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New DNS Agreement Announcement
gumbo writes "The Commerce Department, ICANN, and NSI have announced their
domain name agreements. " Well, of course, it's written in PR-ese, but AFAIK, it looks as if said parties have resolved their differences, and perhaps will start to some progress take place on the DNS front. Given the recent...disagreements and legal disputes this is a fairly sizeable shift.Interesting note - check out the (re)-opening of WHOIS.
Depends on how you look at it. Which two parties are you worried about here? If it's NSI and some other registry - indeed, any two registries, then the group with the power to enforce its rulings is undoubtedly the group that allocated registry status in the first place - IANA or, these days, its successor.
If NSI (or anyone else) is arguing with the very people who ostensibly hold that authority, and is thus challenging that authority, well that's ugly, and doesn't have a simple answer.
Nay, nay and thrice nay. There remains one central database and, just like all the other zones in the world, one primary root server. Type dig . soa on a UNIX machine and you'll see from the SOA that the primary name server is A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET, run by - surprise - NSI.
The multiple root servers referred to in the document are, by my understanding, the ordinary secondary name servers for the root domain. DNS is neat like that, it allows you to spread the load for efficient bandwidth use, or CPU use, or reliability, or all three.
Same for the .COM, .NET and .ORG servers. Every domain registered in these TLDs must go through the operators of A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. This is what the $9 charge is for. It is rather unfortunate that the operators of the primary server are themselves registering .COM domains, but there weren't no easy way out of that one, 'cos NSI was never gonna give up all its hard work (and revenue stream) that easily.
Dave
[My opinions, not necessarily those of my employer]
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I'm confused by this section in particular:
3.A.i) NSI agrees that it will operate the registry for the Registry TLDs in accordance with this Agreement;
WHY keep NSI as the Registry? It's obviouse that they only want to attempt to find loopholes in the future to make money off of what they consider to me 'Proprietary data'. Granted, this section:
10. Rights in Data. Except as permitted by the Registrar License and Agreement, NSI shall not be entitled to claim any intellectual property rights in data in the registry supplied by or through registrars other than NSI. In the event that Registry Data is released from escrow under Section 7 or transferred to a Successor Registry under Section 22(D), any rights held by NSI as registry in the data shall automatically be licensed on a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, paid-up basis to the recipient of the data.
KINDA deals with the issue.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
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However in the fact sheet, we find the following:
(SNIP!)
WHOIS Data
All accredited registrars would be obligated to provide query-based access to registration data and would be barred from placing conditions upon any legal use of that data, except to prohibit use of the data to enable the transmission of mass unsolicited commercial solicitations via e-mail (spam) and to enable high-speed processes for applying for registrations.
(SNIP!)
So, it is perfectly legal to use WHOIS information for any use, except for registrations and SPAM. Take THAT, NSI!
However, this is immediatly followed by:
(SNIP!)
All accredited registrars also would be required to provide third-party bulk access to registration data (subject to the restrictions discussed above) for an annual fee that may not exceed $10,000. This obligation would remain in effect until it is replaced by a different policy adopted by ICANN or a finding by the Department of Commerce that no individual or entity is able to exercise market power with respect to data used for development of third-party value added products and services.
(SNIP!)
Spam(ers) suck(s)....
Second problem - you're maintaining multiple independent databases. Anybody who's used SQL for more than 10 minutes knows that this is a HUGE data integrity issue. Widget Enterprises decides to register widget.com, so they call up NSI and get the order put in. Meantime Funky Foobar registers widget.com with Fabulous Registration Services. Who wins? There's no way to guarantee this situation won't occur under this system - and even if there was - these organizations have no incentives to share their customers "with the enemy" to prevent it!
I find myself arguing against my better judgement on this one, but I can't see how the current system can support multiple root servers - they'll be constantly out of sync with the others! The solution is, of course, to have only one entity in charge of the database, or divide it up in an organized fashion (Internic gets registrations A-D, Frank Foobar gets E-M, etc).
However, one thing I think we can universally agree on here is that Internic should not be this entity! They're a bloated, insensitive, beaurocratic, and downright stubborn organization. Completely the opposite of what we need to make the root servers function reliably. I wish we could just hold an election and eject them from the DNS Whitehouse by popular vote. :\
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OK, so we all know what the so-called 7 Dirty Words are... we've known ever since we were little children that they are "dirty." But what I have never understood is why they are dirty, besides the fact that someone told us that they are.
:"I just have to bang in one more nail and I'm done with the doghouse"? Then why not use fuck as a synonym, as in: "I just have to fuck in one more nail and I'm done with the doghouse"?
Why is "fuck" a bad word? It is simply a synonym for sex, usually mindless sex. But is not "I fucked Susy" the same as, "I screwed Susy" or "I banged Susy"? If so, then why not add screw and bang to the dirty word list? Is is because screw and bang have other meanings, as in
Yes, it sounds silly, but that's only because fuck is not part of our everyday language, just like the other 6 words. And there's no reason they can't be. The only reason that these words carry negative connotations is because someone told us that they do, not for the reasons that, say, "Satan" has negative connotations.
So what I say is this: Want to get rid of those words that offend people? The easiest way to do that is to make those word inoffensible. Let everyone use them in everyday language and they will lose their shock value. And then those who use them strictly for their shock value will stop using them, and those of us who use them to express ourselves will continue to use them just as we always have and always will.
"I'd like to live in theory, because everything works in theory, in theory." - Can't remember who said this.
Jeez... If $70 for 2 years is too much for you, I'd think that you've got more important things to be spending money on than domains... Much more important than lower domain prices, I'd like to see more top-level domains added, otherwise, no matter how much you're willing to spend, the names you want to register won't be available. This will only get worse if domains get cheaper, because it will be much more justifiable for companies and individuals to speculatively register domains in hopes that someone else will want them.
....I think it's really time for NSI to dump their database and adopt the RIPE whois database format.... it's SO much neater.... and free, too.... :)
Item 10 of the Agreements section of the Registry Agreement says "NSI shall not be entitled to claim any intellectual property rights in data in the registry supplied by or through registrars other than NSI". Note that other than NSI clause. Its clear that NSI will still be able to claim copyright on its database.
That's ridiculous. Just imagine how many domains would have to go down. The Internet would be a mess. And it shuns the hobbyists that the Internet was intended for in the first place.
I think a better idea is something like this: $20 per 2 years for the first domain you or your business owns. $40 per 2 years for the second. Every subsequent domain is double the cost. If you sell or disable a domain, it is still considered as part of the doubling until its 2 years are up. This would make cybersquatting prohibitively expensive, while making domains available to hobbyists.
There's probably all kinds of loopholes in that. Oh well, it's just a hypothetical idea. Due to the nature of competition, it won't happen anyway.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
The registrar license agreement is laid out at:m ents/nsi-rla-28sept99.htm
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/agree
Section 5 has all the fees.
Now I realize that this does open up the possibility for price competition, which was one of the main points of all of this. But it also seems that one of the points was to kill NSI as a monopoly. If every single time a domain is registered, regardless of the registrar, NSI still gets a minumum of $9, I don't see that that has been effectively done. Heck -- NSI could sell domains for $8, a fee that no other registrar would be able to match, and still make money all the way around.
I really don't see how any of this can mean a thing until a 3rd party (ICANN would seem the obvious choice, execept for how much they appear to be bungling everything) maintains the central registry. I would even go so far as to say that there should be a not-for-profit entity created who exists solely to maintain the registry and does nothing else.