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Verisign Recommended to Keep .com & .net
An Anonymous SAIC Employee writes "The 'independent' company hired by ICANN to advise them on who should run the .com and .net registry has recommended that Verisign (fact sheet) should be chosen to continue to run the registry. Is it any surprise? Telcordia was owned by SAIC (Fact Sheet) during the time the study was conducted. SAIC bought Telcordia (fact sheet) (then Bellcore) in Nov. 1997 and sold it March 15, 2005. Network Solutions was bought by SAIC in 1995 and sold in 2000. Also, Telcordia worked with Verisign on the ENUM project. Is the fox guarding the hen house?"
Why would we honestly expect any different? Anyone who actually read into the situation expected VeriSign to get the contract, and it looks as if that's what's going to happen now.
I wouldn't mind this, if Verisign's contract was amended to prohibit domain-typo hijacking, and more generally, to require them to remain compatible and RFC compliant. And I would want those same contract provisions regardless of who runs .com and .net.
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
Isn't hijacking every and any unclaimed URL for company profit while providing no public service in an organisation whose very objective is a public service reason enough?
because we know if someone else takes over, the internet will go down for at least a week
.org was transferred?
You mean just like it did when
Oh, wait, nevermind....
I honestly find it hard to believe that a single entity can maintain control over such a large part of the Internet for so long a time; in the net's early days, a centralized domain registry might have been acceptable, being that it was a small thing and the overhead to implement anything more advanced would've outweighed the benefits. Now, though, with the Internet the size it is, I honestly think that something better needs to be in place: get rid of this central-domain-registry crap. Whoever's in charge of it--Verisign, Microsoft, even Google--is going to profiteer to some extent, simply because that is what companies do.
If you ask my opinion, a decentralized system would make much more sense here. Store addresses in a Kademlia network or something; allow anybody to register a domain name, and it'll propagate as it's accessed. With a PGP-like trust system implemented, there need not be a central registry anywhere. The only way to prevent abuse of such a large monopoly is to prevent any single entity from controlling it, and the only way to do that is to decentralize the process.
Anyone.
Keep in mind that a change like this could result in a *real* mess.
Ahhh, so you've never personally dealt with them. OK, here's the short answer for people who've never experienced that dishonor:
It would be darn nigh impossible to screw up anything worse than Verisign. They are absolutely, positively the worst "the problem must be on your end" pack of frickin' screwups ever to bungle network management. Network Solutions? Only if the problem is "I have too much money and time - please help me blow it on getting my domain back from the hijacker you gave it to without asking me first". I would give the job to Microsoft before I'd willingly let Verisign have another crack at it, and that's not something I'd say lightly. If they built cars, people would have died in the Verisign Pinto. They're the New Coke of networking, and I'd swear Terry Gilliam had a crystal ball and based "Brazil" around their bureaucracy.
It. Can't. Get. Worse. This is it. You're looking at it. The lowest common denominator is carrying the treasure. People hate them so much that they built entire alternative DNS hierarchies to fix the theoretical disasters that Verisign somehow managed to drag to life. I'd buy a SCO Linux license before I'd pay Verisign to register another domain.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?