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.'"

Comments

I believe .org should be controlled by the UN

[Tim_F]

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.

Re:I believe .org should be controlled by the UN

[grokBoy]

The problem there is sites that begin life as a .org, gain popularity, and become commercial. Are they expected to give up their .org in that case? The equivalent .com may not be available by the time this happens.

Just waiting...

[Jay Maynard]

...for the thundering hordes of folks who still don't get the difference between names and speech to stand up and cheer for the open source types.

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 .org (for whatever values of "managing" are needed), but giving it to them just because they're open source advocates is a Bad Idea. Give it to them if and only if they're best qualified to do the job.

Re:Just waiting...

[Lemmy Caution]

The trouble is that it's not a matter of who's best for the job - it's not a job like that - but who among the people competing for it represents whose interests. Misreading conflicts between competing interests as simple screens for the best candidate is a fast-track to being completely frozen out.

Incidentally, I'm sure that they are capable of running a .org.

Naming Conventions

[Monkey Angst]

I had always been under the impression that .org was actually reserved for non-profits. It was disheartening to find out that this is not the case, the registrars will sell one to anyone (and indeed, apparently a lot of people buy both the .com and .org names for their sites). I would like to see the administration of .org go to someone willing to enforce a policy of "no businesses allowed," but I'm not naive enough to think this will happen.

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We all live under Monkey Law.

Re:Naming Conventions

[zsmooth]

I could never get used to typing slashdot.com.

Too Late?

[grokBoy]

I think we'd all agree that the current domain name system is pretty messed up, and mostly due to the widespread commericalism of the internet in recent times. The likes of Vixie et al are more than qualified in my eyes, having contributed a great deal to the internet and its inner workings. But to be honest, I think giving them control of .org, or any other existing TLD is too little, too late, because these domains have already been corrupted.

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.

Re:Perception needs to change

[abreauj]

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.

Try answering it with an analogy. "How can Main Street have more than one house on it?"

I don't care who runs .org...

[Lardmonster]

I don't care who runs .org, as long as I can keep using my .org just like I always did.

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.

dot org issue

[zangdesign]

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.

Open Source isn't the issue here - it's Control

[billstewart]

Yes, it's nice that they'll be using open source tools to maintain the database, and while it's much more important that they keep the data in open data formats, what are most critical are who owns the data and who controls access to the data?. The kind of data we're dealing with here is fundamentally simple - lists of domain names, IP addresses, some kind of names and contact information about the owners, passwords or public keys for validating change requests, and maybe billing information.

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.

Phone is a better analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

A registry that provides tools is a good idea.

[chuckk]

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.

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 .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...

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 .org Registry Agreement"
http://www.icann.org/tlds/org/model-registry-agmt. htm
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 .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...