Slashdot Mirror
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.
And just how exactly are we going to set up some kind of election to vote on these issues? A poll somewhere? And I'm so sure that no one is going to vote multiple times. Not to metion the logistics of trying to have some sort of rational debate before hand with the millions of people who actually care to discuss this.
ICANN is a failure, yes. But, it doesn't mean that there isn't some central authority needed to take over for ICANN. The internet is too big now to not have some sort of almost hegemonal group in charge. Yes, there should be community input, but it has to be structured. Maybe take a page out of the US Constitutional framers book and set up some sort of internet electoral college, and have each region elect their rep. And then those reps go and make the decisions.
But in no way can there be a true democracy on the internet, it worked for the Greeks because there weren't millions upon millions of people trying to get their voice heard.
The problem with this idea is that its completely impossible to implement. There are no reliable ways of making sure that one person=one vote, no way of guaranteeing even participation geographically, economically, or any other way. Internet users nowadays are mostly people who log in to ISPs to use email and chat. They don't know what ICANN is, and don't care. Are you suggesting that voting on issues that affect so many naive users should be reduced to a tug-of war between nerds and corporations?
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.
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
How about
To access a web site, type its IP address. If you don't like typing IP addresses, build a database. If you don't have the time/inclination to build your own database, subscribe to one.It's not a technical problem. It's not even an implementation problem. All popular operating systems allow you to specify the IP address of your DNS server, and there are already alternate DNS servers out there. If you don't like ICANN's, find another.
Go for anarchy and ICANN becomes a non-issue.
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.
Slashdot doesn't pretend to be unbiased. IMO, that's better than most of the rest of the journalistic world, which does pretend.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The new TLDs probably can't be added to a list of good things. In fact, I don't think a list of good things exists, as there is not yet any need for one. The horrible method by which they choose to add TLDs is a disservice to the Internet community. I don't think ICANN had anything to do with opening up the domain registrar system. That was Congress, IIRC.
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
This would create a problem with some vhosted sites. There are some sites which require a request for their domain name, otherwise, if you just type in their IP address, you don't get any site. This would force these independent databases to use the same name/ip associations as ICANN for certain sites, or require major changes in Apache or the way vhosted sites are set up.
While I personally think that you have a cool idea, I also think this would merely end up confusing the majority of internet users (of course this depends on how all of the database subscription options are implemented). Sadly, most internet users can barely make their way through hotmail and yahoo, let alone remember IP address, or understand what it means to subscribe to a database of domain names. This would require an incredibly well thought out user interface with language that is perfectly understandable to people who have never touched a computer before in their life.
Karma: Ran over your dogma.
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.
DNS names were never intended to be commodities (at least not to the degree they are today), any more than Java class name hierarchies or SNMP MIB organizational identifiers are meant to be commodities. DNS names have become commodities because there is presently no directory that associates legal business names to DNS domains. DNS is being warped into serving two purposes at once here: the association of names to IP addresses, and the association of legal business entities to an IP address for a web site.
What we need is to return DNS to serving its original role: to provide an easier-to-use addressing mechanism for Internet hosts. The role of associating legal entity names to Internet domains needs its own service (e.g. X.500 or LDAP). A "keyword" lookup service for product names or other service marks would need a third service a la RealNames.
We need to desperately curb the use of www.what-i-am-looking-for.com and to start enforcing DNS delegation like it was originally designed.
My two cents.