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ICANN Eliminates Karl Auerbach's Seat
BrianWCarver writes "SiliconValley.com carries an AP report by Anick Jesdanun indicating that ICANN has given Karl Auerbach the boot by eliminating his seat as well as the four other publicly elected seats on ICANN's board. ICANN is the internet's key oversight body, managing the Top-Level Domains (TLDs). You may recall from this previous Slashdot story that Auerbach is the director who successfully sued ICANN to receive access to their records without having to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement. 'Though soon leaving the ICANN board, Auerbach vows to keep complaining. And he leaves with no regrets -- he'd do it again.' It'll now be up to organizations like ICANNWatch to keep an eye on ICANN for the public. Is that good enough?'"
It'll now be up to organizations like ICANNWatch to keep an eye on ICANN for the public. Is that good enough?'
Obviously not.
On the ground? On the table? Or will he just stand? I bet he finds this very uncomfortable.
... action from the last vestiges of elitism and arrogance that helped the Internet stay small and academic before the plaque of commercialism was allowed access in the early 90s.
Ahhh, the good ol' days, when the Internet was young, and closed to only the educated, and information was free to anyone who could pay tuition or get a grant/scholarship... all this open and free sharing of information, regardless of the IQ of the participant. I'm tellin' ya, we never should have let the stupid vote.
Dirty peasants!</sarcasm>
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Expect to see lots of good, firebreathing commentary on this at Farber's Interesting People mailing list. He usually has good things to say about public internet matters.
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
It'll now be up to organizations like ICANNWatch to keep an eye on ICANN for the public. Is that good enough?
No, I think it should be open sourced and made freely available under the GPL.
</zealot>
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
He's going to go to work for ICANNOT
Best Windows Freeware
#1. The story makes it seem as if the seats were removed because of the trouble he was causing them. If that is the case, why did they eliminate the other seats.
#2. How many "publically elected" seats are left? The story just says they eliminated 5 without elaborating.
#3. Other than through public election, how does one get a seat on ICANN?
I definitely think booting the publicly elected people is a Bad Thing. Monitoring by external organizations likely will not cut it. I have one question, though. What prevents us from ignoring ICANN when we feel like it and doing our own thing?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So, for those of us who don't know enough about this, what can we do to help get everything right with ICANN? Are there resources that might help us in writing a letter to our reps etc?
I never use domain names anyway. When I want to web surf (only thing the Internet's good for), I just type in random IP addresses and see what I get. It's completely random that I'm here now posting this. The bestiality porn has cost me a few jobs, but I've learned 3 new sexual positions and proudly own a shiny X10 camera.
Contact your political representative (in whatever country), and ask them to contact the US Department of Commerce to express your growing concerns that ICANN is not working in the best interests for everyone, and
perhaps in light of its tactics to silent critics whom are board of director members
by eliminating their position, perhaps the Dept of Commerce should have an inquiry
into the affairs of ICANN and its executive.
Why should I adhere to ICANN's decisions instead of supporting alternative DNS-Roots? ICANN turns further away from the public, they ought to lose more trust in consequence.
It proved to be yet another nice illustration of politics efficiency; they do nothing for their users (consumers, they think), but they manage to obfuscate anything related to them, to be sure that they can grab a big amount of cash and still look legitimate.
Now that we got the long awaited new TLDs, what are the next key thing they're waiting to screwup?
have you been defaced today?
Karl being on the board was a black eye for them as he kept trying to reform them and trying to assert the rights of the public and make them accountable. The last straw was Karl successfully suing them.
They had to get rid of Karl and in one stroke, they got rid of Karl and the public input via the other elected members.
Fight Spammers!
Nobody knows what the hell ICANN is doing. In all honesty though, the whole thing is kind of a joke. The only reason ICANN has any control is because the DNS admins of the world point to their blessed root servers. If we were to all decide one day to point to another set of servers it would make ICANN, Network Solutions.. err... Verisign, etc. completely irrelevent. So when we hear people bitch we need to take it with a grain of salt. We can fix it, it's just nobody wants to rock the boat.
