasites, these net-raiders, the stronger they get, the weaker we get; but we the host will not die -- a fate much worse is in store for us if we don't fight this infection. They are like a virus which infects its host and gives it extreme pain, taking away all its strength and all its capacity for pleasure, leaving only the capacity for pain, but does not kill. If we allow this infection to spread, the internet will not die -- it will live on in eternal torture and disfigurement: a fate worse than death.
So here's a simple three-step plan to reclaim what is OURS:
1. Fight off the onslaught of this plague in our capital, dot.org. We must eliminate every trace of corporatism from dot.org: both in the organizations and in its control/infrastructure. All regulations and protocols must be transparent. There must be a constitution similar to our own, gauranteeing the rights of the
2. Reclaim the neutral zone, dot.net. Dot.net can be likened to a suburbs surrounding our capital.
3. Launch a full strike into the land the neti-nazi's stole from us, dot.com. By this time, dot.org and dot.net will be under our control. You'd think that would make taking dot.com easier: wrong. The more you take from the greedy, the harder they will hold on to what is remaining. The only way to reclaim dot.com will be out of the dying hands of the Net-Raiders.
Strategies.
1. Identify traitors in their ranks. It is important that we obtain some corporate allies. Not all corporations are Net-Raiders, greedily milking the gold-mine for all its worth. IBM may be an example of such a case. We must forge alliances with such corporate forces which are not netinazi's. Redhat's another good example, though their trademark gripe is questionable.
2. Make them fight amongst themselves. We must take advantages of differences between the netinazi's. You don't take on the most powerful economic forces in the world by yourself. You make them fight amongst eachother. We want the RIAA to sue the BSA for supporting clients who make programs which can copy songs; we want the BSA to sue the RIAA for having unlicensed copies of MS Windows. While they're doing that, we want to be taking shots at them from the site. The more resources they spend fighting amongst eachother, the less they can spend fighting us or defending themselves from us.
3. Retain moral clarity. In "Fighting Terrorism," Netanyahu said that the standard for entrance into the coalition against terrorism must be that "those nations entering the coalition must expunge the terrorist groups within their own nation". Similarly, our standard for entry into our coalition must be that all members must believe that the internet should not be controlled by special interests, and decisions should not be made for special interest (i.e., Intel Insite & Yoga Inside) benefits. Rather, it should be decisions be made in respect to the rights of netizens; and where those are in conflict, to benefit the net-community.
4. Remain united. If we allow our differences to become the focus, we will surely lose. There will be plenty of time for fighting out differences later, after the war's won; and there's even a place for airing differences while fighting the war. But when standing against the forces of evil -- the Raiders of the Lost Net -- we must be united.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
... "the government is run by who? The public." You're public maybe. You see those of us in other contries actually have our own governments now. Cool huh?
Well, maybe not totally, but there seem to be far too many exceptions.
Pampa Independent School District (Pampa, Texas) is
I'll rephrase. "There has been alot of smoke and mirrors, but what we need is actually a public utility that is well managed in the public interest FOR the public." This is what I think was meant.
.mil) for the military; not for the public.
.mil is a public utility that is well managed in the public (hell you can even call the guys that run
EDUCAUSE manages .edu, it was switched a few months ago. They SEEM to be an organization of colleges, but I don't really know that must about them.
I thought .org is reserved for non-profits. Maybe domain names wouldn't be so scarce if they were only permitted for legitimate use in the appropriate domain. Shouldn't this really be slashdot.com now that they are trying to make a buck or two? :-)
Paul got the crap sued out of him by spammers, from what I've heard, and had no choice but to turn MAPS into a subscriber service. AFAIK he never promised to do anything other than that, and it operated for free for quite a while.
He has been extremely scrupulous with the Internet Software Consortium. I know of few people whose integrity I trust more. I would trust him with the title to my house.
Regarding the members-only thing, somebody got to pay de bills. When was the last time you sent a donation to the ISC? Paul's very good at leveraging value in such a way that everybody benefits, but sometimes leverage means that you have to wait a few weeks to get the benefit that the people who are paying to generate the benefit get immediately. This is an unusually good deal in the real world - usually if you don't pay, you don't get the goods at all.
