Slashdot Mirror
ICANN Plans to Charge Fees to .net Domain Owners
museumpeace writes "ICANN, though it was soundly rebuffed for trying this in the past, is
reported by CNET to be planning a $.75/ year fee to holders of .net domains and will look at fees for other TLD's next year. Is this taxation without representation? And where would this trend stop?"
And where would this trend stop?
It wouldn't stop. Not until ICANN became less of an independant organization and more of an elected body.
Yes, Im sure that they will keep it at 75 cents too.
At least until they rationalize that they need to raise more money.
Do you see where this is going? They can charge as much as they want, be it the measly 75 cents or $15.
(It's like the income tax. The gov't said it would be temporary--and small. But it wasn't temporary, and it's grown quite a bit.)
Keep your eyes to the sky.
I'm going to wait at least till the third warning to pay. That way they spend more on stamps than they get from me.
So how exactly does this cause anyone real grief?
Self-referential sigs are rarely entertaining.
RTFA... it's $0.75 plus $0.25 they snuck in just recently... Notice how they're sneaking those in? You'll be paying a dollar and you thought it was only $0.75... Slippery slope, isn't it?
haha. Should be from the ICANN0T-afford-budget-increases dept.
They're upset because an unelected group is taxing an important part of the world's communications infrastructure, a group that, I might add, wields considerable power and has pretty much lost the respect of anyone that knows anything about them. BEGIN:TINFOIL I really have to wonder if Jon Postel's untimely death was entirely natural END:TINFOIL And that $.75 is just a start, like all taxing bodies they never know when to stop until they go so far that someone has to shoot them.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
There is no difference in requirements to purchase a .com, .net, or .org domain, so why should one have a different fee schedule from another?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Those nice phone fees are where the legs of this fee grow from. The FCC line fee was introduced, and then increased under the same pretense -- "long distance rates will continue to fall, so even with increased FCC Line Fee you will see reduction of your overall bill". The hell it did.
So... I guess once this fee is applied and nobody's bottom gets removed from the high and mighty chair over this, there will be a fee increase, then another fee (for the regulation and patent disputes, for example), and another one (to help public schools pay for their domain names) etc.
All of those fees will be removed from the registrar's ads, so you'll see ".NET Domains for Only $5.95* " with fine print stating "Please note, additional fees and surcharges may apply" and final price will crawl up to $9 or more.
Look at cell phones and regular land-line phones... That's where it's heading.
Hyperom.com
This just give everybody who's concerned about ICANN's unchecked control even more reasons to learn about and support the Open Root Server Confederation.
The Internet needs to stay unregulated and as free as possible from the corporate mindset if it's going to stay in it's current shape. You can already see problems arising with corporations controlling so much of the public's interest in the Internet such as VeriSign's abusing their power by implementing programs like SiteFinder.
It's reasons like these and ICANN's increasing little fees they charge that something needs to be done at some point and the sooner the better. I suppose the very nature of the Internet is a saving grace - if the current custodians fail the public then the network can always be restructured, if very slowly. There is more than one way millions of computers can be inter-connected.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
ICANN only controls non-country TLDs. If you do not like the three quarters of a dollar tax, then move to a country TLD like .US.
Also of interest, everyone here complains about how closely aligned ICANN is with the US gov't. Now, from what I can see, they want to charge you 75 cents a year (1/3 the price of a cup of coffee) so they can privately fund themselves. This leads to getting the gov't OUT of the DNS game and truly internaitonalizes it!
RTFA.
.net is coming to an end in June 2005, and ICANN added the $0.75 fee as a requirement for the companies bidding to operate the TLD. When the others come up, look for the same trick.
It clearly states that Verisign's contract to run
...just because THEYCANN.
when domains were $100.
See, a company I recently worked for had no qualms about registering 100 domains every other day for no other purpose than to use them for SPAM.
If the domains were $100 each, I am pretty sure that they wouldn't be burning through domains like that.
It's more a political question. "Should ICANN be able to use its power to raise that much money? Money for what?"
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Because a .COM is more likely to be a company, and companies have lawyers.
.NET, on the other hand, is more likely to be too cheap to hire lawyers, because we're more likely to be unrepentant network laying unix hippies.
A
You are confusing centralized management with centralized servers. P2P would decentralize the servers, and not solve the management problem - if anything, it would -cause- problems.
I register FooCompany.com. Some guy on his server publishes FooCompany.com to his IP. Which server has the correct IP? You need a way to verify authenticity. Maybe SSL certs? Oops, those are centralized under a small handful of companies... Maybe GPG keys? We can see how all the other web-of-trust security systems have just taken the 'net by storm...
No, ICANN's purpose is to provide management of the namespace and make sure that someone can't just use FooCompany without having gone through a central source to do it. You can't have two FooCompany's in existance. (Aside from server hacking. Which, btw, becomes so, so much easier in a P2P resolution system.) The DNS system itself is already highly distributed in technical terms - a hierarchy where each level is distributed between several (or more) servers.
