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VeriSign and Other Registry Giants Blast ICANN
rhwalker22 writes: "VeriSign, ENIC, and Nominet UK today released a letter to the U.S. Commerce Dept. urging Uncle Sam to 'scale back the powers of the body that manages the Internet's global addressing system,' according to this report on washingtonpost.com. ICANN, of course, has its own take on the Registries' letter..."
So after they make a fortune because of the ICANN does business, they want to change it so they can rape another group of customers?
They are not the ones I would listen to for policy changes.
Which you'll only be able to examine after a long lawsuit, and you won't be able to copy or leak to anyone without a 10 day opportunity for injunction.
Judging from their financial records history at least....
What would the consequences be of Verisign, InterNIC, and the like addressing providers simply ignoring ICANN?
ICANN doesn't have physical control of any servers. They can legislate away but if the regulations they impose are so far fetched that nobody will impliment them, they've got no real power.
I don't think the USDoC would care that much, either, honestly.
Free clue to ICANN: When even spamming, fake-renewal-notice-spewing, domain-slamming scumbag registrars like Verislime aren't afraid to write the Commerce Department and call you scum, you've got problems. ;-)
Sir, ICANN has created a rule that favors the Public Good over their corporate sponsors.
Good GOD man! You there! Take the chopper and go swine hunting, You over there, start taking bids on subteranean cold food storage.
---------
Or maybe we can all just put our wallets out, bend over, and get it done with.
-GiH
Lovely. So now, Verisign and company are envisioning a new lightweight ICANN that Verisign can push around. This isn't going to be solved until a responsible group takes control, and until Verisign is out of the picture as well.
I'm not a huge fan of ICANN (is anyone?) but I'm distrustful of verisign even more. Anything that Verisign wants is probably not in our best interests. Could this be a power grab?
God is real unless declared integer.
It's the same link. Read the whole article.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Disclaimer: No, I did not read the article.
VeriSign, ENIC, and Nominet UK today released a letter to the U.S. Commerce Dept. urging Uncle Sam to 'scale back the powers of the body that manages the Internet's global addressing system.'
"Hello, pot? Yes, hi there, pot. This is your old friend, kettle."
"You're black."
"That is all. Goodbye."
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Oh, boy, VeriSign wants ICANN to give up some of its regulatory power. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Maybe the Swiss could do it; they seem like nice folks. Very private. Kickass knives, too.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
So basically we have these different groups arguing over who gets to be the big cheese monopoly If our government had more than about 3 brain cells dedicated to this problem, we wouldn't even have a monopoly in the first place. Look where we are now. We have institutionalized cyber-squatting. We have artificial scarcity in domain names. We have a couple of unaccountable organizations resolving domain disputes. We have ICANN removing even the pretense of democratic control, while attempting to prevent the public (and one of its own directors) from ever finding out what exactly goes on behind the scenes or where the money goes. I think things are pretty well screwed up now. Do we really care which group has the monopoly? Unfortunately, nobody seems to have enough clout to stand up to ICANN and Verisign and get changes made. Most people just don't understand the issues. Those few that do don't seem to get any attention. It's a sad state of affairs when the world's leading democracy puts a non-democratic, unaccountable entity in charge of the Internet.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Does anyone but me find it ironic that the most influential gripe about ICANN is coming from the registries that gained most benefit from ICANNs excesses? Of course they only gripe about the price cap since this is one of the few ICANN policies that bites the registries harder than it does the domain owners.
The registries are as evil as ICANN in their own way. The only spark of interest in this is that Nominet joined the party - Having dealt with administering domains in .com, .ac.uk and .co.uk I found that of the new crop of domain barons, Nominet were the most true to the way it used to be. (probably because when they took over .uk the fastest backbones in the UK were still in the hands of the academics, so they messed with .ac.uk at their peril)
I had a
How unfortunate to live in a part of the world that does not have talking kettles.
Beer wants to be free
As a starting point, I assert that ICANN's role should consist of two jobs and two jobs only:
.com/.net/.org.
- Making sure that IP addresses are assigned and allocated on a fair and equitable basis and in conformity with demands of the the packet routing systems of the Internet.
- Making sure that the ICANN/NTIA root zone is expanded on a basis that is fair and equitable to everyone, that the root zone file is properly maintained and disseminated, and that its set of root servers are operated by persons and entities that have the proper skills, resources, and obligations.
We have plenty of national legislatures and treaty organizations that can handle those who claim that their commercial rights trump other rights.
It is an open question, and one that has never been debated, much less agreed upon by those affected, whether ICANN should have an additional role to act as a consumer protection body to protect those who due to historical circumstances are locked into
Thousands of slashdot readers spontaneously combust, unable to pick a side involving an underhanded, unscrupulous entity and... an underhanded, unscrupulous entity.
