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ICANN Deep in Debt
Milkman Ken writes "It seems that after several months of operating, ICANN is now a million bucks in the hole. Bummer. "
Apparently the transition from the NSI monopoly over .com,
.edu, and .net domain registrations to a competitive
registration environment has been handled so poorly that the whole system
may collapse, at least temporarily, without government
intervention. And I thought the purpose of ICANN was to
get the government out of the domain name registration
business. Oy!
Why not just ditch .com, .net, and .org, and get back to country domains? .ca domain.. it runs nicely. no bullshit. You can't register 100's of domains, you can't horde them.
Like the
You can register a domain if you have a business/organization/something else to attach it to. Period. You can't register dozens.
You can register enough to give you a domain name to give your services through. period.
I agree completely. .com. .ca.
But the thing is, nothing is stopping anyone from using the geographic domains... they are just all in a fuss over
I'm not. if I want a domain, it'll be under
Well, can't disagree with the fact that CEOs are overpaid.
But the rest doesn't really hold water. You can't really blame them spending money on lawyers, as most of their legal action has been because NSI (being a rational business entity) doesn't want to forsake it's position at the top. They start suing. Maybe ICAAN should have looked harder for some pro bono lawyers, but it seems like it would be pretty hard to come by in their position.
So that leaves the oft-maligned topic of the travel expenses. A number of people have commented on this, saying it's absurd, etc. But for god's sake, think for a moment here people. They're trying to develop a system of open competition -- that means it's not necessarily confined to the US. i.e. there's a LOT of capital available overseas. They went looking for it, and had to go looking for it even more actively once the NSI thing really got underway. You're all acquainted with how the business works, if you're trying to push your product, you're going to have to go where the money is. That's sales, and even a non profit needs to find a way to support itself.
How in the hell did NSI sneak in and get so much power? The people working there must be more assaholic than mircosoft. No way does it cost $70 a year to point a domain name to a few nameservers. It should be like $5 max to pay for the machines that get the query for the lookup and the bandwidth. They must have millons of names stored on a single machine. Here's a quote from the pages of the *free* .us domain:
h tml
"While each locality domain manager is responsible for setting his own fees
or billing practices and deciding what is 'small', it does seem that what
the Internic charges should be considered to be 'large'. Some of these
companies are charging $10 per year."
-- http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/usdnr/usdom-overview.
Although I'm all for it and I think just about everyone else is, I don't think it's possible to start our own free or reasonably cost TLD. NSI thinks the list of existing names is all theirs and the only way we could get a hang of them is by having some sort of a police raid.
Same thing goes for IP addresses too btw, the prices are way ludirious. A block of 65,000 or so breaks down to costing $0.03 a piece per month. My ISP (@Home) wants to charge me $8. What the hell is that?
Something has got to change. Non-profit orgs should not be able to run themselves a million dollars into the hole. They need to fire some staff and get JOBS instead of sitting around and hiring their friends so they don't have to get a real job and can all just slack around with their unearned/undesereved power.
~Kevin
Oh well. I'd settle for the new domains any day. :-/
I'm not going to say that i fully comprehend what are the issues here.But this i do understand - the root servers originally belonged of all people to the DoD and when they were transferred the ppl who used to run it came attached (does remind one of IE 4). Thier mentality is the same as that of govt. people all over - it does'nt matter how well it runs or how efficient it is it runs ok so dont mess with it and dont mess with us. In India we had till 6 months back only one ISP a govt. company - that meant waiting 25 mins to login & to stay connected for 5 mins.Today we have 20 ISP's and suddenly i have a new digtial dial in line, i can stay connected for hours on end & i have plenty of other things. Toss out ICANN & InterNIC get everyone in let's see what happens.
And God created Linux on the 7th Day.
