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Network Solutions Gets Antitrust Protection
joshmathis writes "ZDNET is reporting that a US federal judge has ruled that Network Solutions, Inc. has antitrust protection for their monopoly on domain name registration. It may be short-lived, though. "
When are they going to stop doing favors and ass bending for all the companies that have no competition? I am sick of hearing about how much protection Microsoft needs, or how badly Intel is being treated... What the hell is this? Lets get some companies that are in it to make a product or technology that ACTUALLY helps the end-user and not always looking to stick it to Joe Q. Public.
IFLYHIGHBYTAI
I hate monopolys, but *somebody* has to be the registrar. Nobody has come up with a realistic better way to handle DNS, so....
Why should network solutions do this at all when they could get sued by millions of people over something as rediculous as domain names? They only work because we choose to use DNS the way we do anyway.
I, for one, say they should get the protection. If they misbehave badly, it's a simple matter to do something about it.
Things like this are tough decisions to make. On one hand, its nice to have centralized administration of registrations. On the other hand, competition encourages better service (faster response time, lower rates, etc.) I for one hope that we see more competition in the future for name registration.
On the whole, I'd say that the situation with phone companies is worse now than before the AT&T breakup. As a monopoly, though, at least AT&T was regulated by the gov't (unlike NSI[now] or Microsoft). Now "free market" companies just all conspire together to drive prices as high as the market will bear. What's the real cost of a phone call anyway? I'll bet it's pennies per hour if that much.
It's obvious that you've never had to deal with them. They are at best, slow!
This about this. Couldn't this have a great impact on those big companies suing for domains that little people own? After all, a company can't sue you for a telephone number. If this federal judge has deemed that domains are more like phone numbers, then how can it be decided that a domain falls under trademark laws?
Just something to think about
asinus sum et eo superbio
asinus sum et eo superbio
in omnibus veritas
Really.
.com, .net, and .org are not your ONLY solutions, what about .us? .ca? What about your country domains? NS is only responsible for a *PART* of the DNS structure, a part that shouldn't even exist.. IMHO.
I've dealt with them MANY times, over MANY years.
I'm not saying nobody can do it better, I'm not even saying they are doing an adequate job.
I AM saying that SOMEONE has to do it. If not them, WHO? Instead of bitching about them and how they run things, suggest an alternative solution to the world so that we may adopt it. believe me, people will be all ears and NS will have little ability to stop a change.
Unfortunately, the DNS system requires a central authority at some level, just like the IANA. In the case of the IANA, there is no presteige attached to network numbers, so nobody bitches. The IANA tries to do things fairly. When it comes to DNS, things are different, as there is so much weight attached to these letters.
also:
For the internet domain names, there needs to be one and _only_ one governing body. I think it should be a not-for-profit organization. NIC has been doing a good job so far, so lets not rock the boat and create a load of confusion.
...Alpha
But no.. that's not quite how it works. .com, .org, .net, .edu, I dunno about .gov and .mil and .int, I think those are elsewhere). There is an agreed-upon convention as to who handles the different TLD's, meaning the country codes. InterNIC has no say in how .ca is run or how .us is run, that is up to the appropriate governing body. The IAB decides what the TLD structure is, don't they? InterNIC is just the registry for *some* of them. It is not up to NSI to decide to add new TLD's or anything like that.. they are just supposed to manage the ones they have. The world is by no means bound to stick to those.
InterNIC handles several of the TLD's (the common ones,
I think it's well past time to stop perpetuating the myth that domain names need to be easily guessed -- this is what directory services are for. The sooner people realize that you can't assume that company.com belongs to Company, Inc., the sooner this lawsuit BS over domain names vs. trademarks will stop. Of course, this may require a technical solution -- perhaps a directory service that fuzzily maps human names onto domain names so that it really doesn't matter what domain name you use.
Domain names should be easily remembered, but this doesn't necessarily mean easily guessed.
I'm sure if I advertised my phone number to people as "1-800-mcdonalds" I'd get a call from a rather large fast-food chain.