ICANN's At Large Membership is a new way to participate in the ICANN process. The At Large Members will help select Directors to the ICANN Board. The At Large election process will give individual members of Internet communities worldwide a voice in the selection of policymakers to oversee the critical Internet resources entrusted to ICANN's technical coordination process. The selected At Large Directors will help the ICANN Board be representative of (and accountable to) the vast diversity of the worldwide Internet.
How was ICANN permitted to make this change to the charter that was granted to them by the government? It's this kind of crap that, if you raise your voice enough, can be changed by your representatives in Washington and by regulatory agencies who are open to public comment during policy making. It's also fertile ground for a lawsuit (albiet a money-losing one).
My wife gives me so much grief when I forget and leave the seat up on theCANN, how could anyone get away with removing them completely!
come on fhqwhgads
Did someone sell the Internet to Enron or something? Seriously, I cannot believe that the rest of the world has not demanded that the US hand over control of ICANN to the UN. At least that way we can be screwed over by multi-lateral action instead of these pre-emptive strikes.
The Internet is the primary storage place for all information contained in the world, and largely serves as a global resource onto which a price simply cannot be placed.
b ylaws.html
Therefore, I and many other feel that the actions of those on the executive board of ICANN must be closely monitored. Anyone and everyone who's ever signed onto AOL or Prodigy or even MSN has a stake in these events.
I've attached below a list of some sites to gleam information from about the latest happenings (and scandals) related to ICANN.
- http://www.icannwatch.org/
- http://www.icannwatch.com/
- http://www.atlargestudy.org/index.html
- And, for reference, http://www.domainhandbook.com/archives/comp-icann
Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S., Canada, B3H 3J5
What bothers me most about this is not the moves ICANN has made. It's not that they've booted the sources of public oversight off.
What bothers me most is, since it's been pretty clear all along they have no concern for integrity of the net or public good online, and they never felt the need to keep us from knowing that, what the heck is it they're getting ready to do that they don't want us o know about? Paranoid, yes, but I really don't see why they would have gone to so much trouble over this unless they have something up their sleeve.
They gave him the TLD .bye
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
"Publicly elected Karl Auerbach, suspected terrorist sympathiser, is booted from the ICANN board. His insubordination was seen as counter productive in the war on terrorism by the other self-appointed members of the board. One member said, 'Mr. Auerbach was a subversive who was sympathetic to freedom loving people - not a patriot. We will not allow these neo-commies the ability to destroy everything I, I mean we, have built. He may have been elected by the public, but the public doesn't know what we know and we know lots of stuff that would scare the public but we aren't to say what it is cause it's really scary.'"
LoRider
Let's hope Auerbach left the plans for the DNS server loaded in the memory buffer of a brave astromech droid.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
``Karl's a conundrum,'' ICANN Chairman Vint Cerf added.
Why should they care about what religion he is if he's capable of the job?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
ICANN *must* be brought under government oversight, immidiately. They're essentially running a dictatorship, doing things how they want, not disclosing information, not allowing their own to see their inner workings, and eliminating the public voice.
This needs to be stopped immidiately...
Auerbach's current work station is set up more for functionality than for show. Orange, yellow and green Ethernet cables bind his traffic routers, monitors, laptops and desktop computers, some operating with the cover opened.
What's wrong with that -- isn't that how most of us have things set up?
Sounds good. Kinda like ENRON, and the like.
by painting him as a "loose cannon" and "politically naive" is scurrilous. A false binary-opposition is constructed: on the one side the claims of the ICANN monopolists that they are responsible, sober and politically sophisticated and on the other the picture of Auerbach the radical.
The fact is that the ICANN board tried to restrict information that ought to be available to the public let alone an elected board member, the courts found that this was wrong and then the buggers decide to kick him off the board.
Let's get these people under control. It's our friggin internet subsidized with our taxes, populated with our webpages.
What prevents us from ignoring ICANN when we feel like it and doing our own thing?
...)
The need for unique identifiers.
How do you do an internet if:
- A particular IP address may map to different hosts. (Packets addressed to 64.28.67.150 go to www.slashdot.org according to ICANN, a Microsoft server according to Joe's Nameservice and Grill, the US Army Recruiter according to the MIL BGP servers, and the local kindergarden according to a router configured by a junior high student. Which authority - and thus which route - do you think a commercial ISP (PAID to deliver packets) will honor?)
