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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..
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...
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?
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.
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.
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?
Isn't that what happened with the last presidential election?
Best Windows Freeware
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
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)
Actually a republic would be a much better idea. This is what the majority of the civilized word uses, including USA, GB, Mexico, Canada, Germany, France, etc. People should be elected to make knowledgable choices and to handle the mundane choices.
.com address. An average person would say "Linux, isn't that some kind of virus? I don't want any flesh eating virus on my computer." Uniformed people resort to rumor and hear-say when they don't know the facts or can't get easy access to the facts. Or take this example to change from IPV4 to IPV6, most people won't think of it as a big deal and won't vote, so IPV2 wins by write in from 15 high schoolers pulling a prank.
Imagine if a vote is called to all Linux to connect to a
Individuals can be very smart, but take a large group of people and the IQ plummets. The masses are fickle and apathetic. Yes electing officials is based on popularity more then qualifications but the officials at least have to know something because of the 1 percent of people that ask intelligent questions.
--Beware bias, I live in the USA
Pardon me for flaming, but...
Have you heard of computers? Of course you have. How about web software? Yep.
So are you one of those folks who:
A. would never trust a website with your credit card information, much less some third party to tally your vote on whether or not to grant a block of 4096 IP address to the fine folks at ilovemonkeysex.com?
B. advocates the perpetuation of the electoral college - which was created in the days when people sent messages on horseback?
C. both of the above?
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
<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
No, in the last presidential election (in fact, in the last several), large organizations who don't care about the common citizen, but who want to be left alone by the government, battled large organizations who don't care about the common citizen, but want the government to grant them all kinds of money, monopolies, special rights and privileges. There is no way I can think of that a society can have personal liberty, and a two-party system, without this state of affairs prevailing.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
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?
That would certainly be preferable to simply letting the corporations win by default.
If you choose not to vote, you have only yourself to blame and should probably quit bitching now and forever.
If your right to vote is taken away from you by [insert favorite hated authority figure here], then you have not only the right, but the moral obligation to take up arms and drive [said authority figure] from power. In the case of ICANN and the Internet such weopons might be more metaphorical than real (one can hope), but I wouldn't count on it.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It may not be the mbest solution, but it seems like the most fair way to do a vote would be the owner of every domain name gets one vote. Before an election every domain owner gets some type of id number emailed to them, and they use that to vote. Granted people with more domain names would get more votes, but there does not realy seem like there is a "good" way to do this, and this seems to be the most fair way to me. Also since the people with more domain names are hopefully contributing more to the web by increasing the amount of content on the web with more web sites, they should get a little more control becouse they are hopefully contributing more. The same argument also works for the people who do own domain names. Every single election system has some type of prereq to vote, in the us it is citizenship and age, on the net it is owning a part of the net, a domain name.
"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." -- Mark Twain
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.
...and what do we do about all the name-based HTTP/1.1-compliant virtual hosts out there?
I thought the premise was that IP numbers were scarce.
myselfmusic
One domain one vote is not a good idea because of the bottom feeder domain squatters. They contribute nothing to the Internet but they own a lot of domain names. They could also skew the rules in ways that profit them and not us.
I would say that the rule should be that everyone with at least one domain name gets one vote. We can tell who is who (roughly) by using whois.
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
So what do you use for links on your web pages? IP addresses, which will go bad as soon as the destination site reorganizes; or DNS names, which won't work for any users who subscribe to a different database?
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?
"So what do you use for links on your web pages? IP addresses, which will go bad as soon as the destination site reorganizes; or DNS names, which won't work for any users who subscribe to a different database?"
h tml"
Well, for internal links you do what you should be doing now. Dont include the domain at all, and dont begin the url with a HTTP://
bad : href="http://www.example.com/path/to/my/document.
good: href="/path/to/my/document.html"
For external links, the idea is stability in IP addresses (Which isnt easy in IPv4, not because its not doable, but because ICANN would like us to believe its not doable.)
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.
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?
Actually, I'm neither A or B. Because while I do trust my credit card number on the web, that's only because they say I don't have to pay for things if my number gets swiped. But I have no assurances that someone isn't going to crack the third party tallying server and make their own group win.
The point that I was trying to make is that there is no real feasible way to allow everyone to get up and debate the points in question. There just isn't enough time for everyone to put in their two cents. The concept behind the electoral college is that you elect people you trust who have time and will get their voices heard, and through them, your voices. Its no different then a legislative assembly of some sort.
And what's wrong with ideas that were made when people sent messages on horseback? As much as we bitch and whine about the laws in the US, I have rarely heard someone moaning about the constitution itself, which was also created when people sent letters by horseback.
All except the first can be found at www.----.net. An IP is attacking you, and you want to find out who it is registered to? Look it up at the various RIRs.
Regional Internet Registries (RIR)
:c c/about/regionale .net/perl/whois
American Registry for Internet Number (ARIN)
Asia Pacific Information Centre (APNIC)
Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE-NCC)
for more info on these go to
www.apnic.net/db/RIRs.html
www.ripe.net/ripen
www.aso.icann.org/rirs
www.rip
-Alicia
Run them on port 80,81,82,8080,8081,8082,8083.....
Actually a republic would be a much better idea. This is what the majority of the civilized word uses, including USA, GB, Mexico, Canada, Germany, France, etc.
I'm sorry to have to inform you that GB is not a republic, nor is the UK of which it is part... We are a monarchy, a dictatorship in which supreme executive power derives from a fluke of birthright rather than from a mandate from the masses!
In practice, admittedly, the monarch is a decent sort, and she allows herself to be told what to do by people who _do_ have a mandate from the masses, and several laws, charters, and at least one major war have institutionalised this arrangement... but the principle still stands!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
Hand every voter a personal certificate validated by a trusted authority, and there you go. It would require the governments' participation, but one can dream..
have you been defaced today?
.. and by the way, CIRA (.ca) did it to elect its board members:
results
have you been defaced today?
"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"
Need I direct you to the Free democracy project?
The state-of-the-art in electronic voting is a whole lot more advanced than you might think by looking at government's "send your PIN in a text message" projects!
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?
"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.
Yes, it is better than tug of war between corporations and other corporations. ICANN is becoming a commercial entity. That is NOT good, another system needs to be put in place. It is very unethical of a standards body to do this, and I think they fall into the same general category. I think these people should be volenteers. Many standards bodies charge to be part of them, and people still participate, I do not think finding people to do this would be a problem. I do not think they should take a salary. I think finding places to host the root servers would be no problem at all, although I think a university (come on MIT, we all know you have the money, Stanford, what about you?) would be best. I think the naming rules should be changed to first one to register it owns it, and can do whatever they want with it, unless they let registration lapse (current TLDs reserved and controlled by the root, keep them under the same rules. I think any tld should be allowed, let it be part of the registerable domain names, allow, up to 10 per person (or corporate entity), and keep the rules that simple... it will sort itself out. this will allow a solution to the technical problem without letting it become a political one. New versions can even be voted in, (with backward compatability being a big thing.) hint rfc process hint. Make these the rules, and go from there. I think that would fix most of their problems.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.