The headline is a bit misleading. What NTIA did was withdraw the RFP. The IANA contract still stays with ICANN (contract extended until the end of September), and there will likely be another RFP.
However, it is indeed a big rebuke, because in the NTIA Notice they stated that " we are cancelling this RFP because we received no proposals that met the requirements requested by the global community" which is another way of saying that ICANN has not been acting in the global public interest.
Thanks for accepting the article. ICANN is still reviewing the proposal. If folks share my concerns, please do send them your comments by emailing registryservice@icann.org (from the top of ICANN's Registry Services Evaluation Process page). You can view comments by others here. EasyDNS has submitted their concerns too.
At a minimum, they should open up a formal 30 day public comment period that is widely advertised, in order that domain name registrants can be heard.
ICANN has really dropped the ball on new TLDs. Folks like Tim Berners-Lee were explicitly against new top level domains. The W3 even wrote a position paper New Top Level Domains Considered Harmful. They used the examples of.xxx and.mobi, but the reasoning applied to all new TLDs.
ICANN hand-picked economists to examine the costs and benefits, and their own experts could not come up with anything close to definitive as to whether the benefits exceeded the costs. ICANN is supposed to act in the public interest, and only approve policies where the net benefit (i.e. benefits MINUS costs) are positive. ICANN doesn't even know the *sign* (i.e. positive or negative) of this policy change's impact, let alone know the magnitude. Their pathetic reports didn't even attempt to put a monetary figure on the costs vs. the benefits, i.e. are we talking about millions of dollars of benefits, billions, etc? However, many individuals and companies commented in each of the relevant comment periods pointing out how there would be grave consequences, as there would be huge costs associated with such a change. As is typical, ICANN ignored these concerns, attempting to win a war of attrition, to "tire out" opponents.
Fortunately, the US Department of Commerce / NTIA may not renew its contract with ICANN. There is a pending Notice of Inquiry regarding the renewal. I would encourage people to send comments, to voice their concerns about the bad policymaking from ICANN.
ICANN is also about to renew the.NET agreement with VeriSign despite numerous comments in opposition. VeriSign will be allowed to continue to raise prices by 10% per year, despite falling technology costs, and without facing a competitive tender process (which would certainly result in much lower prices for consumers). The US Department of Justice should investigate both ICANN and VeriSign for anti-trust violations, as consumers are being harmed by these no-bid contracts. Toll-free numbers costs less than $1.50 per year at the wholesale level, yet.com/net/org fees are above $7/yr, due to lack of regular competitive tender processes.
Why has ICANN been consistently making decisions against the public interest? The reason is obvious -- it has been captured by the registries and registrars, who only care about selling more and more domain names, even if they are not needed (i.e. "defensive registrations"). They don't care about confusing users or making it harder to navigate the internet.
They're not "cybersquatters" but you're giving them that label because you are upset that they own something that you want for cheap. They registered and paid for the domain name (they're not getting something for free), before your business even started. Since you have no relevant trademarks with priority rights (i.e. created and used before the domain name, and in the same class of goods/services) that they're violating, they can do anything they want with their domain name. Just because you feel you might be better able to use a domain name then they can doesn't mean you are entitled to anything. There are lots of empty pieces of land in most places that do not have skyscrapers on them. It doesn't mean that I can compel the owners of the land to sell them to me at below market value.
Microsoft owns the domain name juice.com, for example, and currently redirects it to a search page on bing.com (visit www.juice.com and you'll see). Similarly, CNET has owned Kids.com for years, and it is currently a parked page. Microsoft acquired bing.com years ago, before they launched their new site. Smart companies plan ahead, and register domain names well before their product launches. Your company was not smart enough to do the same.
Your company has choices. It can coin a new term ("google" wasn't a dictionary term, but was a typo, when the Stanford boys registered Google.com). Or, it can get real funding, and acquire a domain name that is within its financial means.
In a comment to a question I posted for the CircleID article, Paul Vixie posted a nice and simple test that people can run to see how vulnerable they are:
dig porttest.dns-oarc.net in txt
FAIR or GOOD means you're ok, but POOR (which is the result I got) means you should be worried.
Q: Would making documentaries offer a superior risk/reward ratio compared to feature films, especially if someone is just starting out? What suggestions would you offer to succeed in documentaries?
I'm astonished. How is this any different from the postal service ripping out all the magazine ads and replacing them with their own ads before they get delivered to your house?
With the "deep packet inspection" technologies, conceivably ISPs can just replace, in real-time, our Google AdSense pubisher IDs with their own. Or, they could simply replace the Google AdSense Javascript snippet with something else.
I would hope that Google and other large advertising networks lead the charge against this, and that they are not partnered with any ISPs involved in this activity. A large class action lawsuit on behalf of publishers might slap sense into any ISPs using this "enhancement" to steal revenues from legitimate publishers.
