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ICANN Updates
ICANN is meeting in Bucharest next week, which means they're floating all their usual smoky-room schemes just prior to the meeting. leto writes "The three RIR's, ARIN, APNIC and RIPE-NCC have just released a joint statement that basically tells ICANN that their
Evolution and Reform plan is unacceptable, and tells ICANN to go play elsewhere, and leave the address space in the hands of the well working bodies." An interesting mailing list debate has been going on between ICANN's critics and ICANN's extremely well-paid and extremely sleazy attorney: critic, attorney (sleazy!), critic again, another critic, attorney again, critic's response, still other critics. And finally, note that the .org TLD is up for bids - the New York Times has a story, Newsforge has another.
Back and Forth, Back and Forth...Commercialization...Disputes...Greed. Once again, the road to Hell is paved with Good intentions.
I'm taking my internet and going home.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
I'm not sure I understand fully.
.ORG domain name is not affiliated with a true non-profit organization, and the ownership runs out, it can NOT be re-purchased?
If a
There's no "I" in Linux.. err..
no, the italics is used because a user submitted this, acronyms are normally full caps (when was the last time you saw Fbi?).
What really needs to happen is that the ICANN should be completely eliminated. Every decision about assigning IP addresses to corresponding web addresses should be democratically made by the net-community. That is, every issue should be voted on by the net. The internet makes it possible to have a true democracy as did the Greeks. We should go in that direction.
This makes me almost start to believe the US government actually could do a better job running ICANN...but then again I doubt anyone would stand for it...
Welcome to /.
I stole this Sig
What has ICANN done in 4 years that actually trickled down to internet end users?
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
We also know that a purely private organization, without the support and
involvement of governments from around the world, will not be able to carry
out thes mission assigned to ICANN (if you believe that mission requires
the agreed participation of all the relevant infrastructure
providers). ICANN has no guns, and no soldiers; it has no coercive
power.
Something tell me before too long we can expect to hear dark rumors of ICANN building a droid army to deploy against the shining republic of the IETF.
Seriously, though, it is shocking how poitical they can try to make a system whose entire job is to associate names and numbers. For something that is essentially a hack (put the fate of the internet on the backs of a handfule of individual servers, yeah, good idea), they sure seem intent on turning it into the basis for a UN-scale political swamp.
Apparently, ICANN has learned one lesson: If you can't answer 'em, get your attorney to work on 'em...
since it seems to go on and on with all sorts of legalese and other crap for miles and miles as if he (the attorney) is quite pleased with the look or more likely the sound as he was dictating these letters.
:P
Or have I just described all attorneys?
The revolution will be televised. Blackout restrictions apply.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Could somebody please translate this into English?
Or even Engrish.
Good idea, Michael, call an attorney sleazy on a public forum. I'm sure he won't mind, especially if you're right.
Next, we'll spear some bulls and wave red flags in front of them.
Feel free to delete this comment when you fix the story, to keep Slashdot out of court.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
<garfield>Big, fat, hairy deal.</garfield>
Really, who cares? As long as people can register domain names, and have them appear in the DNS servers, the rest is just three-year-olds arguing over a toy.
NAMES ARE NOT THE THINGS THEY NAME!
Fundamentally, it makes no difference what domain name a site has. With the advent of the search engine, it's all moot anyway.
Really, folks...there are a lot of good people putting in lots of time and effort on something that's basically a triviality. Why not work on something that means something?
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Why is it that extentions are regulated in the first place? I think the whole concept of restricting mypage.* to a set of only 10 choices (excluding those strange 3rd world country names) just to create pseudo scarcity hurts the general market.
:P
To make things worse, they sell the names at an absurd premium on some extentions (such as $10,000 USD to purchace me.tv, or whatever they want for it by now)
I for one would like them to release the market so i can score www.www.www
- tristan
But it is below 0.90 as of this posting. Today is day 1. 29 to go.
ICANN's extremely well-paid and extremely sleazy attorney
I credit the Slashdot editors for aggregating most of the topics that I find interesting -- however, I don't think that I'm going to be accusing them of jounalistic integrity any time soon.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
And finally, note that the .org TLD is up for bids - the New York Times has a story, Newsforge has another.
:shakes head:
Oh, alright. I'll do it. I guess.
I mean, if someone has to, and no one else wants it, i'm not really doing much else this month and i've got some free time. I swear though, you people.. seems sometimes like if you wanna get something done around here, you have to do it yourself.
Uhh.. do I have to set up BIND now, or something? Hm. Could anyone point me to a HOWTO..? I'm running slackware, so i can't do an RPM install..
--super ugly ultraman
Yes, money is a big fat fucking hairy deal.
... you dont want to tie your site to an IP. If it moves IPs not even search engines can find it anymore, till the links to it have been updated. This is hardly an option.
It might not make a difference what name something has, but it still needs a name
So we need domain names, and the bigger ICANN grows the more expensive it will get for us in the end.