- A particular domain name may map to different organizations. (joe_user@slashdot.org may go to joe at VALinux, joe at Microsoft world headquarters, joe at the draft board, joe at the local kindergarden,
- A particular protocol number may specify different protocols. (WHICH IPV4 are you talking about? Which SMTP? Which NFS?)
- A "well known port" may perform different functions. (Imagine a new Microsoft OS putting a webserver up on port 414, or whatever port is used for an important service in the latest competing OS, and configuring the next release of Internet Explorer to try that port first. No need to "embrace" and "extend" before getting to "extinguish".)
and so on, depending on which organization the owner of any particular machine is affiliated with?
The answer is: You don't. (It's like the street addresses, state names, and personal names being a matter of political debate and faction-fighting - while someone's trying to send you a letter.)
Assigning a unique name or number is an indivisible transaction. In the absense of a solution to the "distributed update" problem you HAVE to do that with a single-point mechanism - an "authority". The best solution yet found is delegation - which is what ICANN does with domain naming and selling blocks of IP numbers.
Which brings up the question: Why are domain names handled by ICANN, rather than the trademark/servicemark section of the Patent and Trademark office?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
ICANN is now causing so much damage (technical and otherwise) to the future of the Internet, hopefully some force will come along and effectively destroy this organization. I'm not calling for any lives lost, but hopefully some reputations can be destroyed. Time to put Mr. Lynn on the streets and make him eat dog food.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
1) It's not ICANN's job to stop ping/smurf attacks.
;)
The internet was nearly brought to it's knees.. except basically nobody noticed. It was a massive attack and it had little overall effect.
The internet routes around problems. If icann goes too far, the world will find a way to ignore them.
that is, unless major isp's start doing transparent proxying on dns
No, Al-Qaeda would be to blame. ICANN would be guilty of negligence but not responsible for the activity.
You might as well say that whateverthehell airline it is whose plane was crashed into the WTC is wholly responsible for the attack, but they're not the ones who seized the planes and crashed them into the buildings.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Some of us were skeptical about the concept at the beginning, but the immense practicality of a common naming system compared to
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
ICANN's like Section 1, always trying to escape the essential Oversight.
These guys are all fucking crooks. Owned by corporate interests. They've shut out the public from participating in electing the board members -- ALL MEMBERS SHOULD BE ELECTED. If businesses want to have their interests represented, their executives can vote. These crooks have taken all accountability to the public out of the equation. Its no different than taxation without representation.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
They tried very hard to eliminate the publicly elected seats before the election, and it was pretty clear when Karl managed to get elected anyway that they didn't want him there and were going to try to prevent any "representative of the public" from interfering. While Karl is definitely on the cantankerous side, that had a lot to do with why *he* got elected - it was obvious before the election that ICANN was trying to railroad the public, and the public responded by electing a representative who was not only articulate and aggressive but also very clearly committed to trying to get ICANN to behave properly, work openly, and make policies that were responsive to the public. He started off his term as pretty much the lone member of The Opposition, with his major support base being the people that the rest of ICANN wanted to ignore - it's a tough spot for someone who's really good at politics.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well, maybe it is time to move over to OpenNIC. It is pretty small, but since the Titanic seems to have hit the iceberg, I think it is time to make a break for the lifeboats.
:P).
I joined and set up my primary NS to resolve their domains for me, as well as the normal ones. Took about 15 minutes to get working (forgot the forwarders, so it took 10 minutes longer than expected
Yeah, I know; I have heard it all before. "But nobody else uses it, so it's worthless!". Not. Everything, and I mean EVERY DAMN THING starts out SMALL. That's not a reason to ignore it or otherwise dismiss it out-of-hand. It's even democratic right out of the box, so it is exactly what *we* want it to be.
Join it now. If you are an ISP, set it up for your customers. Help out. Set it up for your friends and family members. Make it a REAL alternative to the monopolized mess that the US Gov't has made of the current DNS system.
Don't argue. Just do it. It CANNOT HURT!