The DNS competition gates open in May.
Which makes me wonder, what if 2 parties register the same domain name at 2 different domain name services at the same time? Who gets to keep it?
Ah yes... SAIC where those movers and shakers who have toiled in public service go to double dip... uh I mean retire and cash out their hard earned influence.
NSI is but a cash cow being milked hard by the upper crusty schmucks at SAIC. I wouldn't be surprised to see some influential person on the virge of getting out of public service (to land at a nice coushie job at SAIC headquarters), claim that NSI must be protected as a domain monopoly due to the threat of cyber terriorism and/or in the interest of National Security.
The whole thing will come full circle when NSI becomes the sole key escrow/certificate authority for the postal service (god knows the USPS can't handle it).
I think they will probably stop short of branding "666" into everyone's forhead, though...
On the whole, I'd say that the situation with phone companies is worse now than
before the AT&T breakup.
You don't know what you are talking about. Local phone service is still a local monopoly, and it sucks. At least cells phones offer some competition.
Long distance service is not monopoly, and long distance rates have fallen dramatically. You can get it for 5 cents a minute interstate. In many cases, intrastate calling is more expensive than interstate calling.
It is obvious (to me at least) that the Government of the United States cannot be trusted to properly manage domain names. The Judiciary is merely an adjunct to the Executive branch. Their primary interest is garnering additional power and influence.
So, since we all control which root servers we access, lets just abandon the USA based domain monopoly. I suggest that we all turn to a Swiss based root servers.
Oops, that might not work... wasn't it was a Swiss company, Crypto-AG, that sold to the NSA access to all of the crypto secrets. Hmmm... other ideas?
I hope that post was a joke, otherwise I would hate to see written proof of how stupid people are becoming.
One more time, THE NSA IS NOT THE SAME AS NSI!!! ONE IS A US GOVERNMENT AGENCY, THE OTHER HANDLES DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATIONS FOR CERTAIN TOP LEVEL DOMAINS! NSI IS A BUSINESS!!
You just described DNS. We have DNS so we don't HAVE to type 192.168.50.5 to reach a host and can just type "www.lamewarez.org". DNS IS a directory of names to more complex IP address numbers. You want to further obfuscate it by having ANOTHER directory to index dns names? That's stupid. There should be a better heirarchy in the domain space like: time.mag.com, people.mag.com, etc. Internic should setup second level domains that are cheaper to register in to encourage their use. Instead of blowjobs.xxx we'd just ahve blowjobs.xxx.com. It'd put everything in a nice heirarchy and prevent the flat name space of com, net, etc. from being overloaded.
The larger, more recognized company or the individual with more money and influence of course. ;-) Haven't you taken Capitalism 101 yet?
About 3 years short lived to be exact.
And how do you propose that after the massive switchover to a new set of root servers, that it be managed? How would it be 'better?'
is the cost of the wires. Especially the wires out to remote areas. If we all paid for our share of the infrastructure, the upfront cost would be huge and the incremental cost tiny. LD companies can get away with charging low rattes precisely because they don't have to maintain the local loop from your phone to the CO. LD rates are higher than they would be otherwise because the LD carriers pay the local carriers for bringing calls into the local system.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Network Solutions, Inc. is ANYTHING but a non-profit organization. I'm sorry, but I'd rather not have my domain name registrations subsidize their sad little "GET YOUR OWN DAWT CAWM!!!!" television/magazine advertisements.
I don't know about in the US, but in Canada when Bell lost their monopoly on long distance, the prices fell a lot. Bell's own quality of service also increased.
The judge is wrong. IP addresses are like
telephone numbers. Domain names are like
company names. The DNS is the telephone book.
You use the domain name to lookup the number.
Of course, the domain name is really just a
more memorable handle. There isn't sufficient
categorization to really duplicate the company
name/trademartk arena.
