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.net Domain Up For Grabs
belmolis writes "
The New York Times is reporting that the bidding is on for the .net domain currently
administered by VeriSign. VeriSign's current contract
expires June 30th; applications are due today. Three companies are known to be interested:
NeuStar, which currently manages .biz,
Afilias, which manages .info,
and Denic eG, a non-profit that manages the German .de domain.
ICANN is bending over backward to avoid any suggestion of bias due to its conflict
with VeriSign over VeriSign's Site Finder "service" and has appointed an independent team
to evaluate the applications. VeriSign has been lobbying hard to keep the domain and
is reported to have received letters of support from Microsoft and IBM."
lets hope microsoft doesnt aquire .net domains, only to confuse the term further.
this sig no verb
When the get to much power they take advantage (sitefinder). IMHO when a company has poor ethics, they like to show it.
They showed us their ethics... we can do better. Lets look at other companies.
Just put the authority to the .net tld on ebay. This would raise millions, possibly billions for ICANN - as the new owner could take ownership of every single .net domain... or raise the price to very high levels. If panix.net thinks its situation is bad, what will they think when the new owner of the .net domain asks for $10000/year for a registration... Or makes google.net install spyware...
I hate their tactics, prices, schemes, and business practices. I am personally responsible for registering THOUSANDS of domains with them over the years, and I am treated like dirt by their service teams when I have trouble. Bastards rot in hell.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
To access this .net site please enter your .net Passport.
Wait, IBM is evil now? What about the patents that they are opening up to spur innovation? What about the vast funds that they pour into OSS? Just because a company is big, it does not necessarily make them evil.
I like to think of IBM as a very "Apple-esque" company - putting out good products and encouraging innovation at all opportunities...
Big Deal.... Take those letters and shove them. Using those letters, regardless of where they came from, would cause and/or swing the bias. If an independent group is making the decision, let them do independent research to decide.
People need to get off this "because Microsoft, IBM, AOL, etc. said it, so now I'll believe it" mentality and start thinking for themselves. For example, I like Linux. Not because Linus said so, but because I did my own research and found it to be what I feel I need.
When exactly did ICANN care about appearing impartial?
.net domain?
Why can't they just tell VeriSign something along the lines of "You fucked up. You thought you were all bad and shit. We're taking it away from you." and just let the other three companies mentioned bid for it and shut VeriSign out of the
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
To me, this is the most important part of the article:
VeriSign is lobbying actively to hold onto its .net stewardship, however, lining up written support from major players including Microsoft and I.B.M.
At $5 a year for each domain name, VeriSign earns an estimated $30 million annually from administering .net - far less than its revenues for .com, which has 200 million names at $6 each.
I've been thinking about registering a .net domain, but now I'm not so sure anymore. VeriSign is very likely to lose and the transition process will not be an easy one as I'm sure VeriSign will fight tooth and nail to keep .net even after the final decision.
This made me roll my eyes, and I hope I wasn't alone. This quote:
.net, one of the Internet's most popular domains.
.com but still... I will admit ignorance in these matters, but it's weird to think that a coroporation would run the .net domain - which, as the article points out, is responsible for a vast array of sites - including "About 40 percent of government domains allow access through .net, including the White House, the United States Senate, Homeland Security agencies and the Social Security Administration, making it a vital Internet transportation layer, said Tom Galvin, a spokesman for VeriSign."
.net - what advantages does this convey on them?
VeriSign has been lobbying hard to keep the domain and is reported to have received letters of support from Microsoft and IBM.
Hah! Woopty-doo, hopefully this doesn't matter and there is some legitimacy in the bidding process. I'm not an anti-Microsoft crusader (although I did ditch Windows), but come now . . . unless they're willing to throw their money behind VeriSign (as opposed to a letter), they should simply STFU. From the NYT article:
But later this month, the system's underpinnings will become a topic of debate when rival companies publicly bid to run
It is rather disturbing at a base level that a company controls the domain. I know VeriSign runs
So weird.. WHY does VeriSign want
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Why not turn it over to the open-source community and let the experts take care of it? I'm sure they could provide a much better system than Verisign, more accountability, and much lower cost.