I was the author of the CircleID article, and had submitted a slightly less technical version on Slashdot on Wednesday evening. It got rejected within 10 minutes.:) But, thankfully one can't keep a newsworthy story down, and there's coverage all over the place now.
Please do post your comments to the official ICANN comments archive. ICANN will send you an email to authenticate your email address, so you'll need to click the link in that email for it to be confirmed (otherwise, your comments won't show up in the archives, but will instead be junked as spam).
No matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it's still a pig. My lips won't kiss that pig.
The revisions that were made to the proposed ICANN-VeriSign settlement were extremely minor, and the staff has, intentionally or unintentionally, misread and mischaracterized the public comments on the prior settlement proposal.
One of the most misleading lines was in the analysis of public comments, where someone (no staffer signed their name to the document, to take responsibility for it) summarized the feelings toward price increases as "Regarding registrants, there was some expression that there might be some negative effects due to the potential price increases, but, the majority across constituencies expressed that the increase in cost was negligible when compared to the value of a domain name registration." Most registrants, who are ultimately paying the bills for ICANN, registries, registrars, etc, were solidly against the price aspect of the proposed settlement. As I mentioned in my prior comments at:
competitive bidding for the.com registry would have brought the wholesale cost of.com domains to the $2/domain per year level, approximately, a 66%+ reduction in costs. Yet ICANN considers it a negotiating victory for consumers when there's no cost reduction at all, but instead an average price INCREASE per year of 4.7% (i.e. 2/3rds of 7%). In technology-based industries, price REDUCTIONS, due to economies of scale, are far more typical, yet ICANN somehow feels price increases are desirable. It makes no sense.
The only possible reason one could conclude that price INCREASES are the norm would be if the majority of VeriSign's costs are not technological. If the majority of VeriSign's costs consist of wining and dining ICANN staff at exotic locations around the world, I might begin to see your point....
The sale of traffic data provisions is unacceptable. Notice that the language specifically permits access to data on "non existent domain names" for "promoting the sale of domain names". In other words, if example.com is getting a lot of type-in traffic, and is unregistered, VeriSign could sell that data, thereby promoting low-cost cybersquatting (since a large percentage of those types of names are TM infringements, as various independent analysts of SiteFinder concluded. Instead of monetizing that traffic itself, VeriSign will monetize it indirectly. Furthermore, VeriSign will be able to see the traffic to individual domain names (e.g. to know whether eBay.com is getting more activity than Amazon.com, or more importantly, whether yourdomain.com is getting more DNS activity than yourcompetitor.com).
With regards to Appendix W requirements related to R&D expenditures (including universal WHOIS), there continues to be a total lack of transparency, due to ICANN's continuing refusal to disclose the annual reports of VeriSign. I did a search of the 2001 main agreement at:
and the word "confidential" appears a total of ZERO times. The number of times the word "private" is also ZERO. Yet, somehow, we are led to believe that ICANN can't release these annual reports? Why? Yet,
This sounds like a smart move, to segment their markets, and thereby avoid losing business to some of the low-priced alternatives. Assuming they don't cannibalize their higher margin customers, it should be a net positive.
I think AOL might want to come out with a version that boots directly from a CD, and doesn't rely on Windows, etc. This would be a nice turnkey system for those who are not very familiar with PCs. Using technology from Knoppix, I bet they could squeeze in everything into a bootable CD.
What might get VeriSign into very big trouble is the admission, in the press release that "ICANN is using anecdotal and isolated issues to attempt to regulate non-registry services, but in the interests of further working with the technical community we will temporarily suspend Site Finder."
I think this is a brand new tactic on the part of VeriSign, to categorize it as a "non-registry service".
That seems to escalate things to a new level, in that it seems to be an admission of abusing their monopoly in the Registry for the provision
of a NON-REGISTRY SERVICE.
It had been my understanding that previously their position would have been that it would have been categorized as a Registry service, but one
that didn't need approval due to it being "free" (i.e. needs no contract amendment). However, giving advantage for the provision of a non-registry service seems to be MUCH WORSE. Suppose that NON-REGISTRY SERVICE was a REGISTRAR SERVICE, for example, and VeriSign abused its
monopoly to advantage one of their partners in that space? Just like WLS.
Clearly, VeriSign's abusive and monopolistic business practises need to be examined at the highest levels of government and by regulators.
P.S. Keep up the pressure, by supporting the Stop VeriSign DNS Abuse petition -- 17,000 signatures and counting.
This would ruin the authoritative nature of DNS. It's not supposed to be an "approximation" system. Doing the above would cause more problems than it would solve, as it would leave to misdirected emails, misdirected websurfers, and big privacy and security issues.
Failed lookups are a good thing. It empowers the end-user to decide how to best handle those errors. Shifting that power to the registry (in the case of Verisign's Sitefinder), or to BIND (hosted by the ISP) would remove power from end-users.
Register.com might be the next one to file suit, given their strongly-worded letter which was sent to VeriSign and ICANN.
