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Peter Sunde Wants To Create Alternative To ICANN
An anonymous reader writes "According to Peter Sunde's Twitter feed, he has been suspicious of ICANN for a long time. The non-profit corporation is tasked with managing both the IPv4 and IPv6 address spaces as well as handling the management of top-level domain name space including the operation of root nameservers. Sunde has lost a domain in the past because of the way ICANN acted. It was taken without any consultation on their part, instead the organization relied on information from recording industry group IFPI to change the domain ownership. But it seems for some reason his frustration has come to a head recently, and he has put a call out for help to create a competing root server."
And why didn't ICANN start the process of "firing" VeriSign immediately after the incident?
That was what was going to happen. Instead, something very strange happened. The final outcome was that ICANN SETTLED with VeriSign. But this was kind of like the Google books settlement, in that the settlement was EXTREMELY FAVORABLE to VeriSign.
Prior to this settlement, the .COM / .NET registry was a FOR BID contract that would come up for bidding and renewal every 6 years.
The registry price was capped at $6 per domain per year under the contract at the time.
In the settlement ICANN agreed to guarantee to renew their contract at the end of the term, unless it is proven that VeriSign substantially breaches the new contract, they have the contract perpetually. [paraphrasing], "For the sake of Internet stability" (as ICANN people put it)
The settlement from the SECSAC process also Gave NSOL the right to raise prices. The settlement gave them the right to raise prices 7% 4 out of 6 years of every contract term after 2007, with no cost justification needed.
The VeriSign/Network Solutions Internic can raise prices all 6 years of the contract term, if they provide a cost justification for 2 of those years. In 2010 they raised prices for .COM and .NET domains, and publicly someone indicated a cost justification of "Increased number of DNS lookups being performed" (against .COM and .NET registry servers)
I think 5 years from now, .COM and .NET TLDs will be prices by the registry at
approximately $12 instead of approximately $8.
We can look forward to paying $100 per year to the cheapest registries to renew .COMs, within this decade or the next,
just like it used to be before competitive registrars.
Oh right... "competitive registrars" doesn't matter much, when there is a for-profit global registry everyone has to pay who has a guaranteed right to raise prices, and a guaranteed right to not get fired, because a legal settlement means ICANN legally cannot bring the contract up for bid, unless NSol screws up.
This is already in the works at; http://dot-p2p.org/index.php?title=Main_Page .p2p will soon be incorporated into OpenNIC.