Slashdot Mirror
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.
i don't want to have to change my bookmarks to slashdot.orgy
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
.... and raise you Celine Dion.
(I'm in canada, we don't want her)
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. .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.
And for those who don't think that this might affect them in the slightest, look at the current webpage in your location bar.
Oh yea... and no prizes for guessing whos gonna win... since dot-com is dot-gone... I guess .org will be going to dot-morgue...
PAranoia Rules!!My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
they could register B.ORG
sulli
RTFJ.
That will describe the sound you make when your site's been slashdotted.
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
"Dot-org is important now because it the one space on the Internet that ... has been devoted to noncommercial speech," said Barry Steinhardt, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Program. "If it were to be turned into just another dot-com, that would be a blow to speech." (emphasis mine)
[cheapshot]
mpaa.org?
riaa.org?
What is 'noncommercial' about that? I guest we can chalk up another 'blow to speech' by the corporations that RUN mpaa and riaa.
[/cheapshot]
-- My HARDWARE, My CHOICE.
I'm sorry, but nothing is more valuable than a case of Guinness :)
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Slashdot and other OSDN sites are considered profitable, right? Owned by publically traded VA Software.
So will slashdot.org become slashdot.com?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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.
83chrise.nuf
ICANN should not be deciding who controls .ORG. They are greedy corporate fucks who just want to make as much money as possible and benefit their corporate buddies. Does anyone really think that there's a chance in hell that ICANN will "award" .ORG to a non-profit organization? No. Its going to go to the corporate interests which can benefit ICANN the most.
.org should vote on what organization they want to run the .ORG domains. This way, we have a better chance that whatever organization that controls it will serve the interests of the public, not some corporations interests.
What SHOULD happen is that all the current owners of a
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
They can re-register under the .reorg TLD.
~N
You (and I) may not agree with them, and a lot of other non-profit organizations, but that's the nature of organizations--they usually reflect the views of the members.
What is it, exactly, that makes this guy think .org has some lockout on commercial entities? If anything, the tendency for nonprofits to gravitate there seems like a popular custom more than a rule.
I own two .org domains. I don't have any plans to make any money off them ... but why shouldn't I?
Breakfast served all day!
I'm sure they'd give you $50 just to take away the case of miller lite.
ROTFLMAO! Damn where's my mod points when I really need them!
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
...and will need to "evaluate" your proposal. Please send the case of Guiness to my house, post haste. ;-)
I like lots of people. That doesn't mean I go carting them around the galaxy with me. --Dr. Who
Yeah, three days of recruiting participants, four days of phone tags, two days of fighting with Outlook to fit everyone in. And then it's all over in six and half minutes.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Funny how Molson is suing for control of the canadian.biz domain(as if a beer company could have intellectual property rights to the name of our country and yet:
.Org Foundation" and the other "The DotOrg Foundation" can both be bidding for the same contract at the same time without litigation.
Two foundations, one called "The
Nice to see a sign of maturity in this overly-litigous world.
lysergically yours
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
I was going to bid, but I only had $34,000.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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.
.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.
.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.
Unfortunately that gets you into the "distributed update problem" which is unsolved (and may be insoluble).
Determining that
(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.
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-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Isn't this just the Byzantine agreement problem, which is solved?
The end result is that they can only compete on price down to $6 before they start losing money. What's to stop VeriSign from charging $20 per wholesale domain name from each registrar? In other words, there really is no competition within the dot-org TLD. Sure, whoever runs the dot-info TLD can try to compete on price, but that's why people are clammoring for hundreds if not thousands of TLDs.
A dot-com domain name is valuable simply because there are only a few alternatives. If there were thousands of alternatives for foo.*, foo.com wouldn't be that much more valuable than foo.bar. The problem is that many TLDs are more valuable (dot-tv, dot-com, dot-xxx) because DNS continues to be used as a keyword system.
Is there any way out of this mess?
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Apparently no one caught my reference to Fudd beer on the Simpsons.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
To lay my cards on the table, I've had a ".org" domain registered for more than a decade now, years before Dupont registered all their trademarks as domains in a single day, and forced us to go to a pay-for-domain system. I've defended my domain through several shady attempts to take it over (the last one being non-notification of renewal being required).