NSI Closes Top Level Domain Servers
NSI challenged over "obscene" domains
NSI Modifies "whois" agreement
Other related "alternative" DNS and related resources which I have seen mentioned here on /. or elsewhere: Not the European Union: eu.org (free domain names), The Internet Namespace Cooperative (provides alternative to mainstream root servers), The .us domain (an often overlooked alternative for those in the united states), Granite Canyon (free primary/secondary DNS). eu.org recently got very efficient and cleared a backlog of domains; Granite Canyon has had a lot of complaints about spotty service.
Suggested other readings: In whose domain, Exclusion and Coordination in Cyberspace, for the advanced user; Ask Mr. DNS and the FAQ for comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains.
Fuck Slashdot
or for a lengthy critique of ICANN see Gordon Cook's report on ICANN at http://www.cookreport.com/icannregulate.shtml
Wasn't Bobby Inman handed NSI as a consolation prize after the Senate refused to confirm him as CIA Director? NSI was used to hand out patronage jobs, just like at the sanitation dept in big cities.
The minute I read Esther Dyson was involved in ICANN, I knew something would go wrong. Her books are awful. Some of the others have published incredible things, too.
I'm beginning to like NSI.
Guess it depends on whether political pressure is better than economic pressure. In this case you have a politically appointed economic monopoly.
Well, for one thing, it's been tried (and failed) before.
Next, there's this nasty matter of geeks thinking things up in labs while being blissfully ignorant of the greed, politics and jive-schuck of reality. Or, maybe they were all too aware of it, in which case, they should rounded up and shot.
The crux of the matter is that any naming system that achives wide spread acceptance will rely on the cooperation and agreement of those who use it.
The current system seems to have gained technical mind share and user acceptance before the systems evolving reality was groked by geek population at large.
The fact of the matter is that someone has to be in control, or there will be no consistancy, leading to degeneratopm into meaninglessness of the name-number mapping.
It's good to keep some prospective. DNS/bind isn't the only name-number mapping system to come along in 50+ years of computing. It is the first to recieve wide spread exposure and general inclusing in the collective mindshare of the public.
Things could be a lot worse. I mean, would you prefer to see an internet wide, all Microsoft solutison? I didn't think so. On the other hand, given my first hand experience with NSI's parent company, I can pretty much guarantee you that things are going to get much worse before they get better. After all, whatelse would you expect from a bunch of retired government bureaucrats dealing themselves in on a goverment project spinn-off to the private sector.
All it will really take for big change is for NSI to become unprofitable; they'll get dropped like a hot brick, perhaps bringing about real change at the top level... but I doubt it.
I was with SAIC when they acquired NSI. Since it's an "employee owned company", they had to at least pretend to offer ALL employees the chance to buy NSI stock (the acquisition was very close to the IPO, if I remember correctly).
In short it was total bullshit. Even Regional managers who put in requests to buy limited shares of stock were left out in the cold. You had to know someone who had luch or played golf with ex-presidents sons' on a regular basis.
Same as it ever was, the people at the top constantly fsck those at the middle and bottom. Needless to say, I don't work for that particular "employee owned company" any more. Neither do any of my co-workers who worked through that particular ars-fscking. Nor would I recomend employment with SAIC to anyone...
The purpose of ICANN was to ensure that the government got to run the transition. Keeping government out was what CORE had in mind.
I looked into getting something under .us, but information was relatively hard to come by, compared to InterNIC. What's more, they seemed to want to tie names to a geographic location. I am not tied to a location; I will probably move and would feel silly with a domain named after a place I used to live. Besides, my server is hundreds of miles away from my residence.
Actually, though, it is rather silly that I got a .org for a single individual. .pers would be more appropriate, if it existed. I guess back in the days when reason was in charge, nobody imagined that people would live in ``houses'' with their own ``addresses'' as opposed to high-rise apartments like mediaone.net and skyscrapers like ibm.com.
I sure hope the world finds a reasonable solution to the DNS squabbles. Why doesn't IPv7 just scrap the binary address and let routers do string lookups? IP headers should be like HTTP headers, a few lines of text followed by a blank line. Your kernel grows by 1k or so, but your resolver and the whole DNS become just bad memories.