ICANN's Mission lies in the nexus between ICANN's technical coordination role, its operational role, and its policy role
Why isn't ICANN structured this way? How can they be a group that decides policy AND a group that implements policy? Doesn't this create an room for conflict of interest that ultimately leads to abuse of the system?
you know as someone who deals with ICANN and BS they cause i can tell you that they really need to either be abolished or handled by some other higher up group. for the most part they have no idea how to do there own jobs.
and lets just hope the US gov't doesnt take over for them. that would only make things worse
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
The notion that not enough happens at ICANN in public, and that the answer to ICANN's problems is more transparency, illustrates a profound lack of understanding about what ICANN really does, and how it really does it.
Did it ever cross anyone's mind over there in East Timbuktu, or whatever remote jungle ICANN is meeting at this month, that if ICANN were more transparent, people wouldn't have so many questions about what it does and how it does it?
Hmmmm?
Edith Keeler Must Die
Nobody's yet explained why it takes a raft of lawyers, eighty million dollars, and meetings all over the world to accomplish what Jon Postel did in his spare time on his office workstation.
The Internet has gotten bigger, but damitall, IP addresses are still IP addresses and DNS is supposed to be a hierarchical, delegated system. What's the big problem? Jon just ran a root server and kept backups like it was the most obvious and natural thing in the world. What else is there to do?
Perhaps the time has come to employ the philosophy behind that phrase. ICANN keeps whining on and on about how "hard" their job is.
How about just find the individual - and I'm sure there is one - who can just say "What? this? just do 1, 2, 3, 4.... there - done." - and give them ICANN's job? Given enough DNS experts, ICANN's job MUST be shallow.
ICANN is an organization which wants to control the internet.
ARIN and the other RIRs is an organization that wants to control the internet.
Both charge outrageous fees to dole out ones and zeros in the form of IP numbers and DNS entries.
I particularly like ARINs approach to IPv6, which still costs thousands for a block of numbers even though there's essentially limitless identifiers.
I also like ICANNs policy of "give us 50k and maaayybeee you can run a tld, but probably not, and, oh yeah, its nonrefundable."
Lets face it, without these internet inhibitors there would be no artificial scarcity of either IP numbers or domain addressess. These scams only drive up the costs for internet users. IPv4 blocks are not reclaimed, IPv6 blocks are virtually limitless. New TLDs don't require any sort of voodoo magic, and can be handled the same way, and with the same hardware as the old TLDs.
It sounds like these organizations, built on greed, are getting carried away with each other.
Was where he tried to reinvent history and describe the founding of the Net and the Web and redescribe the "role" of ICANN.
... which would make the current ICANN board shudder to hear the tale.
...
Some of us were there in the beginning. Some of us even predate CERN's role in popularizing the World Wide Web (that nasty www thingy).
In fact, some of us grew strong in the UseNet Flame Wars
It all makes me wonder why bureaucracy has so much troubles with democracy and true representation.
It's just a technical problem, after all
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
like Dave Farber. He even states the problem, except he points fingers at someone else "it is "laughably naive" -- to imagine that the legitimate interests of governments and large users -- business and other -- can simply be ignored because to some they are unattractive." This is what most of the critics are screaming, the larger interests are being ignored, and there is no accountability, and i'm shamed to say the best arguement for that has been made by Dave Farberm, except he will never conciously admit this. Obligatory link
"good, common words domain names can generate hits on their own."
This is why we're in the mess we're in. Hostnames and URL's were meant for a time when the Internet was in the hands of the techies. When business and legal interests completely overwhelmed the purpose of the Internet, nothing better stepped in to supplement the current naming system.
We basically need a new directory service: one that maps legal entity names to DNS domains. Legislate this with all of the intellectual property crap you want, but leave DNS itself out of it. There's no reason users need to really see DNS domain names, and little reason they'd even need to see URL's for that matter. What percentage of the general public understands http:// and ftp://?
I should be able to tell my Internet browser to go to "IBM", and it should be able to consult a directory of entities, find a list of legal entities that have the name "IBM", obtain a DNS domain name from that directory (ibm.com), do an SRV lookup for the HTTP service at ibm.com, make the request for / at this server, and boom, you're at the "IBM" organization's home page. A TLS/SSL certificate at this point could validate the organization's identity (it should match the original directory entry), for those looking at security. Nowhere in this process do I have to guess that www.ibm.com is IBM's home page. The hostname in this case ceases to be such a valued commodity, outside of vanity uses.
We no longer see companies registering a hundred 2nd-level domains for every service mark and product they sell. For that type of thing, RealNames or similar services would (and do) work fine.
NAMES ARE NOT THE THINGS THEY NAME!
How do you think most things get into search engines? Word of mouth?
People tend to link to things, initially, which are awfully bloody obvious to discover (i.e. things with easy-to-remember domain names.) If this weren't the case, typing "www.cnn.com" wouldn't lead me to CNN's website, and typing "www.microsoft.com" wouldn't lead me to Microsoft.
Furthermore, the courts disagree with you, too, since registering trademarked names almost always results in a court loss.
Names are the things they name, more often than not. It's a fact. Deal with it.