(I should say that I used to work for him, although I haven't for a couple of years, so it's not like I'm a disinterested bystander here.)
OK, so these guys are qualified to run the registry - I won't dispute that.
However, how does one determine who a dot org is? Non-profit status is determined by the government according to registration forms filed with the IRS. So, would one be required to show proof of non-profit status by filing a form with the registrar?
Another question comes up: a protest group can be considered a de-facto non-profit organization, but it does not necessarily have to file with the IRS since it is not a formal organization. Do you allow protest groups to have their own namespace within the dot-org TLD?
Which raises the interesting question of: what about individuals? I have my own website in the dot-com space, but I don't make any money off of it. So, I am a de-facto non-profit. Would I be eligible to purchase space in the dot-org domain?
What about non-profits from other countries?
How do you recompense the companies who are protecting their trademarks by keeping dot-orgs?
This whole issue raises some really nasty questions that can only end in massive lawsuits.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
The same reason the computing press, which should know better, spells FORTRAN Fortran, BASIC Basic, and COBOL Cobol.
I see your point for COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), but Fortran and Basic didn't start out strictly as acronyms. Fortran is a "formula translator" (two words not five or seven); Basic is a "basic" programming language. (The "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" expansion is considered by some to be a backronym.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think the Internet domain name system should be regulated in such a way that everything is separated into well-defined hierarchies.
First, domain names owned by any government agency, business or individual worldwide would be organized under a two letter country code corresponding to the country where the server is physically located. If someone or something has servers physically located in multiple countries, then and only then can they get a domain name that isn't organized under a country code (but the name itself would have to be identical).
Domain names would further be organized by the type of services offered. So .com would apply to for-profit companies; .org to non-profit organizations ONLY; .edu to educational institutions, and I suppose something like .pri for private individual(s). I don't know if there's use for a .net, unless someone can define exactly what it's for. So a university in the U.S. would be something.edu.us. A university with servers in multiple countries would get something.edu, something.edu.us, something.edu.mx, etc. for all the countries involved. Or something like that. Then, the domain name holder subdivides their domain into various parts. And names are first-come, first served once again. Let people buy and sell domain names all they want, and I don't care what problems it brings up.
Oh yeah, and get people used to the fact that websites aren't www.something.com. It's gonna be a pretty darn technological world soon (if it isn't already)... it's time for people to be a bit more educated and a lot less stupid. Ooooooooh well. Time for another Negra Modelo.
What is the purpose of domains?
.org's and organizations grab .com's to keep from getting sued (suid ;) in the future.
More specifically, what is the purpose of the ".com", ".net", or ".org"? These are 4 nearly useless characters in every URL...
Are they meant to describe the type of group involved? They don't. Corporations own
Are they meant to make web indexing easier? They don't. They are horribly inefficient and contrived. Indexing would be easier based on the first letter of the url than on this contrived system.
Assuming latin alphanumerics, this gives 36 hashtable slots per character (46,656 for the first 3 characters); this compares quite favorably to the handful of slots in the current system. Instead of having a few central servers for each huge ".com", a normally indexed system could easily load balance and integrate new servers...
_____
The ideas in this post are hereby public domain.
There are lots of kinds of tools that can manipulate it, and the only functions that have any excuse for needing special tools are the validation of change requests, and pretty much anybody who wants to run a name service can find cost-effective tools to run it on, whether they're open-source or not. There are closed-source tools that keep their data in non-open formats (ok, and open-source tools that keep their data in badly-documented formats :-), which may make it much more difficult for competing providers of registration service to use it, or for the Powers That Be to take back control of the registration space if whoever's running it does so unacceptably (regardless of whether the Bad Guys are the registration-mongers or the Powers) and for the real or claimed owners of the information to access the information in dispute resolutions, but that's mainly a problem if the registration-mongers aren't cooperating or if they're so incompetent that their database scribbles itself.