You can't turn something like ICANN into a global shared responsibility. You need some real management. If you pull that management out of DNS, you just push it somewhere else - making all 'net traffic require SSL certs or GPG keys or somethign else, which is still going to require a central authority. (Sorry guys, even GPG will have central authority's, since 95% of users would much rather pay $100 to a company to sign their keys than have to track down, call, and meet in person with a handful of 'net uber-geeks to get keys signed, and have to do that over and over everytime they get a new key.)
Do you think implementing a 75 cent fee is going to stop this? Even if a company owns a thousand, this will only cost them 750 bucks more.
Don't get me wrong, the problem you described sucks, but irrelevant to this topic.
--- The revolution will be digitized! - http://www.binrev.com/ ---
At last we can add in step two!
1. Get self on ICANN board.
2. Increase fees gradually so nobody notices. (formerly ???)
3. Profit!
As a result, I will be charging ICANN a monthly 7.50 'Blow Me' fee. Bitches.
Fees and surcharges are the first sign that you should get your gun and start thinning the herd from the top down, because someone has decided you're easy pickin' and an easy money bitch. ICANN does not DO anything, except charge poor fucks like me and you for having a shitty website.
Now mod me offtopic, you ICANN sniffing mod-whores. HAHAHA! Profanity is always uncalled for, and used by ruffians, and ner' do-wells, so eat it.
oh yes, good idea. let's go storm a ship and toss .net domain names overboard.
when you finally solve the metaphysics of it, let me know.
on the larger point, this isn't exactly taxation without representation - icann is providing a service of sorts, and this is a fee for the service provided. it is a monopoly, yes, but to call this "taxation without representation" is ridiculous.
--
Build an internet incorruptible by corps and goverments.
Metanet
please forgive my ignorance, but what does icann do?
You're forgiven. :)
Okay, here's how it works. You know how the tech community likes to tell newbies that nobody controls the Internet? Well, that's not entirely true. At the time the Internet was founded, peer-to-peer was nowhere near as sophisticated as it is today, so you needed somebody to keep all the important information about computers on the Internet, to prevent it from melting into anarchy.
Various organizations (and in particular, Jon Postel) had different sets of these responsibilities until 1998, when ICANN was founded. ICANN is a non-profit corporation with a U.S. government contract. They are responsible for assigning IP addresses (so there's no duplication), running the DNS system (so mere mortals can get to Slashdot without having to memorize IP addresses) and other more mundane tasks specified in various RFCs, such as tracking well-known port numbers and MIME types.
So, ICANN and its subsidiaries basically represent a government-sanctioned monopoly, like the phone company used to be. Other companies and non-profit organizations occasionally try to create alternative DNS services, such as OpenNIC, but they don't usually get very far because ICANN, in its official capacity, squishes them like bugs.
I may be hazy on the details, but I think this is accurate enough to get you started on your own research.
I recently contested $35 in bank charges. I did so because the way their system was set up to operate I do not feel that I should have been charged that much for a computer shifting numbers. I contested about $7 on my phone bill for a call that I don't recall ever being capable of making (some 10-10-27500 bullshit). I've contested $3 on my phone bill when the phone company tried to charge me for 3 months past service (read: I already paid and filed the bills and the invoice for those months was done). Even had a company try to get me to sign up for $7 of basic cable to save $15 off my cable internet (good deal), and I may have done it, if I hadn't asked "is this off my current rate or whatever it is at now (I pay $46, current is $58)." It is of course off the current rate, so I would be paying more.
Maybe you ask why I bothered. I mean, $35 was something, but $7? $3? That's hardly even enough money to go out and entertain myself for an evening. I do it on principle. I do it because I know the company expects me to blow it off and just pay it. I know that if they feel they can get away with that, then they will try on a regular basis. What happens when there's "just" another $3 charge on your phone bill a month? What happens when $3/month more doesn't satisfy them anymore? It goes up.
I'm not in the game of getting cheated. I look over my bills and confirm that nothing stupid was added on. I won't let these companies get the feeling that they can just do whatever they want without checks for me. Yes, it may only be $.75, but it adds up, and it sets a bad precedent.
What would it matter if you wound up spending $1000 more than you needed to in a year, all because there were some 1200 $.75 charges tacked on that shouldn't have? To me, that's where it matters most.
Is this taxation without representation? And where would this trend stop?
It will never stop. Observing trends, taxation is increasing for long as past 4000 years. Next phase is Slashdot charging all Cowards $.03/year for keeping them Anonymous...
There you are, staring at me again.
A .NET, on the other hand, is more likely to be too cheap to hire lawyers, because we're more likely to be unrepentant network laying unix hippies.
Boy, if that's the case, those dot ORG guys must be complete neanderthals.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"