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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!
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
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
I thought Inman withdrew himself from candidacy. At least that's what he told us (I also asked him if there were really aliens. He said "no". Made me sad.)
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.
.@.
NSI, in the last 6 months, has become almost unbearable to work with. 2-3 days for host changes to go through. Mistakes in billing (being billed 2x for same domains). The change to the website has made hunting for pertinant information even harder than it was before.
But, ICANNs problems, are a good bit of their own. Why did they have to fly representatives around the world many times? Instead of acting like a private corporation, they spent money as fast as government bureaucrat. Private industry is not going to invest in a company that can't control its own finances properly.
As far as the $1 per domain fee, I have no problem with it, provided it helps create competition for NSI.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
Hey, maybe they used the wrong acronym?
...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
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.