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US Gov't irritated with NSI
Cjoh writes "Apparently Slashdot users aren't the only ones ticked off at the new Internic.net site change. The government is pretty ticked off too." I'd say that NSI recognizes their time is ending, as the switchover to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers draws near. Mmm...I just love crass commercialism!
If enought people complain, email, and call.
They will probably change it
A lot of you seem to be missing an important point here. The government isn't angry because they're trying to make money, they're angry that NetSol is pulling much of the registry information from public view and treating it as if it were proprietary information. They've killed their telnet WHOIS service, killed ftp.internic.net (where most people pick up documents and forms for managing their domain names), made major changes to their existing WHOIS services, and completely obfuscated their web interface to all of that information so you're forced to deal with NetSol as a business rather than a custodian of information.
The WHOIS database has to date been treated as a community resource, but NetSol is making it as proprietary as they can, to suit their own business interests. In the process, they're making our lives extremely difficult by making it nearly impossible to retrieve information about domains and contacts or to retrieve domain name templates and the like to manage domains/contacts by any means other than NetSol's web forms (which many of you will agree are extremely painful when we're used to e-mail templates).
The bottom line is that they've taken information and services that were once very public and widely used and without any warning whatsoever either dropped many of these services altogether or bastardized them to the point where many are all but useless. They did this so that everyone would have to interact with them through a single interface: the Network Solutions corporate web site, where they can now mislead you and try and sell you hundreds of dollars of crap that you don't need. It's all about ethics.
There are other solutions... try http://www.alternic.net.
AlterNIC is a "cool" idea, but it's hardly a viable alternative for anybody right now. AlterNIC domains only work from sites which have added their info to their root servers info.
It's difficult to find any DNS servers that do have the AlterNIC TLDs added in. More importantly, it's even more difficult to find systems configured by default with the AlterNIC TLDs preconfigured.
If you want to use a domain to do business or reach people, "an-overly-long-domain-name.com" will still have a better chance than a nice, short, AlterNIC domain. Why? Because only a trivially small percentage of people will have any chance of reaching your domain unless you have a domain that's in the "standard" list of TLDs.
And if you were brave enough to try and register and 'push' both domains, you'd be running too much of a risk that lots of people would try the AlterNIC domain and give up without trying the 'normal' domain.
It'd be nice if AlterNIC were a viable alternative, but it's currently nowhere close to being that. Too bad.
What's not clear in many of the news reports is that while NSI's monopoly on domain registration will be ending soon with the selection of the four other domain registrars, they will still run the actual central domain registry itself for quite some time -- I believe their contract runs through late 2000.
This means, in effect, that the other registrars will have to give a cut of their proceeds to their competitor NSI.
NSI has proven to be a marginally competent, arrogant, greedy, empire-building bureaucracy.
Something needs to be done.
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Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.