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The Race Is On For .net

mikrorechner writes "As reported previously, ICANN is looking for a new registrar for the .net tld. The biddings are in now, and The Register has a lengthy article about the five contenders. Their guess is that only two really have a chance: VeriSign and DeNIC. We will know more in two months."

14 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Fraud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Speaking of domain registration, I found this website that allows you to register the domain slashdot.org

    What a fraud!!

    Anybody knows who to complain or what to do to take this idiot down?

    1. Re:Fraud by randomblast · · Score: 4, Funny

      > Anybody knows who to complain or what to do to take this idiot down?

      Yeah, post the link to slashdot...

      --
      ...these aren't my real teeth.
    2. Re:Fraud by simcop2387 · · Score: 5, Funny

      fraud you say?
      i just bought nsswitch.com from them!

  2. microsoft by myukew · · Score: 4, Funny

    Isn't .Net (c) by Microsoft already?

  3. Anyone but Verisign by H_Fisher · · Score: 4, Insightful
    P. J. O'Rourke wrote that giving money and power to government was like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. With VeriSign's track record being what it is, I'd say that giving them .net might end up being the same kind of bad decision.

    I know there's no totally-impartial, non-profit-driven corporation or entity that can do this job well, but Verisign's past practices ("Site Finder" and its blind ignorance of how the Internet should work is a perfect example) have led me to see them as worse than the rest of the pack. I simply don't trust them to do the job right because they can't understand that the Internet != the WWW.

    1. Re:Anyone but Verisign by wertarbyte · · Score: 5, Informative

      I know there's no totally-impartial, non-profit-driven corporation or entity that can do this job well,

      Actually, DeNIC is a non-profit organization (http://www.denic.de/en/denic/index.html), and they manage 8336375 .de-Domains at the moment (http://www.denic.de/en/domains/statistiken/index. html)

      --
      Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
    2. Re:Anyone but Verisign by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Funny
      So who would you suggest? Microsoft? The US Govt?

      SCO! :-)
      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  4. How do you know... by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Funny
    Q: How do you know your sysadmin is on the phone with a Verisign rep?

    A: You can hear screams of "YOU FUCKING INCOMPETENT COCKSUCKERS!" from six cubes away rather than the usual three.

  5. Not for profit by wertarbyte · · Score: 5, Interesting
    As you can see here, DeNIC is an organization that does not aim for profit:

    "In Deutschland ist es die DENIC, die diese Aufgabe als "designated administrator" im Sinne des RFC1591 übernommen hat. Sie erfüllt sie ohne Gewinnerzielungsabsicht zum Nutzen und Wohle der gesamten deutschen Internet Community, neutral und unabhängig, fachkundig und verantwortungsbewusst, diskriminierungsfrei und in Übereinstimmung mit den international anerkannten Standards für den Betrieb einer Domain-Registrierungsstelle."

    This roughly translates to

    "In germany, DeNic took this duty as 'designated administrator' according to RFC1591. It achieves its duty without any aim for financial profits, but for the benefit of the hole internet community, neutrally and independently, competently and responsibly, withouth discrimination and in accordance to international standards for domain registration services."

    --
    Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
    1. Re:Not for profit by Florian+Weimer · · Score: 3, Informative

      DENIC is not as neutral as it claims to be. It pursues the interests of its members (like every good co-op should do), not those of all Internet users. Sometimes, the interests diverge. For example, DENIC members generally want easy domain transfers with as little validation as possible (because they make money by transferring domains), but most corporate users want rock-solid delegations that cannot be altered by anyone except themselves.

  6. Can't see how Verisign could win.. (article) by Staplerh · · Score: 3, Informative

    Seems a little sketch. The article clearly argues that DENIC eG will win the contract. These two snippets say all, despite their conclusion that doesn't really support the evidence that they themselves introduced. From TFA regarding DENIC eG:

    So Denic isn't messing about and while ICANN would love nothing more than VeriSign to lose the .net registry, it would be equally delighted to see Denic win it. Why? Because Denic is the most powerful registry outside of ICANN control.

    So it appears that The Registrar thinks that DENIC eG will win the bid. This is especially apparent when contrasted with their earlier snippet about Verisign's bid:

    These very reasons are also why ICANN would desperately love for its old foe to be humbled. With VeriSign weakened, ICANN can start to assert itself properly over the Internet. It may even mean the end of the lengthy legal battle that VeriSign has been running against ICANN - something that is as much a bartering chip as it is a legal dispute.