The "Commercial vs. non-commercial" argument is nothing but a bunch of BS.
The reason the ".com" domain is "used up" has to do with the fact that Netscape initially started doing automatic URL completion using ".com" as the default suffix, and Internet Explorer has since followed suit.
The result is that the ".com" is a defacto keyword index mechanism built into almost all URL input fields. So it's about controlling a particular keyword.
The fight over ".org" is the same as the fight over ".info" and ".biz"... trademark defense.
Almost anyone who owns a trademark feels that they must "grab it" in all possible domain suffixes to "defend" it. And this means money to anyone who controls a top level domain.
This is the business model of all the people trying to push ".biz" and ".info" domains onto currently registered ".com" domain owners.
They effectively get a "commission override" (currently $6) of every domain registration in the top level domain. Just like, no matter who you register a ".com" domain with these days, VeriSign gets $6 from you.
This is the business model of every company trying to obtain control of any top level domain.
I wish ".tm" didn't belong to a country; it would be a perfect place to put jerks who think that there is only one namespace in the world, the trademark namespace.
What we really need is a ".rtm" ("Registered Trademark") or even ".trademark" top level domain, and an agreement from legislators that that's all that's necessary to defend your trademark in the domain name space.
Of course, right now... that's ".com", isn't it? And it's not going to change until the default name completion rules for browsers change to embrace some new top level domain.
PS: Just to throw jet fuel on this fire... I'm *really* surprised that there isn't a ".aol" top level domain, into which all AOL "keywords" are registered, and all AOL controlled browsers complete to, by default...
-- Terry
Apparently it didn't. A quick Google came up with this info on foo and foobar.
In short, "it now seems more likely that FUBAR was itself a derivative of `foo' perhaps influenced by German `furchtbar' (terrible) - `foobar' may actually have been the original form." "Foo" seems to have a pre-war history, its "earliest documented uses were in the 'Smokey Stover' comic strip published from about 1930 to about 1952."
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
MPAA and RIAA are not selling anything, just advocating viewpoints of their members (who are commercial).
What I find more disconcerting is the raft of 'nonprofit but with commercial partners' type of applications - which seem to be just a non-profit front for commercial operations. For example, the DotOrg Foundation have already agreed to outsource all the work to register.com at $5.20/domain, and then charge Joe Public $6. Why not let register.com put in an application themselves? (To answer that myself, they have put in their own application as 'Register Organisation Inc.'). Similarly 'UIA' seems to be just a front for Verisign.
These semi-non-profit organisations then seem to have bizarre ideas about what to do with all the filthy lucre they accumulate: from giving a fraction of it to good causes (justifying overcharging by donating a tenth of their profits to charity), to using the money to develop tools which they will then sell to .org registrants (WTF?).
I would personally prefer a proper (open) non-profit organisation to run it, but wouldn't mind an accountable for-profit company. Having an open, non-profit, well-run shell organisation who shovel all the money into some shadowy forprofit partner seems a recipe for disaster.
Incidentally, the most amusing(worrying?) application seems to be the '.Org foundation' who claim "We want to make sure that [dot-org] is representative of the larger world and not just representative of U.S. organizations," - and follow this up by: 'Microsoft has tentatively agreed to help fund The .Org Foundation if it wins the contract, Rogers said. Details of that arrangement are still being worked out.'
The standard approach is to say that a quorum is required - say Q sites out of N, where Q > N/2. It's still quite painful to actually implement distributed and replicated databases (they were all the rage in the 80s and early 90s but never really took off), but it should be possible, particularly if a human is available to resolve occasional update conflicts.
Each site should be able to determine independently if it is part of a quorum, even in the event of network partitions (Internet breaks connectivity between two subsets of the sites). So I don't see this as a big problem, although other problems certainly exist.
There are still interesting issues with two-phase commit, where the transaction coordinator (which collects all the 'ready' responses and makes an atomic decision to proceed) is a single point of failure, but I think Transarc (taken over by IBM) may have done something in this area by moving this to a more reliable server.
Perhaps someone with more recent involvement in distributed DBs can comment.
Grandfather clause. If you already had a 1-letter name when the no-1-letter rule was passed, you got to keep it.