But the real issues here are who controls reading, writing, and storing the data, and who owns it in case of disputes. Obviously there's a master copy (plus backups and transaction journaling) that's the Authoritative information, and the registration-mongers need to validate changes to it somehow. But is the whole database going to be totally open for wholesale reading (so spammers can download the whole whois database, and competing registration-monger-wannabees can also do so), or for record-at-a-time reading (so you can find contact information for the people who are spamming you), and will you be required to provide your True Name, True ICBM-and-Lojack Address, and Blood Type to the whois database, or will you only be required to provide some kind of working contact information? What are the privacy policies, and will you be able to use competiting registries with different privacy policies or only the One ICANN-Approved Registration-Monger-Imposed Central Policy?
And who owns the intellectual property of the individual records and the collection of records? That's one thing that Network Solutions (or was it Verisign) did that really irked me, which was declaring that some parts of the DNS system were public information (the domain name and IP addresses), but that most of the rest was their private list of customers and billing information and didn't belong to ICANN or the Feds or the Internet-As-A-Whole-Community or whoever it was that the domain name system really belongs to.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Paul Vixie is a Hero.
Carl Malamud is an untalented publicity-seeking ass.
ICANN will have fulfilled it's role re DNS when there are thousands of TLDs and we use other means of looking up COMpanies and ORGanisations.
But, sadly, they want to keep control so they won't Free the TLD.
Why can't /. be both?
If someone pumps out a good product/service, shouldn't they at least get compensated for the hard work that went into it?
Remember, not all money making companys/org are evil as you like to think.
Today anyone can register a .org domain, and I didn't seen any mention in the article of changing that policy.
Holy shit, I have a reflexive hatred for this guy. Am I knee-jerking here, or does anyone share that feeling?
Registration-free link: http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html?url=2002/06/15 / echnology/15NET.html&submit
The key difference is that with corporations (minus government involvement), any one can join with enough hard work. You can make an impact one person at a time. Whereas with the government, you basically have to make your impact one majority at a time---otherwise nothing will happen.
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
You're absolutely right. Why do we even put up with a government anymore. We should just privatize everything and get rid of it. Those pesky majority requirements and voting only serve to complicate things. We'd be better off if a massive corporation just ran everything and one man had 51% control over it, thus, that would sort of make him King.
Why not just make it .gnu/org before RMS starts complaining? :)
^_^
The problem with OpenNIC, and, in fact, all existing registrars, is that they can't turn around a domain registration request within a browser timeout.
OpenNIC adds to this problem by codifying a non-realtime protocol, such that it's impossible to use their API, and build an interactive application on top of it. Their API *expects* high latency, and won't expose low latency, even if it exists.
Further, they want you to give them an email address they can use to contact you... and it's not permitted to be an email address at the domain you are registering -- so that you have an email address. Read "Catch-22" lately?
If what is being offered here is software that can *really* turn around a registration in realtime, then it would be a *huge* step forward over what OpenNIC, etc., is offering.
-- Terry
Multiple people at the same house can share the same phone number. Multiple servers serving the same web address (as with cnn.com) can be explained that servers are like people and whichever is available at the time that someone loads the page (dials the phone number) servers the page (answers the phone).
There was a suggestion at one time that
There are lots of domains that don't need to be in .com space - they're not something that's trying to be a business, and they're not providing infrastructure to the net, and they're not educational institutions (either the early flexible definition or the later Four-Year Officially-Accredited Universities), and they're not geographically limited (so they're not .us or .other-country-code.) It wasn't a big issue in the early days, when you had to be somehow tied to the US government to get on the ARPAnet, and most other people lived in UUCP or FIDO space, and computers tended to either be big and expensive (and not personal) or small and not sufficiently Internet-connected to run their own domain name, as opposed to using their ISP's namespace), but sometime in the early 90s, lots of my friends started getting domain names before the rest of the world knew that was cool :-)
So where would you hang a domain name for your family? Not under .com, and not under something geographically limited like gallo-family.modesto.ca.us unless you're all living down on the same family farm (and it'll be a while before stolzfus.northeast.birdinhand.lancaster-county.pa. us is on the net....) There's now a .name or whatever for that, but .org is ok.