    So there, the Registrar actually thinks that DENIC eG will win, despite their own conclusion and the story submission.

    --
    "There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
    - Bob Dylan
    1. Re:Can't see how Verisign could win.. (article) by Zocalo · · Score: 3, Insightful
      so what the article author meant was that ICANN would hate to see either Verisign or Denic winning the bid.

      In which case, I suspect that ICANN would probably have stuck with the Devil they already knew and hoped that the move would have smoothed the troubled waters between them and Verisign. That would however have led to all sorts of allegations about the selection process. Assuming that he's come to the same conclusions as the Register then the appointment of the independent body is quite a canny move by Dr. Twomey. Whatever happens, they should hopefully avoid any mudslinging after the announcement and can get on with what they should be doing.

      Personally, I'd have to say that DeNIC is much better positioned than Verisign to be our .net gTLD overseer come July. DeNIC already runs a ccTLD with more domains that .net, so there should be no problems there. Moving the .net gTLD to DeNIC means that all the main gTLDs are managed by seperate entities; diversity is good here. Moving control of gTLDs about is certainly doable because .org has already been reassigned, and DeNIC has the additional advantage of knowing where PIR had problems. Finally, DeNIC is not a US company which addresses another issue for ICANN; they can use that as an argument against the UN/ITU's claims that control of the Internet is too US centric.

      By contrast, all Verisign seems to be offering is a continuation of the status quo, for which they have managed to earn themselves a less than stellar reputation. Sure, they can do the job, but where's the vision? Big changes are afoot for the Internet over the next few years with VoIP, streaming media services and more all gaining momentum; I hardly think "status quo" is going to be a winning argument against that dynamic backdrop.

      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
  7. root for Afilias by MagicMerlin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Afilias runs the .org domain on PostgreSQL. It has been pretty smooth, no matter what the article says, and it was a huge embarassment for Oracle who ran a huge disinformation campaign against PostgreSQL and open source in general.

    Merlin

  8. Re: Registrars serve no useful purpose by r5t8i6y3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    from: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.operators.nanog /28565

    From: David M. Besonen panix.com>
    Subject: Re: Registrars serve no useful purpose
    Newsgroups: gmane.org.operators.nanog
    Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 09:06:31 -0800

    [a dated, biased (what isn't?), insightful, and
    relevant interview]

    Published on Policy DevCenter
    (http://www.oreillynet.com/policy/)
    http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/12/05/ karl.html

    Karl Auerbach: ICANN "Out of Control"
    by Richard Koman
    12/05/2002

    Editor's note: Strong forces are reshaping the Internet these days. To understand these forces--governmental, business, and technical--Richard Koman interviews the people in the midst of the changes.

    This month, Richard talks to Karl Auerbach, a public board member of ICANN and one of the Internet governing body's strongest critics.

    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.

    Auerbach--who successfully sued ICANN over access to corporate documents (ICANN wanted him to sign a nondisclosure agreement before he could see the documents)--will only be an ICANN director for a few more weeks. As part of ICANN's "reform" process, the ICANN board voted last month to end public representation on the board. As of December 15, there will be zero public representatives on the ICANN board.

    How does ICANN justify banishing the public from its decision-making process? Stuart Lynn, president and CEO of ICANN, said the change was needed to make ICANN's process more "efficient." In a Washington Post online discussion, Lynn said: "The board decided that at this time [online elections] are too open to fraud and capture to be practical, and we have to look for other ways to represent the public interest. It was also not clear that enough people were really interested in voting in these elections to create a large enough body of voters that could be reflective of the public interest. This decision could always be reexamined in the future. In the meantime, we are encouraging other forms of at-large organizations to self-organize and create and encourage a body of individuals who could provide the user input and public interest input into the ICANN process."

    Former ICANN president Esther Dyson is also supporting the move away from public representation on the board. "I did believe that it was a good idea to have a globally elected executive board, [but] you can't have a global democracy without a globally informed electorate," Dyson told the Post. "What you really need [in order] to have effective end-user representation is to have them in the bowels (of the organization) rather than on the board."

    Auerbach isn't buying. "ICANN is pursuing various spin stories to pretend that they haven't abandoned the public interest," he says in this interview. "ICANN is trying to create a situation where individuals are not allowed in and the only organizations that are allowed in are those that hew to ICANN's party line."