> NSA != NSI
Yeah, but when civil servant X at Fort Mead calls local contractor SAIC honcho Y in DC who rings up company big-wig in San Diego who calls NSI technical forman in Palo Alto... well, the distinction becomes a little blured. It's a pretty short communications chain and you can be damned sure that NSI is not ignorant of the NSA and vica versa.
"NSI IS A BUSINESS!!"
Yeah, well the CIA is just a "business", too. That's why they call it the company.
The Cathloic Church was probably the world's first largest corporation.
The NSA?
Well, they're in the "none of your business" business.
netscape's already done it... it's called smart browsing. I assume that IE has some sort of equivalent "technology" lined up in their brower. They only thing that kept Bill G. from completely suplanting DNS with wins was the fact that naming scheme had become an entrenched meme for which there was no physical entity that could be purchased. Bad boy kasperof (sp?) did a pretty good job of switching huge portions of InterNIC domains over to his AlterNIC.
You know how easy it would be to re-program backbone routers to duplicate packets on port 53 to goto some other port as well? Can you say parallel, redundant system? Probably not.
It's a damned sight easier than you think and has already been done. It's just not been allowed to "catch on". There are two things that keep the current system in place :
the government
massive mindshare
meat-space to cyber-space analogies always fail.
you would have goten extra point of you had mentioned that IPv6 has enough address space to saturate every square meter of this planet, but since you failed to do the analysis that reveals that IPv4 doesn't have enough address space to cover physical, spatial reality to an adquate resolution, I revoke your license to make analogies between address space and physical reality.
There's nothing that says they have to be the *ONLY* root servers. DNS is somewhat more flexible than that. It's perfectly possible to set up alternative roots - look at alternic.
And of course DNS can be replaced - there are other directory schemes in the works.
At best, NSI is attempting to exploit a temporary imbalance. When people wise up - we'll all look like idiots for giving them so much money and pretending there was a reason for it.
Network Solutions Inc. does not have to be a monopoly. Although, you're right about one thing, someone has to have root authority. However you are mistaken about it being NSI.
IANA has the authority over the root NS system and IANA is the organizational point between the people who own root servers. NSI is simply the registrar for the generic TLDs. The duties of NSI can be shared between several different companies without any major conflicts.
I for one can take on the project all by myself and do a much better job then they are, but it's not my purpose in life to monopolize anything, so I'll leave that to our friend Billy boy.
I wonder if MS has ever tried to buy out Network Solutions?
hmmm.
~PanIc~
Dude, this is amerika. Fuck the people if you can make the capitalists richer.
What is the point of having anti-trust and patent laws sitting in the same federal law libraries? Would NSI "monopoly" actually be an issue if they happened to own a patent a critical piece of the DNS protocol? It seems to me that the amount of money involved in certificate registration will shortly surpass domain registration and RSA, Inc. seem to have a legallized monopoly of having their fingers stuck in deep in every CA's pockets.
now that new TLDs being introduced, why not create them in couples, like .shop vs .store, .mall vs .mart whatever, my english is rusty, and let two separate companies maintain them. there you have it: competition.
and internic is slow.
Unfortunately, as stuff like the hassle over pokey.org reveals, maniac lawyers don't currently respect name spaces.
They should, but there's no case law out there that clues them in about it.
As for fuzzy directory services, as advocated upthread: not going to work. They already exist in various forms, including categorized directories like Yahoo (aren't they now charging for favourable placement?) and that RealNames thing, whatever it is.
The problem is that there is more than one fuzzy directory. Trademarks seek to protect exclusivity (within bounds -- yes, a proper domain-name-space should define some of those bounds), and there's only one generally recognized exclusive forum for everyone's precious special words: "your own dawt cawn." It's the only one that everyone's pretty much forced to use (unless, of course, you luck into a snazzy numeric IP and promote that -- there's a trend or subculture waiting to happen, there).
Mind the Gap
DNS is intended to make internet addresses usable by humans, not to make it easy to figure out what the address of Company X's web server is. DNS is *not* a directory service. Directory services allow you to search on real names and other possibly arbitrary attributes, not on one single key that doesn't allow fuzzy matches.