That many people feared would take over the Internet. Everyone thought it would be Microsoft, but they only buy money makers, NSI has a leash on EVERYONE. From what I've read of their practices it sure seems like they are just a bunch of nerds who have way too much power. I dont know how they ever ended up with the TLD contract, but it should be revoked. It's horrible paying 70$ for two years, then if you need to change the address of a name server or have it point somewhere, they sit on their asses and take their sweet time. One would think that 70$ would be enough to pay for the domain for several years, considering the volume of domains registered every week. I know other people have suggested it but i will too just to show I'm in favor of it. A set of free TLD's owned by a non profit organization. Instead of trying to get support from the community at large we could work on the linux community, both commercial and personal, for support. It would even be pretty nice publicity for linux: "New TLD root servers run on Linux"
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
If this non-profit organization would conduct its business in a manner reflecting its lack of funding, it wouldn't have this problem.
For example, using things like the Net to hold teleconferences, instead of spending $10,000 or so to hold one.
.@.
I have a hard time believing the average IP packet is so small. Can you back that up?
Anyway, a text header wouldn't have to be much bigger than what we use now. If you really want to scrunch it, we could leave all fields the same except replace the host addrs with (variable length) host names. "slashdot.org\0" is actually shorter than the 16-byte IPv6 address that's to come. Plus you'd save out on all that DNS traffic.
No, the only technical reason I think people really wouldn't go for this is the novelty of variable-length stuff at such a low level. Maybe Cisco routers would cost more, or maybe some hardware-level optimizations would become impossible. But we're going to get HTTP request parsing in the kernel before too long, so I don't consider it an unreasonable idea.
Of course, there are non-technical reasons to oppose such a change, such as costs of transition and NSI's fudmaking ability.
check out http://www.alternic.com for a couple of those - to get the sites you'll need to specify their NDS server. trivial matter, and they have step by step instructions.
you might enjoy doing a lookup on c/net about AlterNick, seems the guy running it is pretty colorful - used to be a tow truck driver, and twice he hacked InterNic's DNS and redirected traffic to his site. Their story ends wth him returning from Canada to plead guilty, but no further info - anybody got details on what happened next?
Well, the $70 is just for the registration. Just to point the root servers to the domain name server that serves queries for your domain. The $49 "setup" fee that the other registrars charge you is to host your domain, i.e. actually set your domain up so that whenever someone types in your domain, it queries the alternative registrar's servers to find out what IP address your site is at. It's just a scam (excuse me, product extension) to get people to buy more at one stop. Kinda like the "register all three, .com, .org, and .net!" attitude.
> After all, what else would you expect from a bunch of retired government bureaucrats
> dealing themselves in on a goverment project spin-off to the private sector.
Ah, okay, that's why this whole mess is happening. I understand now.
Looks to me like NSI's scare tactics and general inteansigence are working...they may succeed in keeping their monopoly at this rate. If ICANN succeeds, NSI loses, and there's no reason for NSI to cooperate in their own demise.
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Hmmm ICANN Gone Pear Shaped?, i would have never have guessed it, well i would have but i was to busy doing stuff....
"In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king"
Or is this simply not to be alowed?
Hey, maybe they used the wrong acronym?
Internet related, in debt quick and much so...
When's their IPO?
That's why I asked in question #11 why they have not been brought to court by the administration. This change from a government sanctioned monopoly to privatization was a decision by our (USA) government. If NSI is taking actions to delay or undermine that process, it seems to me that we could take them to court.
...when you look at NSI's practices.
NSI has a habit of double-billing, 'losing' registrations, 'losing' payments, 'not recieving' the faxes of the canceled checks and so on.
Think it's a load of bull? Guess again; I used to deal with that on a daily basis. Was working at an ISP that handled some 200+ domains for customers. And on a near weekly basis, one of those domains would be put "On Hold" pending "payment." Even though the whois database showed that it had been paid for and registered less than 9 months ago.
