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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.
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.
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)
<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!
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.
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?
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?
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.
Run them on port 80,81,82,8080,8081,8082,8083.....
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.
"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!