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The Internet Society Will Manage .org

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the formerly-known-as dept.

ahpeterson writes "The ICANN board just decided to hand control of the .org domain over to the Internet Society. You can read more about their bid here. Whee, no more VeriSign in .org!"

14 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. My .org by Klerck · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does anyone want to explain what this would mean for my .org domain? I actually own several others, but is it going to move to a non-profit only kind of domain, or will they still be available for anyone?

    1. Re:My .org by garcia · · Score: 3, Interesting

      you better be able to. If VeriSign is going to continue to profit from it, why should we not be able to?

      I think they should have to give up 100% control of everything involved in the .org process, but that's me.

    2. Re:My .org by Soko · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Does anyone want to explain what this would mean for my .org domain? I actually own several others, but is it going to move to a non-profit only kind of domain, or will they still be available for anyone?

      A question I have - in the same vien as yours - is what will happen to the URL you use to get here - ./ itself - http://slatshdot.org. Snide remarks about profit aside, Slashdot is supposed to make money for VA Linux. If ISOC demands that .org is for non-profits only, will this domain be moved to .com, .info or somewhere else? Is this site enough about "a community" that ISOC will look the other way? Will Rob be forced to become what he hates and use the courts to retain the current domain name?

      Should be interesting to see what transpires.

      Soko

      --
      "Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
    3. Re:My .org by Kallahar · · Score: 4, Interesting

      point of information:

      slashdot has slashdot.com, slashdot.org, and slashdot.de, and slashdot.jp (in japanese!)

      slashdot.net is being squatted by the norwegians
      slashdot.info is owned by ZDNet which is offering tech news, arguably profiting off of slashdot's good name.

      Travis

  2. Verisign still in it by rczyzewski · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "VeriSign will continue to profit from .org as it owns a small interest in the company that will run the back end of the database for the Internet Society."

    Do you think Verisign is really out of it? I doubt it if they have a financial stake in the Internet Society's future decisions. I'll be curious how Verisign tries to slowly gain more and more authority in the background.

    1. Re:Verisign still in it by Conare · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Fighting to maintain over $10 million a year in revenue? Naaaah.
      Oops, my sarcasm is dripping again.

      --
      Stop Continental Drift! Reunite Gondwanaland!
  3. This could be a BAD thing.... by CSG_SurferDude · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This could be a bad thing considering that their current website (www.isoc.org) is currently slashdotted to death. One would hope that somebody in their purchasing department is actively ordering more bandwidth and servers to handle the long term load.

    --

    LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!

  4. Nintendo Trouble by Trinton+Azaleth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does this mean I can repurchase n64.org, the domain which Nintendo so rudely took away from me by sending their lawyers after me, back when I was 15??

    1. Re:Nintendo Trouble by Trinton+Azaleth · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Ok, that was vague. That details are as follows: back then I was a big fan of Nintendo, and paid using my own money to get the domain and have fun telling people how great the N64 was. I made a great site, and never got paid a dime for it. And I made it clear my site was not affiliated with Nintendo. So how did they repay me? They threatened to sue me unless I freely GAVE them my domain. I said no way, and sent letters back to their lawyers, considering my dad is a lawyer. Eventually they realize they couldn't TAKE my domain, since I registered my domain before they registered their trademark... so I decided to sell it to them for a rip off price of $50 because I was no longer interested in supporting Nintendo at that point. I was a non-profit individual having fun supporting a cool product. What did I get? Nothing but grief.

  5. The problem with ICANN... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...is that the members of the board are not elected. We're always babbling about democracy (or lack of it), and how our congressmen are paid by corporations to do their bidding.

    This is already happening with ICANN. Remember the Karl Auerbach incident?

    For all we know, this might just be a temporary measure, and that Verisign has already secured a deal which will go into effect in the future.

    Just something to think about...

    1. Re:The problem with ICANN... by karl.auerbach · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ICANN's so-called "reform" plan eliminates all vestiges of public participation in ICANN's decisionmaking processes. ICANN's board will probably never again have someone who represents the users of the net; it will be dominated by people who serve corporations who make money from users of the internet or who are trying to own the products of peoples' minds.

      My own term as director will end on December 15 of this year - I have no sucessor.

      As for ISOC/PIR - The actual awardee, PIR, didn't even exist as of a couple of weeks ago. In other words, ICANN awarded .org to an entity that technically didn't even apply for the job.

      I do not have faith in the organizational/business skills of PIR - although its board members have skills, I do not perceive that they have the kind of skills that will be needed to make sure that .org runs smoothly. In fact, my experience with the lack of skills of some of the people gives me great concern. And I do not see that there are adequate financial resources. In many respects, PIR will be little more than a thin shell around the actual operator, Afilias.

      One of ICANN's jobs is to create more competition in the domain name space. Afilias has already won a piece of the top-level-domain sweepstakes - it has .info. I do not see how giving .org to PIR/Afilias does anything but increase the concentration of DNS into the hands of a few operators; quite the opposite of increasing competition.

      And lest we forget - this transfer of .org is the "other shoe" of the deal privately brokered by ICANN's outside lawyer, Joe Sims, in which he gave .com to Verisign/NSI in perpetuity.

      Oh yeah, I voted against this. I liked the IMS proposal best. And I won't vote to give a TLD to anybody who already has one; nor would I vote for any entity in which ICANN directors or officers have a degree of control.

      By-the-way, I'm a member of ISOC and have been since before it was formed.

  6. VeriSign gone! by blurp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Maybe...
    "Whee, no more VeriSign in .org!"

    or maybe not...
    "VeriSign will continue to profit from .org as it owns a small interest in the company that will run the back end of the database for the Internet Society."

    Not that I'm a pessimist or anything...

  7. Re:so it's ISOC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The ISOC proposal is a shameless money-grab. They are contracting out the actual work to .info operator AFFILIAS (a privately held for profit company owned by - among others - Verisign) while grabbing a part of the revenues for whatever club activities they deem worthy.

    Thus addressing one of the principal problems that has been facing the IETF, the lack of funding for ISOC which amongst other things funds the indemnity insurance for the IESG and Working group chairs.

    This is the very same ISOC that got its bid approved by an evaluation comitee which judged principial Bind developer and internet pioneer Paul Vixie and his coworkers to be technically incompetent to run a registry

    Well there is no way I would trust Eric Allman to run something like hotmail and he wrote sendmail. The problem with Paul's bid was that he underestimated the difference between 99.9% reliable and 99.999% reliable.

    The large registries don't use BIND and have not for many years. There is a major difference between running an enterprise scale DNS node and a registry, not least the behavior of the registrars.

    Thing is that the average Internet user is willing to pay $6 per name to get ultra-high reliability DNS service. If the DNS goes down the Internet goes down. Paul's proposal to do the job for less just did not seem like much of a bargain.

  8. Afilias? by sjlutz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From Press Release
    Afilias Limited, a global domain name registry services provider and current registry operator of the .INFO top-level domain (TLD), will provide PIR with a full range of back-end registry services to support .ORG.

    Uhhh.. didn't Afilias has a boat load of problems when they launched .INFO?