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
There have been some recent proposals saying that the ITU should be in charge - as somebody who's been in the telecom business for 25 years, I view them as better than ICANN, because some of them are engineers and because they're a slow bureaucratic multilateral committee rather than a cabal, but they're still the kind o f bureaucratic telecom who brought you E.164 names, X.25 as their best example of data networking, and OSI protocols and high European telecom settlement costs, and the best thing about them has been that you could usually ignore them and use whatever interesting tools came out of the vendor and developer community...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Since they mentioned it -- what did Karl find in the records he had to try so hard to get? I was expecting some sort of smoking gun the way the rest of the board was fighting him. Or were they just being stubborn to get Karl to use his time and effort getting something of no great importance?
As far as the DNS DDOS attack goes, the relationship between ICANN and the root servers is pretty fluid - it doesn't own or control them, though the Feds fund some of them, and it's more concerned with the master databases of who owns what names than the implementation issues of what IP address currently is attached to the names. Remember, ICANN are not engineers - they're intellectual property policy wonks. ICANN does encourage the root servers and the registries and registrars to follow security / reliability standards, and the recent DDOS attack means that there'll be some changes in the way things are run. There's an RFC 2870 on Root Name Server Operational Requirements, so if you've got opinions on how they can do a better job, go Comment.
ICANN's work on the top-level domains deserves mixed reviews. Moving slowly is usually ok; the big reasons for expanding the space are "because it gives us more cool names to sell", and one of the big reasons for going slowly is that you can only sell each TLD once, so you'd better get it right. Unfortunately, their definitions of getting it right strongly involve letting them stay in control, and are biased against any experimentation except along very narrow lines that they can stay in control of. But the IETF Ad-Hoc committee couldn't crack the political layer either. One thing both groups did right is pick a bunch of boring TLD names for the first batch, because they're going to make mistakes and discover unexpected problems in the first batch or two, and it's much better to mess up the market for .MUSEUM or .FIRM which nobody cares too much about than to mess up commercially valuable names like .INC or .LTD or .SEX or anything that overlaps with the voice telephone business.
IPv6 is Not ICANN's Job. It's the industry's, and the carriers', and Cisco's. ICANN does have the responsibility for coordinating the root servers' transition to support for IPv6 name lookups, and for making sure the Reverse DNS Lookup space (today's 1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa PTR queries) gets managed correctly, though the standards work is probably the IETF's job, or maybe ISOC's. The one thing they've done in the IPv6 space that was Blatantly Evil (but probably reversable) was to claim that all your address bits are belong to them and set an unacceptably high price for the smallest routable address block. This not only delays widespread implementation until a major carrier either decides to pay them or ignore them, it nails down some assumptions about the shape of the hierarchy and organizational relationships that may be hard to repair, and increases the brittleness of the net without obviously benefitting the routing table situation (which is probably a more important IPv6 issue than the supply of address bits.) This delay gives them more time to try to finish grabbing power before IPv6's virtually-unlimited address space escapes from their ability to steal it from the world and sell it, but it also gives the industry more time to figure out what we're going to do with IPv6 and how to manage it, which is not a Bad Thing - there's a lot we really need to learn about how to use it before it's ready to replace IPv4.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you take a look at ICANN's homepage you will see a number of references to new and proposed bylaws for the organization. The first proposal looks to have surfaced on Oct 2 of this year. I'm guessing what's happened recently is that ICANN voted to adopt the proposals and that's why Allerbach and the rest of the 'At Large' directors are out of a job. It's a guess, but it fits the available facts. But this certainly isn't really new information, not unless you count proposals posted over three weeks ago as new. Allerbach likely knew this was coming, it wasn't just some 'out of the blue' move from ICANN.
Reading through the proposals I note that they suggest eliminating a number of directorships, not just the At Large directors. The proposals call for shifting the functions of the At Large directors to an At Large advisory committee and a Manager of Public Participation. There are a bunch of other suggestions on reform, et. al. in the documents, feel free to have a look on your own if you're interested in the nuts and bolts of the ICANN organizational process.
Finally, I don't personally know Allerbach and I can't say one way or the other if his departure from the ICANN Board of Directors is appropriate or not. He may be a stark raving nutcase for all I know, or he may be the last voice of reason and integrity in the organization, who knows? Not me. I can however guarantee that suing the organization, regardless of the reasons he did so, was unlikely to win him any friends on the board. After that, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone that ICANN wants to close-up the ranks of their Board of Directors and avoid this type of public embarrassment in the future. But I think it's inaccurate to claim that ICANN forced him out, there's nothing to substantiate that.
