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

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:I believe .org should be controlled by the UN

[Monkey Angst]

They could then be migrated to a new ".sellout" TLD! No problem!

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We all live under Monkey Law.

Perception needs to change

[peterdaly]

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

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?"

vixie scares me

[technoid_]

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.

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:TLDs, etc

[reemul]

An infinite number of TLDs pretty makes TLDs meaningless. The system only has value if it fosters a useful hierarchical system for resolving hostnames. (This says nothing at all about the system and politics for creating and administering that hierarchy, just the functionality.) As the number of TLDs increases, the extension becomes less a pointer to where to look for the domain, and more an arbitrary few letters tacked on the name because it looks cool. By the time DNS finds the root for the exotic TLD, it might as well have looked directly for the domain without bothering with that root at all.

An analogy: File folders are useful to organize large amounts of paper. One can look for the folder first, then in that folder for a specific document. Why bother using file folders if every piece of paper gets a separate folder? Such a large number of folders no longer helps organize the data; they just take up space in the drawer.

A few more well thought out and well discussed TLDs won't hurt, but an unmonitored flood of them from everyone and everywhere defeats the entire purpose of the system.

Re:Paul Vixie aready runs root servers

[shani]

Running a root name server is nothing like running one of the gTLD servers. Believe me, my company runs one of the roots and provides support for another root. I got yelled at the last time I said the name of my company, so you'll have to trust me (not that I'm bitter or anything).

Running a root name server basically means running BIND for a few hundred NS records in one zone file. You set up a cluster of boxes that run some random Unix variant, although to be honest a dual-CPU Athlon MP box could easily handle the load we see here. That's it.

Any web hosting company could run a root name server.

Running a gTLD, however, probably means running your own version of BIND (at least, I think Verisign runs a tweaked version for their domains - not that Vixie would have any trouble tweaking BIND ;)), on higher-end boxes (the COM domain hasn't fit in a 32-bit memory space for 4 or so years now, and I expect that ORG probably doesn't these days). It also means using some sort of registry-registrar protocol for the comptetive registrars, and most importantly setting up administration to deal with these registrars, various end users, ICANN, and the like - meaning ticketing systems, account management, help desks, etc, etc.

Not rocket science, but an entirely different ball of wax.

Vixie doesn't scare me.

[mellon]

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.)

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.