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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.
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"
Am I the only one who first thought TLD = Thermoluminescient Dosimiter?
I know it doesn't fit the context, but, well...
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We all live under Monkey Law.
stripShow - Where WordPress meets webcomics
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.
stripShow - Where WordPress meets webcomics
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...)
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
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;
For it is said in the Book of Tao that it is better to .org than .com.
Aaah, Grasshopper...
Cheers,
Ian
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
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.
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
Today anyone can register a .org domain, and I didn't seen any mention in the article of changing that policy.
Registration-free link: http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html?url=2002/06/15 / echnology/15NET.html&submit
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
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?