Whatever the reasons, I wish him luck in the future and hope that he will continue his efforts to keep ICANN accountable for their policies and actions and keep the process open to public comment and criticism. God knows they need someone to hold them accountable.
What about handing over all naming, TLD, root server and registration services to the top comp. sci. universities in the world? A huge step, but logical if you think about it.
For one, universities are all connected to a huge backbone and the technical knowhow is there too. The money coming in from domain/ip registration would come in handy to the universities, too. Hell, even if they where to make a profit, I wouldn't care that much, as long as it gets pumped back into education.
But just as important is that universities want and need a free flow of information. Transparancy is what they're about, if only because of the historical precedents of scientific research.
Sure, this would be a huge undertaking to set up, but there are even more benefits here: the fact that more dns servers are around mean the internet will be what it has always meant to be. Decentralised in a big way, and if a top uni comes up, hell, put it in the loop. The pieces of pie get thinner, but that's the whole point: this pie is not for consumption.
Or am I missing something here?
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
On the other hand, I mostly stopped bitching about bureaucrats using this terminology when I built a lab a couple of years ago - we had $900 desks, with $400 PCs on them, so if the Furniture Mafia are getting more of the money, they can decide which stuff gets the title. (Of course, the reason we had $900 desks and $1500 racks that arrived six months and eight procurement review meetings after we started the project instead of $100 desks and $200 Metro shelves that the furniture store on the next block said they could deliver on Tuesday was because the Building Furniture Mafia told us that furniture procurement was An Offer We Couldn't Refuse, and that we would only be allowed to install racks that were Officially Earthquake-Bolted to the floor, and the only way to get Official Earthquake-Bolting was to order furniture from people the Building Furniture Mafia had deals with...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hello everyone - I'm currently in Shanghai at the ICANN meeting and connectivity is somewhat limited so I am not able to read and respond to all the comments in this thread.
The elimination of my board seat is not new news - ICANN repudated the concept that the right to govern derives from the consent of the governed several months ago in the meeting in Accra, Ghana.
ICANN's so-called "reform" plan essentially estalblishes an oligarchy in which a small group gets to say what is best for you and me without letting us cast votes to indicate whether we agree with those decisions.
ICANN is also retrenching its committment to a board-of-directors that evades its duty to oversee the behaviour and actions of the corporation's management. (For example, one of the things that was uncovered in the course of my lawsuit was that ICANN's Audit committee never bothered to look at ICANN's records but simply accepted whatever the corporation management chose to show it. Sounds like Enron and Arthur Andersen doesn't it?)
Anyway, the end of my term is somewhat uncertain - the annual meeting - being held Dec 14 and 15 in Amsterdam, is the formal end of my term. However, there are noises in ICANN about extending terms. That has me bothered as I do not feel comfortable with this.
Regards from Shanghai,
--karl--
ICANN looks after 3 things:
.cx may change a nameserver name, so to be completely up to date with the primary root server, grab a new copy daily. But frankly, you could use last years copy of the file and not notice.
1) Protocol numbers.
2) IP addresses
3) Domain names.
1 + 2 are autonomous. If ICANN were tovanish tomorrow, nothing bad would happen; they're fine, ignore the,
3) ICANN has an exclusive contract with the DoC to edit the Internet DNS root zone. Technically, they "suggest changes" to the DoC; they cannot do anything they want.
The extent of this though, is it only affects you if you happen to use the 13 root servers operated under aegis of the DoC. Last weeks attack that knocked, what? - half of them off the air is one more reason why we as users and administrators should end out dependance on the legacy root servers.
How?
Just primary the root zone for yourself. You really want to depend of somebody else for a 100K file that if it's not there the entire known internet ceases to exist do you?
Here's the file you need:
ftp://rs.internic.net/domain/
Dat's it. The whole enchilada. That's what all the fuss is about and that is all those 13 precious servers to is serve up that file. Grab a copy yourself and use it.
These are subtle changes every day. Lithuania may get a new secondary or
If you're using windows you may already have the ability to run your own nameservers on your box. If it's not built in, go grab a copy of BIND-PE (NT) or BIND-LE (W9x). If you're using unix, just declare yourself primary for "." or secondary the root zone from your favorite root zone publisher.