Then there's NSI's policy on domain name conflicts. They'll give whoever pays them more the domain. Typical practice. But wait, there's MORE!
For those of you who didn't take note of it, NSI has challenged ICANN's authority over them, saying that they are above ICANN and can basically refuse to allow ICANN access to anything whatsoever. They're paying lawyers ungodly amounts of money to do this. And congress is *REVIEWING* it last I heard. What does that mean? Means another 10 years of NSI if they get their way. At the least.
NSI was a nothing company before they got the government contract. I don't even know how they got it. They were in the hole, they had very few employees, and now they're a multimillion dollar corporation with I'd guesstimate well over 250 employees, raking in millions of dollars of profit every quarter.
Let there be absolutely *NO* question that NSI has done MORE than abuse their monopoly; they have exploited it to lengths which have NEVER been seen before. They're worse than AT&T was. Worse than Microsoft. They have a 100% monopoly, they have absolute and total control over every domain they sell, and the government holds them above the law as they blatantly violate anti-trust law after anti-trust law.
Hell, NSI has even supposedly gone as far as to attack the one existing competitor, AlterNIC, in the past. As if that wasn't enough, to this day, they have refused to allow AlterNIC near the precious root servers.
And now, they're forcing ICANN to spend what little funding it has on lawyers, so that they can attempt to do what they were *CREATED* to do. The EXPRESS PURPOSE of their existence. And they have to fight with NSI about it. Wasting thousands every day.
The only question that remains now is how much longer will NSI get to abuse their power? The way things look, it may be for the rest of our lives. This is what happens when you give one little company a government sanctioned monopoly. You get one big clusterfuck that costs the people who have to deal with it millions upon millions every single year.
And you thought Microsoft was bad. At least they don't tell you that you have to pay for Windows 98 again, right after you bought it.
-RISCy Business | Rabid System Administrator and BOFH
your company here.
shelby != ford
I believe ICANN was setup as a non-profit organization to oversee the other registrars which would be for-profit. It's kinda hard to sell stocks or bonds for a non-profit organization, as by definition they would not have any dividends, right?
You think ICANN couldn't raise a little money if they sold some stock or bonds? Investment funding, that's just what stocks and bonds are used for.
The global Top Level Domains are big waste of all our time.
.FI or .TW or who-knows-where. Making DNS law stop at geographic boundaries keeps both them and us happy.
The people crying out for ".firm" or ".amusing" or ".bookseller" are missing the point. Truely global classification systems don't work -- pick something arbitrary (and ISO country codes are definitely arbitrary) and then stick with it.
The most succesful attempts at classifying general "stuff" are probably the library class mark schemes. However there are still at least two competing schemes, totally incompatible and they're both ARBITRARY. We could learn from that.
If there had never been any gTLDs (not even *.INT, which is a farce anyway) we wouldn't be having this discussion. Making DNS a local issue in each geographical area would reduce the pressure (except maybe in the litigious US of A) on technical organisations to make political decisions.
You may be wondering why I show so much faith in national government. Do I really think they have our best interests at heart? Of course not. But I do know that they have poor co-ordination. If the UK government tries to stop the Fulchester Underwater Canoing Klubb (www.fuck.co.uk) they'll just spring up in
Nick.
Is NSI unbeatable under the current set of assumptions? How many people outside of NSI really understand the whole situation? I know some stuff about DNS and the other Internet protocols, and I have registered a .org domain, but when I read these articles, I don't grasp the problem enough to begin thinking of a solution. Surely the majority of lawmakers and business leaders lack even my hazy understanding of the politics involved, let alone the technical issues.
Will anyone write a thorough description of the real power structure behind NSI, why (or if) it is a Bad Thing, and what might be done about it? Is NSI evil? Can one boycott it? How many of the world's nameservers give access to funky TLDs such as AlterNIC's .ltd? Are there any databases of .com/.org/.net other than NSI's? Would it be possible/feasible to create one and let people use it as their DNS server? How much effort would this involve? Could the new database's contents be made non-proprietary? Would such a project amount to any more than a mute protest of NSI's monopoly?
