VeriSign To Control .com Domain Until 2012

DIY News wrote to mention a Reuters article reporting that VeriSign will control the .com domain until 2012, according to an agreement with ICANN. From the article: "The agreement settles a long-running dispute between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, and the most powerful company under its jurisdiction. The settlement comes at a time when ICANN is under attack from China, Iran and other countries that want more direct control over the domain-name system that guides traffic around the Internet."

Comments

Verisign icky!

[mister_llah]

They tried to start a 'service' to redirect mistyped domain names to a search engine (with ads)....

These same people also make 6 dollars per year for the 35 million .com domain names in use, and then also the .net names.

They are icky.

===

Of course, one has to wonder... WWCD? What would China do? (if they had control) ... or any other nation/entity vying for control...?

Mountain View, California-based VeriSign introduced a search engine in September 2003 that directed Internet users who mistype domain names like "www.example.com" to a search engine which contained advertisements

IMHO, The internet should always be 'free' (except for the cost of connection) ... and I think right now its as free as it's going to be...

Everyone wins...except the users

[A beautiful mind]

So let me get this straight:

1. Verisign introduces wildcard
2. ICANN tells them to temporarily suspend that
3. Verisign sues, but the case gets thrown out
4. Verisign sues again and they settle that Verisign keeps its reign over .com until 2012, instead of 2007 BECAUSE they fucked up in the first place with that outrageous wildcard-advertising?
5. No ??? here, just profit.


Oh yea, and the people wonder why do I and apparently the rest of the world think that ICANN and the USA is not doing the task it had been given properly?

Why mention only China and Iran?

[CharAznable]

Why not the EU or any other number of countries that don't have despotic governments? Countries depend on the internet for a number of things, and it's only natural and sensible that they don't want to trust their vital infrastructures to Verisign or the US. Mentioning China and Iran seems like a lame attempt at scaremongering. "Imagine, the internet in the hands of China! Oh noes!"

Higher prices too

[karl.auerbach]

The prices for .com names may go up significantly - 7% per year.

And ICANN's slice goes up to 50cents per name per year.

All of this adds up to increased taxation on those who acquire domain name, i.e. you and me. Yet we are unrepresented in ICANN's decision-making processes. Can you say "taxation without representation"?

And if you really think about it, what is the actual cost to provide a service in which the yearly cost is that of *not* removing an entry for a database and in which the resources consumed are a few hundred bytes of disk space?

I've suggested a new domain name selling model - The .ewe Business Model - or - It's Just .Ewe and Me, .Kid(s) (http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000159.ht ml)

Re:The arguments?

[rs79]

"what's going on with the iraqi domain?
Well, since the current owners are in US custody (!??) its in limbo: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/30/iraq_inter net_domain/?"

Around 1995 or so Bayan Elashi was given .iq by Jon Postel (apparanly on the basis of a phone call simply asking for it) I worked at a small company which Bayan was the president of in 1983/4. We talk every few years, or we used to.

The company Bayan ran that I worked for built 100 CP/M S-100 Z-80 based Bilingual English/Arabic computers. They had MS BASIC and Wordstar and nothing else. This was in Torance, California.

I moved to Canada, the Elashi's moved to Texas and opened a computer store in the early 1990's.

Bayan's sister married a guy who six years previous could be pinned as belonging to Hamas, but was guilty of apparanly nothing more than that. Just after 911 in the anti-Arab furor, the Elashis (there's a half dozen of them) were also running a Palastinian relief organization. They had all been born in Palestine and had Palestinian passports, but when I worked with them Palestine didn't technically exist. The government tried to show they were funding terrorists but could only find receipts for medical supplies.

Not being able to pin anything actually terrorst related on them they popped them for sending mice to Turkey dropshipped through Italy. or Libya or something. Somebody we didn't like that week. Was it Iran when we liked Iraq or Iraq when we liked Iran - don't remember.

They've been in jail 3 years now waiting trial if memory serves.

Now, the interesting thing is the Elashis have no more or less claim on "their" TLD than the Brits, the Germans or even the Americans do. A phone call was all it took back then. Cf. Nigel and the Pitcairn Island TLD (rolls eyes)

so, if you can get a judge to believe a TLD is worth money, then the US/ICANN arbitrarily taking it away and citing some nonsense about "community purpose" would, I presume be actionable.

ICANN tries to be risk averse. They're terrified of this one. So, the nameservers for .iq still point on Bayan's machines. They will presumably change without warning one day or have an accident.

I know Bayan reasonably well and I know the actors in DC and Marina del Rey. I think the wrong ones are in jail. That is, I'd much sooner trust Bayan with all names and numbers than the clowns and their yelping trademark lawyers who have it now. I mean, at least Bayan can actually configure a nameserver; he was also the one I convinced fund gryphon.com/gryphon.uucp that ran all usenet news and uucp mail in LA in the mid to late 80s from NASA and mejac. For this we taught him unix. Maybe that's his problem.