Now you don't care what happens to the 13 legacy root servers. Or ICANN.
Need Mercedes parts ?
He's never seemed very cantankerous to me. He'a about as cantankerous in this context as any of us would be when faced with horrific and abject stupidity. I thought he's shown remarkable restraint so far frankly.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Usenet needs unique identifiers too. Compare and contrast the differences between expansion of the DNS namespace and the Usenet namespace.
Hint: they're both messy and ugly, but one works.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Nameservers are:
e jac.palo-alto.ca.us.
p2.cavebear.com.
ns1.vrx.net.
ns2.vrx.net.
m
Need Mercedes parts ?
Thanks for your hard work.
Keep kicking butt up there at ICANN.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The Department of Commerce has oversight.
They're utterly the wrong people to be doing this. Unless you count being inept and corrupt as attributes you want to have for an organization that oversees the Internet DNS.
IBM alone spends $30M a year lobbying for no new tlds. Guess where that goes.
Follow the money.
Need Mercedes parts ?
> accountable capitalist corporation
*blink*
A corporation is accountable to no one but its
shareholders -- and the accountants have helped
the executives make a mockery of even that
constraint. But even in theory, a corporation is
never accountable to the public, which is what
the organization that manages namespaces must be.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
What dirt were you able to dig up in the short time that you had access to the records?
ICANN is a non-profit public benefit corporation. Quite different rules. This was one of the major points that let Auerbach win his case and got the judge mad at ICANN.
They're supposed to be open!
If you think mismanagement under U.S. oversight is bad, I cringe thinking of how screwed up the Internet would be under UN management.
Well well well... Good old ICORRUPT axing public seats and generally stacking the deck so as to have no outside influce.
Nothing like a good, old-fashioned, high-tech star chamber!
Ya, they need to be totally dissolved, and a new body put in place with rules strictly defined BEFORE any members are put in place, with some basic charter principles that can't be changed.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
ICANN's behaviour has several of the normal danger signs associated with illegal financial activities;
/budget, like an accounting firm / law firm, that in theory should act as "watch dogs" have strong "conflicts of interest" regarding their "watch dog" role.
1. Denying and obstructing peoples access to financial records. What makes this even more extreme is that ICANN tried to deny and obstruct a _board member/director_ to this information. Clearly illegal.
2. The elimination of all internal opposition. "Opposition" meaning people who tries to do their job according to the law.
3. Usually when you have the above danger signal, you will also find, that those "third parties" that oversees the financial records
Seen from the outside, it looks like that ICANN is spinning out of control, and that no-one is trying to stop the mess.
A financial "crash" and a scandal would not be an unlikely outcome.
when you work for an organization named "I CAN", how can you not expect to be canned? he was forewarned. it was written in all-caps. not in the fine print.
extension of the real world. It is a way of extending presence globally.
Now, with that in mind, we have a kind of Virtual Estate rather than Real Estate. The addresses are virtual and, at this time, under control of a corporate entity. Is the public to have no representation in this new land?
We need to make sure that the taxes levied by this controlling entity be used for maintenance. Such maintenance should include root servers for DNS, the DNS lists themselves, administrative tasks, domain name arbitration, security for the DNS system and maybe even some infrastructure.
Probably should make it a United Nations venture.
This getting rid of the public overseers at ICANN is just an indication that things are going the other way - fast.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
In the days when the internet was expensive and not everyone was on it it probably wouldn't be possible to send stuff directly from server A to server B, you'd have to go through servers C-F to do it. As the internet became cheaper and more and more people got onto it, it became more and more common for stuff to go directly from A to B. A bang path encoded the route that would be taken to go from A to B via C-F. However, most of the time they wouldn't be calculated by the user, you'd send all your mail to a smart host, which would use a program like pathalias which would work out the best way to route stuff based upon a huge database of links.
Because of this, it wasn't unusual to see bang paths with dotted names in them, and it wasn't ususual to use non-dotted names without bang paths.
It's about gross mismanagement, ineffectiveness, waste of money, unaccountability, corruption, plainly stupid moves and much more. The U.S. government also has many of these attributes, but the U.N. is much worse. Lesser of two evils.
