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ICANN Finds No Wrong Doing in Domain Front Running
eldavojohn writes "Remember the investigation ICANN did in domain name front running? Well, it turns out that there was no wrong doing going on at all. What went wrong? Domain name 'tasting', which involves a free five day trial of a domain name, was the big culprit. From the article: 'In some cases ... the committee found that a separate practice of domain name tasting may be causing problems. That refers to someone testing the financial viability of a name for up to five days and then returning it for a full refund, using a loophole in registration policies. Domain tasting can tie up millions of Internet addresses, including ones someone checks but does not buy.' If you check for availability of a website and someone sees you do it and they reserve it before you, it's fair play."
"The ICANN committee said cases suspected of front running often turned out to be coincidence, with multiple parties interested in the same names."
That, of course, is a load of horse feathers. There were countless examples of the practice being exposed by people searching for domains like NETSOLSUCKSALOT12300091.COM. Were there really many parties interested in that domain?
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
"The report, brought before the ICANN board in New Delhi on Friday, did not examine a controversial practice by domain name seller Network Solutions LLC of grabbing names that people search for on its Web site but don't immediately register."
For those that don't know, Bruce Tonkin, Chair of the Generic Names Supporting Organisation (GNSO) of ICANN, holds shares in Melbourne IT, which is an ICANN-approved registrar. Hence a conflict of interest. So don't ever run a WHOIS query on a registrar you intend to buy the name from!
This is kinda ironic, because I just got hit by this today. I used Network Solutions lookup tool to search for a domain - simply out of habit - and then when I went to buy the domain at my usual discount registrar, I was told that the domain name was already taken. Then I went back to Network Solutions, did the lookup, and lo and behold, it's still available! Confused, I did a whois lookup, and saw that the site was apparently registered to Network Solutions. So I called up the customer service line for NS, and I was like, "hey, do you know what's going on?" And here's the kicker - the guy tried to make it sound like NS was doing me a favor!
The logic went something like this - some "unethical third party" could be snooping on my connection, and, seeing that I was looking into a domain purchase, they could snap up the domain and then try to sell it to me at an inflated rate. Of course, if they were to buy the domain from Network Solutions, nothing would stop them. But if they tried to buy it somewhere else, good old NS has my back. Isn't that swell of them?
Fortunately, the guy was reasonable, and released the hold on the domain. He then tried to upsell me on some stupid hosting service, and I'm like, "Umm, no, I do my own development. And I'm going to buy this domain someplace that doesn't charge $30 a freakin' domain."
On the other hand, if it really is front-running, charging for formerly-free tasting will reduce it a bit (because the front-runner will need to spend actual money, not just kited money), so you'll only get ripped off by people who think it's worth gambling the proposed 20-cent ICANN fee or maybe the whole $6 on selling you the domain name.
It's easy to work around that, though - if you think of a name you might want to use, and want to check if it's available, just buy it from your favorite registrar rather than checking; if it's already in use you'll get rejected. That's less helpful if you want to buy the
Also, of course, if front-running sticks around after there's a fee for tasting, it's much more effective to run an automated check-lots-of-names bot that costs front-runners money on gambles that always lose than if it's only costing them free kiting. (There are ways to fight back - captchas on name queries, for instance - but there are also name-grabbers who use DNS/Whois queries, and you can keep querying those without captchas, and not only do those people deserve to lose even more than registrar name-grabbers, but the DNS operator for the
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why not write a distributed project. It will slowly, in the background, hit up all the recently 'tasted' domain names. This would make tasters think that they got a good domain name and buy it. Then they'll go bankrupt, because they'll buy all these crap domain names that are only touched by the distributed client.
For every problem, there is a solution...
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
If they would put this $.20 fee in place, then people would just start writing scripts to generate millions of random queries per day, and the practice would end overnight.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
But how do we know that its safe and that your not just using it to grab good domains? :)
ICANN went through three stages of evolution. At first it was bunch of - by their own admission - clueless board members picked in secret by the US government, specifically Ira Magaziner, Clintons senior science advisor, and Roger Cochetti from IBM.
... the "domainers" and registration people. That's who goes to ICANN meetings and populate the various ICANN committees.
.web or whatever. His employer, USC/ISI would not back him up. Jon died of heart failure 3 years later.
Next they were taken over by intellectual property attornies from multinational corporations. Once they'd had their way with internet law and policy came...
Is it any wonder they didn't find anything wrong with the practice they invented and make money from?
The US Government mandate ICANN operates under says they must be "open and transparent" and are not to create policy, but to determine the consensus of the Internet community and implement policy based on this. I have personally watched them chnage their bylaws retroactively to prevent the "wrong" poeple from being a part of the organizatin. I've personally watched them kick people out of meeings advertised beforehand as "open to anyone". I've personally wathced them adopt policies where only 13 out ot 1000 people agreed with the policy. I can go on for hours about things like this.
They are one of the most secretive Internet organizations to ever exist. Does anybody else remember Karl Aurbach, when elected to the board had to sue just to see the books? How many organizations do you get to be a board member off but the corporate books are kept secret from you? Why would you need to keep those books secret in the first place.
ICANN was supposed to be a "membership organization". A decade has gone by. Can you find any way to become a voting member of ICANN? Nope. Doesn't exist. You know why? They're scared they'd be voted out of office and for damn good reason.
ICANN runs on a $60M a year budget and it a beurocraic nightmare more complex than the UN in terms of its org chart. (cf. Rutkoswki's brilliant diagram of same. It does NOT fit on a regular sized piece of paper). Now keep in mind the job it does used to be done by Jon Postel as a part time task ("IANA") for $15,000. a year.
When Jon announced there would be new tlds coming ("300 at least, 75 in the first year") the intellectual property attornies made his life a living hell and he sought a legal entitiy as IANA had no legal personality and he himself did not want to assume personal legal liability for adding
If you think ICANN is the best and the brightest of the internet you're sadly mistaken, and if we, as the internet community cannot do better than this, then shame on us all, squared.
Scrap ICANN. Make something useful.
A good starting point would be the consensus points from the last IFWP conference - this was to have been ICANN before thart effort, and a years work to reach that consensus, was scuttled by the actors operating in the shadows who have controlled it ever since in a regime where only they benefit.
Or roll your own root. The only reason ICANN is on power is because they control the legacy root zone. If nobody used it any more, they would fade into the sunset where they belong.
If Linux computers used a different set of root servers, who cares what Microsoft and ICANN did.
Read this: http://iconia.com/before_the_dns.txt
Need Mercedes parts ?
If you dont want people to support the Mafia, Jihadists, vigilanty groups and various kinds of thugs hitting people with baseball bats, drilling kneecaps with electric drills, or randomly killing and calling it "summary justice", then you have to have a better legal system. If people cant get redress for this kind of thing through the law, you can expect they will take the law in their own hands.
In short, its governments that behave like this that create third world countries.
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