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John Gilmore and Maddog Hall discuss .ORG bids
TreyHarris writes "Over on SAGEwire, we have posted an email exchange between John Gilmore (EFF cofounder) and Jon "maddog" Hall (Executive Director, Linux International) about the .ORG bids. It's a fascinating read, and goes much further into depth about the issues than I've seen on any news site thus far."
No comment
There's an ongoing discussion about .ORG right now in EFNet's #bsdcode. Too bad vixie didn't get it. BTW, the key for the channel is 'i8thebabyjesus'
Jesus Monroy Jr
I wonder how he got that nickname. I wonder if it involved chugging banana red as fast as he could to the general disgust of everyone in the room.
Just let me know when Eritrea (.er) wants to start selling domains.
Just imagine...
moth.er fath.er lov.er teach.er
And a whole slew of naughty ones.
HOWEVER, I do like the nothing I spend for dugnet.oss (ref OpenNIC)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
has this site already been /.ed? it doesnt appear to be transmitting...
Come on, folks, who's kidding who? If the price of .org goes down, it won't mean more nonprofits could afford domains...it'd mean more bandwagon domain prospectors and more work for ICANN, who obviously CANN'T handle the load they have now.
.org domain names. I bought them at $15 each per year. If .org dropped to $6, I would have about a hundred -- every possible abbreviation and misspelling I could think of. And I'm just one guy, running what used to be a web hosting co-op.
.org. Organizations are not starving so much that they can't afford $15...hell, a single mailing costs more than ten times that, and it's about the price of two hours of one guy telemarketing. What .org needs is something to cause it to rise above commercial domains. If the price was more like $100 per domain, it would give more credibility to the domain holder as there would be less impetus to snipe these expensive domains.
;).
I have about six
If anything, we need to jack up the price on
Oh, and while we're at it, the profits from the additional price shouldn't go to a company. They should go to a serious of non profits, selected by the members when they register. EFF and FSF could be on the top of the list
Hey freaks: now you're ju
OpenNIC is the greatest! All those additional domains, the public-spiritedness of it all, plus the OpenNIC DNS servers, even the bottom rung ones, are so much faster than the ones provided by my ISP!
Win-win-win-win.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The problem with the whole domain name system is that it has been abused to no end. URLs aren't supposed to make sense; the address box in your web browser is not supposed to be a substitute for a search engine. A good analogy could be made to email addresses. No one expects to be able to email my_neighbor_john@wholived.nextdoor.tome.whenIwas6. com and have it work. Instead, we all have address books so we don't have to remember everyone's email address. Likewise, in the web world, we have bookmarks or Favorites.
.org domain name is priced as under a monopoly (since it is controlled by one). But you do not need a domain name to have a website. Get a subdomain wherever your site is hosted, and you'll be fine.
So what should domains be? Well, just what they sound like, "domains" of servers. Go.com does this right. They have a web server for espn.go.com and another for abcnews.go.com. Don't want to remember those? Fine, then bookmark espn.go.com and call it "sportz."
Registering names for domains that will only ever have websites is also extremely stupid. What is at ftp.hotornot.com? Are there any groups at news.onion.com?
In conclusion, I will concede that the
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Subject says all.
John Gilmore needs to find out how much a gallon of milk costs these days.
$625k a year to run a 2.5 million name database? In the real world that pays for 5 high end people after you count business expenses. This is a hgih availability application. Lets get network transit and co-lo with security and backup power. You walso want to replicate this database in a remote location so that doubles those expenses. You also want maintenance contracts with relatively short turn around time. Don't forget staff to man the phones for international operations (Perhaps 24x7). Yes, they may have bought higher end hardware than they needed, but that's a small part of the overall expenses. Finally, these folks are trying to do a professional job and do deserve to make some money in the process.
How did Gilmore make his money? As I recall it was from being an early employee in Sun. He seems to think that everyone else should give away their profits and live in cardboard boxes, but he sure lives well himself. Let's also be clear that Gilmore has had a very public feud with Paul Vixie about MAPS. Gilmore thinks he has a right to run an open relay and make life easier for spammers, but MAPS does not have a right to list his system. How's the for libertarian ideals? I suspect that's coloring his review.
Back when domain names were free a whole lot of cybersquatters like ecorp.com got 5,000 or more domain names..
and then lost them due to trademark and name infringement and the like through WIPO proceedings..
