Karl Auerbach Speaks Out on ICANN

richard koman writes "Here's an interview I did with Karl Auerbach about ICANN in the aftermath of their eliminating public board members. 'October's distributed, denial-of-service attack against the domain name system--the most serious yet, in which seven of the thirteen DNS roots were cut off from the Internet--put a spotlight on ICANN, the nongovernmental corporation responsible for Internet addressing and DNS. The security of DNS is on ICANN's watch. Why is it so susceptible to attack, when the Internet as a whole is touted as being able to withstand nuclear Armageddon? It's religious dogma, says Karl Auerbach, a public representative to ICANN's board. There's no reason DNS shouldn't be decentralized, except that ICANN wants to maintain central control over this critical function. Worse, Auerbach said in a telephone interview with O'Reilly Network, ICANN uses its domain name dispute resolution process to expand the rights of trademark holders, routinely taking away domains from people with legitimate rights to them, only to reward them to multinational corporations with similar names.'" A Wired article suggests the five elected board members won't be stepping down on December 15 after all.

Comments

RTFAs

[Cap'n Canuck]

If you read the article (and a previous article on /.), you would know:

- he has spoken against ICAAN before. It's not like he's "finally" speaking out.
- his car was stopped by the police when he was younger, which made him decide to get a law degree so he would know his rights. He does not practice law, but he could if he wanted to.

Open NIC

[wls]

Certainly a topic for this discussion, and already repeated and to be repeated:

http://www.opennic.unrated.net/

It's a democratic, non-national set of dns servers that sit above the regular root server and offering additional top-level domain spaces such as:

• .glue for mutual peer root servers
  .indy organiztions and individuals of the independent media and arts
  .geek Duh!
  .null non-commercial and natural persons
  .oss Open Source Software projects
  .parody non-commercial parody work
  .bbs (bulletin boards, pending...)
  

By altering where you point your DNS, you get everything you always had, plus the above, plus more redundancy.

Alternatives and education

[dh003i]

ICANN is right about one thing -- not enough people participated in online elections. That doesn't mean they should be abolished -- they're still better than the corporate-interests free-for-all ICANN wants. ICANN's criticisms about how easy it is to fake online voting is bunk: simple verification scheme can be instituted. I.e., make potential voters register with information verifying who they are, and store that information securely.

The problem with these types of articles is that they don't explain anything. Do you know why only 700 some people voted for ICANN board members in the US? Because very few people even know what DNS means: it means Domain Name System. Now, you can't just say that. You have to say what it does. The DNS binds a certain web-address (such as www.slashdot.org), which you type in your web-browser, to its location in computer-space, represented by its IP (Internet Protocol) number, which might be something like 135.352.653.354. DNS is necessary because no one can remember IP numbers, and you need to have easy-to-remember things to type in.

Now, there does not need to be one and only one DNS. Different people can use different resolution systems. The main one is that of ICANN, but free public-interest alternatives such as OpenNIC exist. Also, note that there is no reason why you have to abide by ICANN's assignment of any website to its IP number. You can -- in your hosts file, a file on your computer -- make it so that web addresses assign to the IP you want them do. Don't think the courts were right in stealing Nissan.com from its rightful owner, a computer business owner? Then assign Nissan.com to the actual IP address of his website. Don't think that Stampede.com should belong to a corporation which makes useless products you have no need for? Fine, reassign it in your hosts file to the IP address of Stampede.org, the Linux distro.

The point is, you the user have power to assign any web address to any IP address. you also have the power to choose whether to use ICANN or OpenNIC...I use my HOSTS file first, then OpenNIC, then ICANN.

In fact, anyone can start a DNS system. All it takes is a server. The only thing is getting major recognition. But that doesn't matter: people who want a free, public-interest DNS will be able to find the appropriate one's. I think that OpenNIC is wrong when they say they won't do anything to conflict with ICANN's domain name resolution. They should actively counter ICANN when ICANN makes decisions taking domain names away from private individuals and giving them to corporations. The court's have no business interfering with OpenNIC's decisions on who to assign domain-names to via its server: this is a private organization, and it can assign domain-names to whatever IP address it wants to. Corporations don't like that, too fucking bad. Users can choose which domain name resolution systems to go to...if corporations don't like OpenNIC assigning intel.com to someone who is selling information services, then they can try to convince people to use ICANN instead of OpenNIC. But in the end, its up to each individual user to decide: Intel (for example) has no right to have intel.com assigned to the IP address for its website on every single DNS system. I can start my own DNS system, convince all you fellow slashdotters to use it, and assign intel.com to my own website! How about that!

Now, there is an obvious problem with having conflicting DNS systems between ICANN and OpenNIC...that is, that ICANN might assign intel.com to 135.354.535.343, while OpenNIC will assign it to 463.534.643.134. Thus, hyperlinking becomes a problem...if I type in

<a href=www.slashdot.org>Slashdot</a>

, then it might mean a different thing for someone who uses ICANN and for someone who uses OpenNIC or dh003iNIC :-). This, of course, is a problem: I wouldn't be able to type in url ref.'s in hyperlinks and know where they pointed to for every user. The solution, of course, is technological -- the solution is NOT for the government to tell everyone they can't conflict with ICANN. The solution is to have services that automatically convert the href I type in to a IP number, depending on the DNS system I'm using. This way, it *will* point to the same thing for everyone. On the other side, the IP number will be translated to whatever href (depending on whether the user uses ICANN or OpenNIC).

So, what can we /.ers do?

1. Stop using ICANN as our primary service.
   
2. Use OpenNIC as our primary service.
   
   
3. Modify our host files to fuck over greedy corporations, and create a server system for these specific modifications so anyone can access them. If thee aren't to many, just post them and offer them for download. I figure there might be about a thousand or so web addresses which ICANN has assigned to various entities that we disagree (and should disagree) with.
   
   
4. Create automated services to resolve web-address conflictions between different services by auto-converting them to IP numbers and then re-converting back to web-addresses, depending on which service (ICANN or OpenNIC) is used.

So, in short, there is something we can do other than just try to reform ICANN. I personally think ICANN's hopeless anyways. Selling web-address locations for all kinds of money is absurd...its only one entry in a file pinning a web-address to an IP number: costs next to nothing to do. There could easily be as many top-level domain's as there are ideas...you the individual user could even create personal "domains" in your hosts file.