Calm down, I'm kidding.
Sitefinder was definitely a bad idea. Here is hoping that a better company wins out.
However...
I can understand that the slashdot community doesn't like Microsoft. They think that company is "teh sux0rz!111". What is your beef with IBM though?
Well, if VeriSign doesn't get the winning bid, your customer service will almost certainly improve.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
> applications are due today.
I think Adam Sandler says it best: "This information could have been brought To My Attention YESTERDAY!"
I'm starting a pool. Paypal me your support so we can put a solid bid in on this. It's for the consortium, and you all have a share. ;)
[i]Help me, get a free [freeminimacs.com] mini mac.[/i]
Call me crazy, but you don't see a problem with talking about ethics, and advertising some ipod/minimac pyramid scheme at the same time?
I say that for now on, we pledge to never mod up people with this bullcrap in their sigs.
Wonder if Tucows / OpenSRS will make a bid -- though I haven't seen anything on their reseller resource center. I'd trust them over MS or Verisign - they listen to their customers and actively support the Linux platform (heck, even their site is PERL and PHP). /me wanders off to call his Tucows rep...
Why exactly can't ICANN take into account the fact that Verisign broke their last contract (in a way that screwed around with the whole Internet and made Verisign lots of $$$) when deciding whether to give them the next contract? What do they decide the contract on then?
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Afilias uses PostgreSQL, so now we know who the Slashdot croud should be rooting for. See the last paragraph:
http://www.active-domain.com/news/2002sep-5.htm
In fact there is a seminar at Afilias starting tomorrow to plan a new multi-master replication solution for PostgreSQL, so they are very involved with open source.
This astounds me.
Having used four or five registrars myself (Register.com, GoDaddy, Dotster, and Network Solutions/Verisign) - and working with a few others that my clients have used - I have never found a registrar with better service than Network Solutions. I can talk to a real person and rarely ever have a problem that can't be resolved within an hour of reporting it.
I had to wait three weeks for another registrar to resolve issues which should have been done within minutes. I'm not thrilled about the lax policies on domain hijacking (as we've read about recently) but those aren't limited to just Verisign.
Despite their SiteFinder crap, I'm happy to pay $35/year for the best service, tools, etc. If someone can point me in the direction of something better, I'd be open to switching. But in the five or six years that I've been managing domains, this is the best I've found.
Years back, between migrating from AOL and my dialup ISP getting sold, resold, and resold, I decided to go to a third party for a popbox, so I could get a stable email address, and that worked for a few years.
Then the popbox provider changed their policies. It wasn't just that they weren't free - I could have handled that. They really didn't want to fuss with individuals, they wanted to provide for businesses.
So I bought a third-level domain, forwarding email to my ISP's popbox. That worked for a few years, and during that time their billing department was a bit odd, at best. Then last year their billing department got to be too much to deal with. (They wouldn't accept a cashier's check issued to the name of their company - they wanted it to a person . Sounds too shady, to me.)
So I went to DynDNS.org and bought my own domain last year, along with mail forwarding, etc.
My domain is a ".net".
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The article mentions SiteFinder, but before that VeriSign was sent fraudulent email to owners of domains registered through other registrars, and just this weekend they transferred panix.com (registered through a different registrar) to a hijacker. Considering the way the seem to have blown off both the rightful owner of the domain and law enforcement, I think it would be appropriate to take into account the possibility that VeriSign will be convicted of computer crimes and banned from computers by court order within the period of this contract when deciding whether to give it to them.
Aren't those guys extremely burocratic w.r.t. domain transfers etc? Didn't they require real paperwork to transfer domains in their .de ccTLD (at least in the past)? Anyone with DeNIC experience cares to comment or explain?
There's also another point here: transferring .net to a ccTLD operator would also mean that all .net domains would be subject to the national laws of that operator's country. Do we really want the whole .net domain managed by an entity outside the US, governed by totally different rules and regulations?
This is by no means a rebuttal of or prejudice against DeNIC eG or other ccTLD operators. I'm just a bit worried that such a transfer would affect existing domains in negative ways (like less legal protection, higher legal costs, UDRP overrides, etc...).
cpghost at Cordula's Web.