;-)
I'd just like to state that there were never such debates back when we were all using Gopher.
Heh heh, so ICANN and VeriSign are duking it out. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." The problem is, what if they're both your enemy? Then who's your friend?
Which brings to mind another aphorism. "When elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled."
Consider this quote from the article: VeriSign runs dot-com, dot-net and dot-org under agreements with ICANN that prevent VeriSign from raising the wholesale price of the addresses it sells ($6), or substantially changing the way it runs the domains.
At VeriSign, domain names are six bucks wholesale; thirty-five bucks retail. This makes the bottled-water business look positively low-margin. The actual cost of service provided by VeriSign (less overhead for executive salaries, Aereon chairs, and Napoleonesque offices) is less than a dime. The markup on domain name registration is already expressed in scientific notation. But of course, even when you have a monopoly (as VeriSign has), everything is never quite enough.
The history of VeriSign (and its predecessor, Network Solutions) and of ICANN is a textbook story of the effects of greed and commercial selfishness vs. political and parochial power-hunger upon the internet. Check it out yourself. If you want to see the future of the net, you need only take a look at its past.
Considering that the WTO was formed in order to allow companies to seek damages from governments who 'mess' with the markets (like banning dangerous chemicals, natch, but thats a whole other ball of wax) .. I can't imagine the WTO taking power away from the private sector and placing it in any kind of public body. That's practically counter to the reason it was put together.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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Enter VeriSign, a corporate giant, and ICANN, a nonprofit service that thinks it is a private -- and profitable -- corporation.
VeriSign (shouting offstage): Hey government, ICANN is taking our business!
ICANN: But you are just trying to racketeer and price gouge.
VeriSign: That's not the point. You are racketeering and we want more of the pie. Er, you are outside your jurisdiction on those matters, and are avoiding the issue.
ICANN: But we filter our money through IANA and other profitable corporations, I mean, nonprofit public benefit groups.
Two small groups, Nominet and DENIC, enter stage right.
Nominet and DENIC: But what about us? We want to work closely with VeriSign because then we can get all the names that aren't taken with .com, .net, and .org. If VeriSign can price gouge, we should be able to also.
VeriSign: You guys all wanna step into another room and we can discuss this rationally?
all step into dimly-light back room, talking. Also in the room is a demonic figure in red, with horns, a tail, and a pitchfork. All of them laugh, join hands, and become a New Entity.
New Entity: We have reached an agreement. We are now VeriSign-Nominet-ICANN-DENIC, or VeriSNIDE for short. Our new registration fee is $15000 per domain, or highest bid. Because we are Internet based, we will no longer report to any government or public entity. We will do all business from our fleet of personal yachts around the world. Please see our Lawyers and Accountants on the way out.
exit stage left.
----
Okay, so it won't be a blockbuster play, but it sure seems like the entire corporate world is following this model.
frob.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
There are many things that I don't like about ICANN, but things like the limits they have on what the prime registrys can charge wholesale aren't one of them. I've had to deal with NSI->verisign refusing to allow me to transfer getyourassingear.com (which has now been taken by someone else). The last thing I'd want to do is make it even easier for them to stomp on their competition.
That having been said, ICANN does need to have it's wrists slapped with a two-by-four (along with the back of their collective head). If they're not willing to go back to being the open, accountable, etc. group that they originally promised that they'd be, then perhaps they should be given a 1-year extension, and work done to design something that does work properly.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Why does the US feel that it should own the Internet?
.com domains, but their corporate site will be at .fr. Similar for Japan, Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia, and pretty much every company in the world. Only the US, with a virtually nonexistent .us domain, has all its companies have .com domains.
Countries have different laws. That's a fact, and a good thing; I don't think anybody wants that Hague treaty that lets people sue Swedish porn producers in Saudi Arabia, for example. So having global domains only invites problems.
A French's company may have
What we really need to do is eliminate the three-letter TLD, and have every single domain name end in a country code. Then. as part of getting a domain, the owner agrees to abide by the laws of the country controlling the domain, and no other laws.
Whether ICANN exists or not, the US government tries to enforce its laws on the whole of the Internet. By more clearly enforcing existing political boundaries on the Web, all sorts of disputes can be resolved and avoided.
Oh, VeriSign's just mad because ICANN rejected their WLS proposal and
"ICANN leaders have "very, very creatively interpreted their authority to get into areas they were never authorized to get into,"
sounds suspciously like VeriSign's own business practices...
Their both just giant evil entities anyway.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Not true, and if it was, it would be a really bad idea to have them all in the same place. RFC 2010 [faqs.org] gives the standard requirements for the servers.
.org, .net] SLDs) are made. If it's lost it can be restarted from a backup or mirror. But changes made since the last backup or flush will be lost.
I think you're confusing two issues.