I don't think WIPO needs any more work than it has right now.. and this woudl just open org domains up to cyber squatters.. we have enough problems with this issue of cyber squatters not to make changes that might increase the problem..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
Disclaimer: site was /.'ed so I couldn't read the article
.org's get registered to nonprofits is to actually make them prove their non-profit status when they register the URL. Maybe it's a novel concept, but it seems to me that if you have to prove your status as a nonprofit to get a .org domain, then you won't have squatters just picking up .org domains.
An approach I haven't seen mentioned yet for making sure
What is your Slash Rating?
Wow, it's crapfloods and trolls like that one that renew my faith in the trolling societies of slashdot. And, just because I'm obligated, goatse.
it is very hard to reverse things. It's very understandable that VeriSign wants to release the majority of .org domains. What would this mean? New business to VeriSign as the people whose .org domain got exterminated need go and buy a new one (in most cases a more expensive one). Atleast a significant number of people would need to.
The exchange cited shows that Linux gods are no different from other humans....
The DNS is good at looking up strings. It's a lousy search engine.
The idea that one should try to "control" a name in all domains is silly - but happened BECAUSE people tried DNS as a search engine.
Personally, I type names into Google when I want to look them up, not my browser bar.
There are other angles of attack - see draft-klensin-dns-search, for instance - but currently that works.
AND Google gives me enough context to show me WHAT kind of "good vibrations" I'm headed for....
Yes, perhaps it would be better if we all had domain names without meaning and then relied on indexing services. Great, but how do I find that web site again? Bookmarking is great, but it only works on one computer. How can I tell you to check out www.643sda453fgasdf.org or would you rather I told you to check out www.xyz.org? Especially if xyz was a reasonable form of the name.
Final point, I hope I catch up with the mod of the poster as troll in m2. Tps12 makes a very good point, he isn't just stiring things.
Do domain names really have any value any more? If I'm looking for a company's website, say Widgets Ltd, I might try widgets.com but if that doesn't work I go Google and, hey presto, there they are. They might as well register no_one_here_but_us_chickens.com and I'd still find them.
Domain name speculators are just wasting their time and money. If I go to a site and find it's been replaced with porno or Viagra or whatever I just go away again. I don't suddenly decide that, actually, I wasn't looking for the new tarball of foo, I was looking for Grow-It-Bigger cream and here's my $20.
And, yes, I did have a point when I started this and now I don't. Public holiday in the UK, drink beer. Hooray!
Why don't you ask your friend the actual name of the site? Instead of a potentially confusing shorthand? When I order books online and then tell someone about it, I say "I got it from bn.com", not "I got it from bn". Why? Because logically the
Of course, the other solution is, do a Google search and avoid the whole issue. Hopefully your friend told something about why "gumby" was a cool site. Go look for it. You know the risk in trying to use a telephone number as a search handle. Why should it be different for domain names?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Real people, however, want meaningful domain names. If you have a hundred TLDs, many of them will overlap conceptually. Who can remember the difference between .biz and .bus, or .game and .toy? They might remember your carefully chosen second-level domain, but with generic TLDs they won't be able to get to it. Unless you register the name in all related TLDs. But isn't that what we were trying to get away from?
We have been attacked by multi-level marketers and spammers, and those people are damaging the system greatly. But we can't win by trying to beat them at their game -- by diluting the system so greatly that they can't play. That just ruins the game for everyone, and the MLMers and spammers will still be there anyway. I don't like ICANN, but I do think that well-defined, meaningful, sometimes regulated, and non-overlapping TLDs are essential. This makes ICANN all the worse, because something like it is essential, but done the wrong way (with the wrong people influencing it) it will again damage the system.
lame
About US$10/year (EUR12/year) to have any of .COM, .NET, or .ORG domains. I have had all my domains registered through them for about three years.
They even do DNS for you, if you don't have it. And their entire system is automated. I've never had to make a phone call, send a letter, or a FAX. Everything, and I mean everything is done through their web interface.
And just in case you wonder, I'm a U.S. citizen... the fact these guys are based out of France and charge me in Euros doesn't seem to make any difference. I've never had a problem with these guys. They're clued.
fifth sigma, inc.
Some kid who wasn't around when domain names were invented posts nonsense like "URLs aren't supposed to make sense." Then some undercaffeinated moderator votes it up. Now, who's being stupid?
Network hosts have conventionally borne the names of their organizations since the 1970s -- in fact, before the creation of TCP/IP. The reason the domain name system was created was to facilitate use of easily memorized, meaningful names rather than numeric addresses.
Read RFCs 597, 606, 608, 810, 952, and 1034 for a start.