The Internet was invented by the US military and is now overseen by the US government. Other countries are allowed to play in the sandbox without predjudice, free of political concerns (note, the Axis of Evil tld's weren't delisted). Despite ICANN's ineptitude, the thing's run pretty well so far.
So, what grounds does 'the rest of the world' have to 'demand that the US hand over control of ICANN'?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Since .su predates ICANN by more than a decade, I doubt they were thinking very much about that:
As for whether .su should be shut down, you won't get any argument from me there. Give them a couple of years to migrate, and then shut the TLD down.
/Styx
As one of the people who voted in the one public election that ICANN held, I'm absolutely disgusted to see them entirely ditch the electoral process here. They have effectively wasted the time of everyone like myself who tried, in our small way, to have some voice in how the public network is run. 5 public positions is a minority but is still a way to have some input into the process; now everyone who contributed to that election is completely disenfranchised, and only the back room dealers are running the show.
I don't write my congressman for every thing that shows up on /., but I think I will on this one. This is blatant disregard for the democratic principles that the U.S. and many of the other nations of the world represent. It should not be allowed to stand.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I'm dismayed by the growing number of alternative (fake, incompatible) root servers such as OpenNIC and AlterNIC that are springing up these days. I get a continuous flood of spam trying to sell me domains in non-existent TLDs, or, rather, TLDs that DO exist, but only in one particular alternative root. You and I know better than to fall for these deceptive scans, but when an average person gets an e-mail saying "Buy an exciting .sex or .xxx domain today for just $199.95!" they won't know that their exciting new domain purchase will be inaccessible to 99.999% of Internet users. You might think that this kind of practice borders on fraud; I think that it is fraud.
.org part is known as a Top Level Domain, or TLD. So-called "TLD registry" organizations house online databases that contain information about the domain names in that TLD. The .org registry database, for example, contains the Internet whereabouts - or IP address - of icann.org. So in trying to find the Internet address of icann.org your computer must first find the .org registry database. How is this done?
.com, .org, etc. and the 244 country-specific registries such as .fr (France), .cn (China), etc. This is critical information. If the information is not 100% correct or if it is ambiguous, it might not be possible to locate a key registry on the Internet. In DNS parlance, the information must be unique and authentic. Let us look at how this information is used.
.org registry - remember, it had copied that information from a root server beforehand - so it forwards the request over to the .org registry to find the IP address of icann.org. This answer is forwarded back to the user's computer. And we're done. It's that simple! The domain name icann.org has been "resolved"!
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Let me tell you why I think that OpenNIC and similar entities are a bad and dangerous idea.
Think of the phone system . . . when you dial a number, it rings at a particular location because there is a central numbering plan that ensures that each telephone number is unique. The DNS works in a similar way. If telephone numbers or domain names were not globally unique, phone calls or e-mail intended for one person might go to someone else with the same number or domain name. Without uniqueness, both systems would be unpredictable and therefore unreliable.
Ensuring predictable results from any place on the Internet is called "universal resolvability." It is a critical design feature of the DNS, one that makes the Internet the helpful, global resource that it is today. Without it, the same domain name might map to different Internet locations under different circumstances, which would only cause confusion.
When you send an e-mail to your Aunt Sally, do you care who receives it?
Do you care if it goes to your Uncle Juan instead? Wait a minute...do you have an Uncle Juan? Then whose Uncle Juan received it? Do you care if it reaches Aunt Sally if you send it from work but my Uncle Juan if you send it from home?
Of course you care who receives it . . . that's why you wrote it in the first place. Whether you're doing business or sending personal correspondence, you want to be certain that your message gets to the intended addressee.
If at any point the DNS must make a choice between two identical domain names with different IP addresses, the DNS would not function. It would not know how to resolve the domain name. When a DNS computer queries another computer and asks, "are you the intended recipient of this message?", "yes" and "no" are acceptable answers, but "maybe" is not.
This is where ICANN comes in . . . ICANN is responsible for managing and coordinating the DNS to ensure universal resolvability.
ICANN is the global, non-profit, private-sector coordinating body acting in the public interest. ICANN ensures that the DNS continues to function effectively - by overseeing the distribution of unique numeric IP addresses and domain names. Among its other responsibilities, ICANN oversees the processes and systems that ensure that each domain name maps to the correct IP address.
Behind the scenes, the story becomes a little more complicated.
