More About The .org Reassignment

Joel Rowbottom writes: "After ICANN 'awarded' ISOC with the running of .ORG in the Draft Staff Report, public comments regarding the process are starting to come out of the woodwork. Eric Brunner-Williams has commented on the flawed scoring and ICANN allegedly using the process to financially shore up ISOC and Afilias; the dotORG Foundation have posted some comments and questions (quote: 'we are perplexed by the Academic CIO Team's rating of our bid's technology as marginal'); Carl Malamud has posted the IMS/ISC response; and Organic have posted a rather damning indictment of the process as well (disclaimer: I work for Organic Names). For the $27,000 it cost each bidder to 'participate' (and that's just the entry fee), we'd have expected a little more professionalism than just getting some 'free' t-shirts! Comment to ICANN today org-eval@icann.org and make a difference."

Comments

Re:Will This ever end

[Anonymous Coward]

"why doesnt someone actually get their butt in gear and do something?"

You mean somebody else, right?

Why don't YOU get YOUR OWN ASS IN GEAR and do something?

Maybe whining on /. will fix it, right?

Write/call/fax your congresscritters, tell your friends, start a website, whatever.

If you really give a shit about icann & .org it's YOUR problem. Quit complaining and help.

Armchair quaterbacks, backseat drivers, .....damn

Can someone answer a simple question for me?

[jfedor]

After all those reassignments and reorganizations, will they let me keep my .org domain if I'm not a non-profit organization (I'm not a for profit organization either)?

Has it been decided yet? What if I paid for many years in advance?

Thanks.

-jfedor

Re:Can someone answer a simple question for me?

[karl.auerbach]

At the March 2002 ICANN board meeting in Accra (Ghana) there was a resololution about .org. My notes might help answer your question. (See http://www.cavebear.com/icann-board/diary/march-14 -2002.htm [You'll need to search for ".org"]):

I made it clear that I felt that .org should remain an open TLD, that no conditions be placed on those who wish to enter new names into .org or to renew existing names. I would have preferred that this policy be written directly into the resolution. However, board appeared to agree that rather than taking the time to amend the resolution that the board express its sense that ICANN management follow that expressed policy. We will soon find out whether ICANN's management follows that expression.

And ICANN's "staff" would never try to do something behind the back the members of its Board of Directors would they?

What will it take?

[unsinged int]

Anyone who pays attention to this stuff has to know by now that ICANN is seriously flawed. What's it going to take for a large number of people (or just a few very recognizable and important ones) to ditch them and go with something like OpenNIC?

We really don't need ICANN. Get rid of it, please.

Full coverage of this issue at ICANNWatch.org

[Froomkin]

You will find full coverage of the .org issue at ICANNWatch.org. My personal take on what happened is in essays titled Old Internet Thinking RIP and ICANN to Give .org to ISOC: Insiders Win Again?. And then there's the .org song, It had to be you.

Or you can browse the whole ICANNWatch .org archive.

Re:This is probably a really stupid question

[The_Guv'na]

The DNS system is basically a phone directory for the internet. It takes a domain name and spits back an IP number.

What prevents somebody from starting their own TLD and just claiming it for use?

The 8 [I think, or however many there are] big fat hot root servers sitting around the world at various hush-hush locations, the big hard doors they're hidden behind, and the fact that you are not authorised to go and fiddle with them.

Are there laws? Not exactly, AFAIK, but see above.

Trust issues? Yeah, we could never trust people to just make up new TLDs whenever they wanted. Oh, and we don't trust ICANN.

Or is it just that everyone's DNS server would filter out/be incompatable with it? To take a effect across the internet, it would have to be introduced by the root servers, then over the next few hours it would filter down to all the other DNS servers. They could be at ISP's, Uni's, or wherever.

With all this trouble that ICANN('T?) seems to cause, I guess my real question is, who needs them? We do, the same way we need governments. The DNS servers we use [that usually means the ones owned by our ISP's] update their info from the root servers. They could just as easily set their servers to update from somewhere like OpenNIC as well as the usual servers, but generally speaking, they just don't.

Ali

Think again

[0x0d0a]

So I'd almost call this post a troll, but it has a point -- that maybe commercial types would do a better job.

However, you're missing one thing -- the informal group of volunteers and engineers that produced and have kept much of the administrative side of the Internet going for thirty years now *are* the open source/volunteer types that you're bashing so much. As a matter of fact, the commercial types are the untested ones, not the volunteer engineers.