If you really believe "you do not need a domain name to have a website," then by all means feel free to use numeric addresses. You won't need to pay a registrar one red cent, and no corporations will sue you for infringing their trademarks.
I've had my ".org" domain name for a decade now. That's well before Dupont and all of the other idiots jumped in and tried to turn the DNS into a second branch of the PTO, and registered 500 domains in a day, and we all had to start paying for something which used to be free.
.com, .net, .edu, and .mil were such that .org was the only place where a private individual was *allowed* to get a domain name at all!
.org were changed at this late date, so that I could no longer keep my domain name. I'm pretty sure that "slashdot.org" would be pretty pissed, as well.
.org, then limit two character domain names based on country codes to *citizens* of those countries, and limit .net to network infractructure (ISPs, NSPs, etc.), and .com to incorporated entities. Nobody else gets domain names, thanks!
When I got this domain, the rules on
I, for one, would be extremely pissed if the rules on
If you are going to do that to
Ut-oh... I guess it's now obvious that limiting domains by lexicography is a stupid thing. If you want to be a lexicographer, and you think you know better than the rest of us, by all means, start a search engine company or a portal site, and let people who agree with you use it and validate your judgement... or ignore you, if that's what their tastes dictate.
-- Terry
The problem with the domain system is that it is a huge, nearly flat namespace. Just adding new TLD's to the current system is a poor way of fixing its problems (although it was a much better idea back when Jon Postel first suggested it). No company with a .com is going to willingly give it
up now.
Do you think Nissan Motors is going to settle for "nissan.auto"? Or that the fellow they're trying to take nissan.com from is going to give it up for "nissan.name"? There's only one way to level the playing field: eliminate the current TLD's and force everyone (whether corporation, organization, or individual) to choose a new one from a reasonably large and comprehensive list.
There are various restictions that might rationalize the system even more (e.g. restrict each entity to a single 2nd-level name per TLD and use further levels to subdivide, e.g. "suvs.nissan.auto") but I'm not sure such regulation would be necessary (or desirable). But one thing for sure: there is too much vested interest in the current system for incremental changes to work.
So today a friend tells me of this great new site "gumby". I go to the web and look for "gumby.com" (because it sounded somewhat commercial). When that does not come up, I try for "gumby.net" and "gumby.org". You are now telling me that I will have to try "gumby.XXX" on the average of 50 more times (not counting bad typing) before I get the right "gumby"?
Or you could just ask your friend for the URL...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
global tlds - require some sort of evidence of being a global company (there are country codes for a reason)
You're telling me you want 200+ contries to agree to start spending huge amounts of money to validate the people registering stuff live in their countries?
Even ones that make tons of money selling their ccTLD as a defacto gTLD (niue, tuvalu, christmas islands (.nu,.tv,.cx))
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If only I had some mod points :P
(bleh, fucking 2 minute timeout)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
A co-worker of mine thought of this idea; it seems like a good view of how DNS should be.
DNS is best at providing a mapping from a static legal designators to a dynamic technical namespace. In our case, that means we are mapping from a legally-owned and recognized domain name to a potentially dynamic IP address.
The problem is that the legal referers, domain names, are valuable, since they are human-readable (e.g., example.com). This value causes all the fighting over them that we see today.
To resolve this, domain names not be human readable; they should be more like an IP address, except that it is static, can map to a dynamic address. That is, domain names could be, say, numbers only, e.g., "23598263596".
As to the problem of 'finding' a website, which is currently done by novices by simply typing "company.com", this is what directory services are for. Example of directory services are Google, or DMOZ, where your amount legal power does not equal the size of your presence. That is, just because you are large, you do not automatically get the first hit on Google for "yourname"; your 'site' has to be popular.
It is also important to note that directory services can provide multiple results for a name. DNS only provides one place to go to for "company.com". However, if looked up "company" in Google, you will see multiple results; from those results you can decide whether or not you might be ending up at the correct site. A good example of this is "whitehouse". "whitehouse.com", of course, is porn. But the first hit on Google is whitehouse.gov, and you can easily tell from the Google summary that whitehouse.com is porn.
Furthermore, this system also eliminates squatting, since the static legal addresses have little value. That is, there is no real value beteween "5982352569" and "2352356" as addresses.
Visit my website at www.leetzor.com!
Wow, that's really useful. Just as useful as:
Call me! My phone number is 523-555-3125!
When I want to find out, say, where I can train in kendo, I could start dialing phone numbers that spell out "KENDO" on the numberpad. That would get me exactly nowhere. I could, however, go to the phone book, and look at that. The phone book approach is far more likely to be successful.
