Control of the .ORG TLD

rhwalker22 writes "TechNews.com has an in-depth look at the 11 groups bidding to run dot-org when VeriSign gives it up later this year." I have a sneaking suspicion that my bid of $100 and a case of guinness has been outdone.

Comments

Harrumph ....

[Carl Malamud]

As one of the official supplicants, I naturally read the profiles (and even read the full proposals). So, it was with some bemusement that I noted a continued strain of ".org has to go to a for-profit registry provider because that is the only way the system will be stable."

We posted a few choice words on this subject. The "trust us because we're a .com and will run a stable argument" argument just doesn't wash.

Carl Malamud
Internet Muticasting Service

Support

[zobo]

The Internet Multicasting Service and Internet Software Consortium (as a team) are among the bidders for .org.

The IMS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit run by Carl Malamud, who was responsible for getting the SEC's EDGAR filings freely available online. There is more info here.

You have to solve a computer-science tough problem

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The way this ought to work is with the database is distributed and replicated across all the registrars, with a majority-voting system for forcing consistency. That would eliminate any single point of failure.

Unfortunately that gets you into the "distributed update problem" which is unsolved (and may be insoluble).

Determining that .org is currently available and assigning it (thus making it unavailable) is an atomic action. Ways to reliably distribute such actions non-hierarchically across cooperating systems have not been found.

(It's not like nobody is working on this problem. It's the same as making a withdrawal from an account, but only if there's money to cover it. So there's big money to be made by getting it right on a no-single-point-of-failure distributed system. It's also the same as determining what constitutes the canonical "latest published" edition of a document - or piece of software - that is subject to revision. So hypertexties, computer scientists, and other academics have been beating their heads against it for years, too.)

The only practical solutions to date have been to have a designated system be the canonical decision-maker - and thus the authority on who is and who is not registered. This makes the operator of that system both the authority on who is and who is not registered, and the maintainer of the one canonical list (which is downloaded onto the other servers).

You can subdivide the namespace and have a multiplicity of "authorities", each with their own "turf". But this creates a hierarchy, starting with one particular authority who maintains the "root of the world" first level of division of the namespace. But that's what we have now. .ORG would be a good place to deploy such a technology, so that when .COM comes up for renewal, we can get rid of the current single point of control.

Right. And if anybody solves the hard problem it will give us a testing ground that only has problems for non-profits, not for businesses that can lose megabux if they're down for a day, if bugs show up. B-)