What about government involvement? The CNN article claims, ``it will be unpopular among Internet users for ICANN to accept government money.'' Is this true? Although no one would have believed it 10 years ago (or whenever NSI got its contract), the DNS is one of the most vital pieces of world infrastructure today. Should any independent company or organization be in control? If not, who should control it? Governments? Treaties? International law?
I've got a lot more questions than answers, I'm afraid.
Let's create a .free TLD and create root level servers that would handle everything for .free and forward everything else to the 'default' root servers. Then we'll make people use the new servers (and provide a web proxy for the ones who can't).
RFC.
I certainly have my problems with how ICANN is running, but those problems can be fixed.
What is going to be hard to fix is NSI's emerging effort to take the DNS private. And if and when they do, then a lot of those net-industry "critics" of ICANN are going to gladly join NSI in the forthcoming industry cartel.
And that is a movie I don't want to see.
-------
Bill Gates Is My Evil Twin.
After visiting many of the "private" vendors'
sites probably NSI is better. Many if not
most of those "private" vendors charge the
$70 for 1st 2 years (domain name) PLUS
a fee like $49 setup. What a crock! I thought
that's what the $70 was for: adminisration.
IMHO, a childish monopoly is better than a gov't run committee.I -have-to-give-them-a-job-but-whom-I-want -to-keep-at-a-distance-from-my-office.
A monopoly is less likely to be a tool for personal political gain.
A monopoly is less likely to lose funding to the knee-jerk-legisation-of-the-week types.
A monopoly is less likely to staffed with those-people-who-helped-out-my-campaign-a-lot-so-
Don't get me wrong. A childish monopoly is a bad thing, but consider the alternative...
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
and here i thought private industry would be more efficient then the evil gov't. the nsi and icann seem to both be rather annoying entities, and yet when the gov't ran it it all seemed to go quite smoothly.
maybe it's because gov't agencies and companies can both be run by annoying people that we sometimes get bad service rather then what type of framework offers the service.
perhaps that's getting too complex for this debate, political things always work better with short mindless statements...
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
- .firm
- .web
- .shop
- .arts
- .rec
- .info
- .nom
When and where will I be able to register?The Internet belongs to the people, so why not create our own free top level domain? Let's put an end to the NSI monopoly, and to hell with their exorbitant Internet tax.
I don't know if this help or muddy the waters. ICANN is a non-profit organization and cannot raise money by issuing stocks. NSI has fought with ICANN from day one. Right now the big thing is that NSI has refused to agree to the ICANN policies that spell out the rules for being an official domain name registerer.
NSI has been under federal anti-trust investigations over the past few years. However, NSI has essentially beaten back all challenges. There was the issue about the registration fee being an unconstitutional tax. There was the issue about the main database of registered names. There been several more charges against NSI. The EU has also been investigating NSI.
There was an interesting article about NSI in the Washington Post a few months ago. The core group of ppl that work at NSI have a deep seated interest in the value of their stock. During the past two years, NSI stock has ranged in price from about $15 to $260 (now around $80). Needless to say, a few ppl became instant millionaires only to see their value shrink considerably.
Yeah, I got a .us domain a couple years ago. The whole system is just beautiful, in my eyes. I really had -no- idea what I was doing when trying to set up DNS servers and the like, the peeps who filed the reg for me helped me out over the phone and everything, and then a one time $10 charge.
.US. Were that done we'd probably see a lot more foreign investment to boot.
.us are closing up. It was set up to be a decenteralized system, but some larger ISPs started snapping up a lot of locales and leverging their power. Since there was no compitition (except from internic), they could start charging whatever they wanted... places like san diego have a $40 startup charge now.
And when you think about it, it's much more logically laid out. I say scrap com, org, etc and expand
On the down side, I'm under the impression that the glory days of
(sigh)