In an Internet address - such as icann.org - the
At the heart of the DNS are 13 special computers, called root servers. They are coordinated by ICANN and are distributed around the world. All 13 contain the same vital information - this is to spread the workload and back each other up.
Why are these root servers so important? The root servers contain the IP addresses of all the TLD registries - both the global registries such as
Scattered across the Internet are thousands of computers - called "Domain Name Resolvers" or just plain "resolvers" - that routinely cache the information they receive from queries to the root servers. These resolvers are located strategically with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or institutional networks. They are used to respond to a user's request to resolve a domain name - that is, to find the corresponding IP address.
So what happens to a user's request to reach our familiar friend at icann.org? The request is forwarded to a local resolver. The resolver splits the request into its component parts. It knows where to find the
Why do we need the resolvers? Why not use the root servers directly? After all, they contain essentially the same information. The answer is for reasons of performance. The root servers could not handle hundreds of billions of requests a day! It would slow users down.
It is important to remember the central and critical role played by the root servers that store information about the unique, authoritative root. Confusion would result if there were two TLDs with the same name: which one did the user intend? The beauty of the Internet architecture is that it ensures there is a unique, authoritative root, so that there is no chance of ambiguity.
Anyone can create a root system similar to the unique authoritative root managed by ICANN. Many people and entities have. Some of these are purely private (inside a single corporation, for example) and are insulated from having any effect on the DNS. Some, however, overlap the authoritative global DNS root by incorporating the unique, authoritative root information, and then adding new pseudo-TLDs that have not resulted from the consensus-driven process by which official new TLDs are created through ICANN. The alternate root operators persuade some users to have their resolvers "point" to their alternate root instead of the authoritative root. Others (New.net is a recent example) also create browser plug-ins and other software workarounds to accomplish similar effects. The one uniform fact about all these efforts is that these pseudo-TLDs are not included in the authoritative root managed by ICANN and, thus, are not resolvable by the vast majority of Internet users.
There are many potential problems caused by these unofficial, alternate root efforts to exploit the stability and reach of the authoritative root. These efforts are often promoted by those unwilling to abide by the consensus policies established by the Internet community, policies designed to ensure the continued stability and utility of the DNS.
For example:
First, the names of some of these pseudo-TLDs could overlap TLD names in the authoritative root or those that appear in other alternate roots. Our familiar friend icann.org could appear in two different roots. Your e-mail to Aunt Sally could end up with my Uncle Juan.
Second, the unknowing users might not be linked to one of these alternate roots and not be able to reach these pseudo-TLD addresses at all. Your e-mail to Aunt Sally could end up as a dead-letter.
Third, those purchasing domain names in these pseudo-TLDs may not be aware of these and other consequences of the lack of universal resolvability. Or they may be under the impression that they are experiencing universal resolvability when in fact they are not. They may be very upset to learn that the names they registered are also being used by others, or that a new TLD in the authoritative root will not include those names.
These problems are not significant so long as these alternate roots remain very small, that is, house few domain names with little potential for conflict. But if they should ever attract many users, the problems would become much more serious, and could affect the stability and reliability of the DNS itself. Users would lose confidence in the utility of the Internet.
ICANN's mission is to protect and preserve the stability, integrity and utility - on behalf of the global Internet community - of the DNS and the authoritative root ICANN was established to manage. ICANN has no role to play with alternate roots so long as these and other analogous efforts do not create instabilities in the DNS or otherwise impair the stability of the authoritative root. But ICANN does have a role to play in educating and informing about threats to the Internet's reliability and stability.
ICANN is a consensus development body for the global Internet community, and its focus is the development of consensus policies relating to the single authoritative root and the DNS. These policies include those that allow the orderly introduction of new TLDs.
There are those-including operators of commercialized alternate roots-who pursue unilateral actions outside the ICANN consensus-development process. Many hope to circumvent these processes by claiming to establish some prior right to a top-level domain name. ICANN, however, recognizes no such prior claim. ICANN will continue to reflect the public policy consensus of the global Internet community over the private claims of the few who try to bypass this consensus.
In Short . . . . .
Just as there is a single root for telephone numbers internationally, there must be a single authoritative root for the Internet, administered in the public interest. OpenNIC is a serious threat to the future survivability of the Internet.