- There is one canonical root database. This is where the decisions about what is registered and what is not (at the root level, the TLDs, and the significant [.com,
- There are a number of root servers. These are all effectively mirrors of the contents of the root database as of the last snapshot.
The issue is who maintains the canonical database, which provides the data for the servers, not the servers themselves.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
is no more meaningful than a 3-letter TLD. Both are meaningless in today's Internet. As are the www prefixes on so many of today's webpages. As are the '.' notation...
.com is a straw man. If other countries don't like the cruft which comes with a .com address, then they can freely not take a .com address...
...)
Saying a 2-letter _ASCII_ (e.g. Latin characters) country code in any less US-specific than
What we really need is a change to a global character set (a la Unicode) which will allow native characters in the URL... Have you looked at ASCII approximations of Korean Hangul or Japanese Kanji lately?
At the same time, it would probably be wise to have an international group redesign the registration system entirely. (making it more automated, bypassing pointless "registrars", moving copyright battles into normal courts, dumping the TLD concept entirely,
They have authority over DNS because almost everyone is using their servers. Europeans, for example, give power to ICANN every time a European uses ICANN's root to look up an address. That's all there is to it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The reality is, almost any business would run the same way as M$.
Bullshit.
There are plenty of examples of companies with firm ethical backgrounds. Big companies, sucessful companies.
Competing by offering a better product instead of using your huge bank account to absorb losses and drive your competitors out of business is the way most companies operate. MS is the exception and not the rule.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
It might have started out when being black was a "bad thing". Don't know of the real origins.
It doesn't mean being black is bad. It just means that you are calling upon both parties lambasting the other for being obviously the same thing.
It's origin is Cervantes' Don Quixote.
You can find ethnic slurs in almost anything. Chess, Pool, France Surrendering...
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Choose the one you prefer:
1. a) Attila the Hun, b) Genghis Kahn
2. a) Stalin, b) Hitler
3. a) headcheese, b) haggis
4. a) trial by ordeal, b) trial by secret tribunal
5. a) death by hanging, b) death by firing squad
6. a) ICANN, b) Verisign
If our government had more than about 3 brain cells dedicated to this problem, we wouldn't even have a monopoly in the first place.
.us and/or the domain system in general was handed off to ICANN rather than the patent and trademark office, and protocol numbers to ANSI, NIST, ITU, etc. That's what they DO for a living, after all. A domain name, for instance, is one of the best examples of a service mark I've ever seen.)
If there's one thing that's a "natural monopoly" it's insuring there are no collisions in a global name space. (It's probably more of one than being the court for people who can't agree on an arbitrator.)
If we're going to continue with the current domains I think we'll have to bite the bullet on this one, let a monopoly have it, and ride herd on them to keep them from being oppressive.
But IMHO "oppressive" includes charging an ongoing fee in the tens of US dollars annually for each name, rather than a (much smaller) one-time fee for assigning or transferring a unique name. (Imagine if you had to rent your personal name on the same basis.) It doesn't cost THAT much to maintain a database for assignments. The root servers can be maintained by ISPs as a (trivially-expensive) part of the service, if nobody (like MIL, universities, clubs, etc.) volunteer.
Now an alternative for domain names would be to establish a bunch of new TLDs, one for each competing registry, and let them compete. Country domains could go wherever the country in question wants. IP numbers are another can of worms - but at least with IPV6 you have so many you could hand off BIG blocks and never feel a pinch.
(By the way: I've NEVER understood why
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The original is the somewhat more pithy "pot calling the kettle blackarse", and dates back to a time when both these utensils were heated by suspending them over fires. The reference is to being dirty/sooty.
> Oh, boy, VeriSign wants ICANN to give up some of its regulatory power. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
>
> Maybe the Swiss could do it; they seem like nice folks.
Heh. That's the rub.
We're all agreed that ICANN is doing a bad job of things. But who shall we replace them with?
Some department or body of the US government? I can't believe that the rest of the world would go for that very well. Same argument if we grant oversight powers to any national government -- be they the British, the Russians, Japanese or teh Swiss.
Set up a part of the UN to oversee this? At best you would have a crippled organization because some major country (e.g. the US, China, Japan, one or more European nation) decided NOT to ratify the treaty that enables this organization to work. At worst, you'd end up with something worse than ICANN: not only corrupt & self-serving, but without a clue of how the Internet actually works.
The best solution would be a group like ICANN only with more transparentness & accountability -- as well as a majority of outside directors elected in a representative fashion. The same fixes that Karl Auerbach has been fighting for. The same fixes I'd wager all of us would back. Once done, this body could eventually free itself from a close association with one nation, & become a truly global entity.
This dispute doesn't address that. It's an attempt by various regional registries to sieze power from ICANN, to increase their own little empires. If this action is successful, instead of one crew of thieves, we're going to have several crews. Not an improvement.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p