And the "Offically Recognized Non-Profits Only" proposal would mean that a bunch of people who want to develop a piece of open-source software wouldn't be able to be mozilla.org or foo-widget.org because they weren't an sufficiently formal group to be exempt from US takes, though they could perfectly well be foo-widget.fsf.org if RMS likes them, which might be just fine. But what if the foo-widget.org project is not only a free software thing, but also gets sponsored by Big Hardware Incorporated, who happen to want a foo-widget around to make buying their hardware more attractive? Should they lose their .org namespace? (Hint - there's more of this than you'd expect; it's becoming an interesting business model for running and funding development of projects like free telephony clients.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
On the other hand, the FBI should really be feebs.gov.us, not feebs.gov, because they're still local boys.
Fellow /.-ers fix some of my small errors and continue to flog this....this....fool
~Snitman
I'll fix one of your small errors... you seemed to have misspelled your name. "Shitman," I believe, is what you're looking for. YHBT.
Our client has publicly stated that when it is completed this software will be released under the GPL. That includes server software supporting geographically separate database replicas, and a full client implementation including management functionality.
It would be interesting to see it used for the .org TLD - currently it is being developed for the .nz ccTLD, but the design is intended to allow for use in any other TLD.
Markoff's article is about Malamud & Vixie wanting to operate the registry for .org. Their bid is differentiated by their reputations and their promise to "public domain" the software needed to operate the registry.
.net, .com, and .org VeriSign. The ICANN deal with VeriSign is to let them keep being the registry if they hand .org off to another company for administration (and pay out US$5M to cover costs). There is nothing about changing policies for who can register a .org. That all went out the window under NetworkSolutions' watch. If VeriSign had control of all three TLDs way back then the taxonomic enforcement that still exists in .edu might still exist as they specialized in reviewing cooporate profiles and documentation, i.e. SSL cert registries. But I digress...
.org Registry Agreement". htm
.info folks). If they were to propose giving away their backend too I would surely use my ICANN At-Large membership to vote in their favor. Oh wait, ICANN At-Large memberships were never worth a shit and were dissolved...
Many posts above are confusing the different entities of a domain REGISTRAR and a REGISTRY. There are now, what, hundreds of companies allowing you to register a domain. All these must pay a fee to and submit data to the top level domain registry. Presently for
This is a lucrative deal for the bidder that can impress the ICANN board with their proposal. ICANN's RFP starts here...
http://www.icann.org/tlds/org/
and goes on and on and on. One interesting sub-page in there is the "model
http://www.icann.org/tlds/org/model-registry-agmt
The organizational and technical requirements are strenuous. An adequate reply to this RFP sounds like a significant undertaking in and of itself!
I used to work for Vixie and know Malamud by reputation. It is my opinion that the two of them could build excellent tools for for operating a registry. I could see other, new, registry operators adopting their tools in the and their paving the way for ICANN allotting more TLDs in the future.
Note: the Markoff article mentions other bidders that have merit. One of which is a partnership with the Internet Society (http://www.isoc.org) and Afilias Global Registry Services (the
Didn't RealNames try the keyword idea and fail miserably? How is it any better than DNS? If you have a mapping between words and IP addresses through any mechanism, then you could just as well add ".com" on the end and implement it to get what we have now.
But you're really talking about a mapping between search terms and pages rather than search terms and sites. Otherwise, how would you direct someone to a page other than your front page? Are you seriously suggesting that Google whacks are more convenient than URLs? "For more information, do a Google search for 'stingray marshmallow'"? Or maybe a search for "a87tigi78y"? That doesn't seem very user-friendly. And it certainly won't be acceptable to businesses unless Google starts accepting bribes for search placement the way other search engines do.
Besides, DNS is for more than just Web sites. How you you plan to send e-mail by Google search?
Watch out, you can get caught for helping people to circumvent a protected login!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
...care about the tla at the end of a url?!? Bored or what?
And Bill Gates just donated $10G to the EFF. Yeah, right.
The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC
Arrgh .com .org .net .edu system is outdated
.com.nz .com.us .com.it .com.XX in every country it does busness and the pressure on .com addresses would be distributed .com.nz , leaving the same name open to .au and .us
.com .net etc are all old ideas from when the internet was small and does not scale well over the whole world - maybe even have the USA use .com.mo.us or .com.ca.us
this whole
the whole world should use
then a multinational can register
my company/employer would only use
the
This could mean that typing ibm.com in nz points to ibm.com.nz and typing imb.com is the usa goes transparently to ibm.com.us
Type unto others as you would have them type unto you.