Content-based oversight of domains is useless if not done right, and too costly to do right. Let's not do any of it at all, and rely on the phone books of the Internet to do the work for us. Furthermore, the phone book approach provides a built-in quality control- if one phone book puts dealers of Kawasaki Ninjas and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles under the Martial Arts section, word will get around, and their usage will decrease in favor of those phone books that manage to put the right things in the right places. There is no "Ministry of Directories" that makes sure that every directory of anything is correct. Quality control is gained through verification with other humans.
Google got to the top because their search results are remarkably good. If someone puts out better results, they'll go higher than Google. A central, condition-immune TLD registrar has no such incentive.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
[Unlike DNS,] LDAP is for searching through and accessing categorized directories.
But is there a popular free public LDAP server that covers the whole Internet? Or is LDAP designed primarily for use on a company LAN?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The problem, as some other posters have noted, is that DNS is couplng static legal identifiers with dynamic physical addresses while at the same time people are trying to use the legal identifiers as conceptual addresses.
This cannot work.
While directory services function moderately well at locating references to concepts, they don't do it REAL well. I went looking for HTMLView a few days ago and had to slog through pages of results that pointed to the wrong product that happened to have the same name. And most people are not experts at using search engines.
Maybe we need to consider Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project all over again. ie., we need something to allow entities on the Net to be conceptually identified and categorized so that people can put a name or concept in a search engine and find an INTELLIGENTLY ORGANIZED (unlike Google where the results are a hodgepodge of whatever the Web server operator put in his HTML) list that describes the entity in sufficient terms to determine WHAT KIND of entity it is and WHICH entity of that kind it is.
Then you hit the button and you get the legal address which has no more importance than "1055 Market Street" does (or wouldn't if we didn't live on a physical street) and IT takes you to 455.622.012.5 which only the routers care about.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Or you could just ask your friend for the URL...
Uniform Resource Locators were not designed to be easily pronounced in situations such as giving a URL over the radio or over the telephone. Canonical example: hotel tango tango papa colon slash slash Slashdot dot org. A natural language keyword system, such as what DNS has mutated into, produces better results for name spaces that are restricted by the phonotactics of a spoken natural language (go to Google.com, as in Barney Google, and type in Slashdot, all one word).
Will I retire or break 10K?
First, the cost isn't 6$ or $.25 per year. It's whatever it is one time, plus maybe a tiny recurring amount to pay for bandwidth used.
Second, the relationship between costs and prices is much less important than the relationship between markets and products. In the real world, some things are cash cows (high margin, low risk), some things are unavoidable overhead (warranty work and other contractual obligations). Everything else is in between.
Apply this thinking to Internet naming, and the answer starts to become clear. There should have been a premium TLD for corporate names. The names should have been sold outright or at least given long term leases. (Here's a thought - someone wants to buy a name, that names gets released into an ebay-like system where anyone can bid. After "n" days, the name goes to the highest bidder.) However, it's done, that TLD should be the "cash cow".
Other TLDs should address other markets - the small business owner, charities, schools, individuals - and each should tailor it's products and prices to suit that market. "EDU" does that now, I believe. All the others should too.
For example, in the "individual" TLD, registration might cost a quarter per year, but perhaps has a rule that the name given must identity an individual uniquely. If the name applies equally well to someone else, and that someone protests, then neither of person gets it. Make them both us something unique by adding location or other distinquishing info, and let the old name redirect to the original owner's new page for a short period. The short-term subscription model makes sense here, because people move and change, and a registry which uniquely identifies them would have to change with them.
The only problem is what to do with all that excess money. You know, somehow in the real world problems like that tend to sort themselves out.
Then I say your company would bankrupt pretty fast...
A more subtle distinction that it appears at first, IMHO.
-- Serge K. Keller
If you want to register a .ORG....you should need to be a non profit organization. The .Org registry should be operated in the same way as a non profit entity.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I think Gilmore's points about the key being a good organizational structure for the DNS system carries the day. In the current system, it does seem that, first, allowing companies to make too much money off DNS is inviting trouble, and second, the registration databases can't (and shouldn't try to) provide a service to eliminate cybersquatting.
I certainly don't think making domain names more expensive will help anything.
The cooling off period idea of Hall's was good, too.
However, I don't think that having a bunch more top level domains will solve cybersquatting either. In fact, I think there probably isn't a clean solution to cybersquatting.
perhaps openNIC could eventually find a better compromise than the current system, however (and perhaps not, who knows?)
-- bayle