The Stop Verisign DNS Abuse Petition is still going strong, with 15,000 signatures. ICANN still hasn't had the sense to post it on their website, though. They have a public forum at the very bottom of the page here at least, with 64 comments (many from the petition site, as we're giving folks the option to forward those along to ICANN too).
It's now here having been Slashdotted last time....on a better server this time, though (we hope!), so be gentle....
It's good to see that PIR is taking the high road. If.com/net are ever redelegated, I'd much rather they run it, than someone who would be looking for every opportunity to squeeze out nickels and dimes ($100 million/yr!) from the internet community, via abuse of their monopoly. Or, perhaps a corporation with a solid reputation (maybe IBM?) would step up, to replace Verisign.
I'm glad the IAB took that position. Hopefully Verisign will do the right thing....but, given their history, they probably won't.
We started a petition on Tuesday, and it got more than 16,000 signatures, before the site apparently got Slashdotted or something. We had to move it to a new server, with backups of the first 10K signatures. The new link is:
We also made announcements here and here, including having sent a hardcopy of the first 10,000 signatures to ICANN via FedEx. Thanks for all the support!
There are for profit links on Slashdot, too! The big difference, though, between this and Verisign's planned abuse, is that we *pay* for our domain names, via registration. If someone pays their $10/yr, there's less of an issue. I and Slashdot and others aren't squatting on other people's typos using free domains.
Furthermore, as a registry, Verisign isn't a party to UDRP, but instead would be cybersquatting on *all* domain typos, requiring lawsuits by each relevant domain holder for abuse of their trademark rights.
We already have the example of WLS in Verisign abusing its monopoly (and ICANN not stopping this abuse -- see www.stopwls.com).
Planning to monetize all typos by rewriting DNS error codes to instead point to itself (i.e. instead of returning error codes, it will no longer return errors, but instead bring the surfer to Verisign money-making pages) is yet another example of an abusive monopolist. See here:
"Some organizations have shown a propensity to make technical changes happen and then ask for permission later," Afilias's Mohan said. "Given the economics of it, I think that's what will happen here."
Given the huge technical standards that Verisign would be violating, as well as the Intellectual Property and economic issues (e.g. a typo of one letter of your domain name could send a client to a search engine listing your competitor as #1, or worse; John Zuccarini is in JAIL for his typo-squatting!), can someone in the Names Council, or the ICANN Board that has a spinal column please pre-empt this Verisign move by forbidding unilateral action of such a nature by means of a vote of some kind, through the introduction of a motion?
From the comments at ICANNWatch when this abuse last came up, perhaps the way to frame the motion is "gTLD Registry operators WILL return NXDOMAIN for ALL DNS queries for which where there is not a REGISTERED domain name." Period.
Once you start tampering with things at the DNS level, as Verisign is intending to do, you threaten the security and stability of the
internet, as I think Vint Cerf properly recognizes (being right at least half of the time; bad call on WLS, but the courts and the US
governmet will take care of that one eventually). For a company whose slogan is "The Value of Trust", Verisign makes a mockery of the
caretaker role it has been given as guardian of the com/net registries. I trust them as much as I trust John Zuccarini.
If the US government had a problem with Microsoft embedding the Internet Explorer browser into its operating system, what will they think given Verisign has an even greater monopoly when it comes to DNS resolution? The power should belong to the users, who should have the choice (through their own software) how to resolve errors. That's why we have technical standards. Making that decision for them, by BREAKING technical standards and the applications that rely on those standards, as Verisign plans to do, and making loads of $$$$ while doing it, smacks of an abusive father-knows-best monopolist. Verisign is the father you wish you never had! Calling it a "service" adds
insult to injury, as they did with WLS, especially when it's a MONOPOLY service, for which one has no choice. When you make a typo for a telephone call, does the 1-800 operator (AT&T, MCI, Neustar?) start playing paid jingles for your competitors, instead of telling you that
you misdialled via a message?
Ultimately, folks know Verisign wants to milk every last penny out of its monopolies, and doesn't care who they have to step on to do so.
Take a look at Games.TV which shows:
games.tv is available and can be registered immediately for $100,000.00/year
to understand what Verisign's goals are (Verisign runs.tv). Do you think you really own your.com domains? What price would Verisign like to charge you for your domains?? Once they wipe out some registrars through WLS, and other monopoly abuses, who will be left to stop them?
I agree with you that there needs to be at least some confirmation that the requests aren't fraudulent. Perhaps there can be a "white list" of known law enforcement agencies? Those on the white list, e.g. FBI, NSA, CIA, RCMP (Canadian), etc. would get expedited access, whereas those not on the white list would need further proof of their identity, to ensure that the requests are indeed bona fide.
If a competing auction site were to be setup with greater privacy, and was successful, more power to it. As long as eBay fully discloses its policies, then there shouldn't be any whining about it -- folks are free to vote with their mouse, and click on another auction site
Personally, I think it's positive that eBay will cooperate with bona fide investigations, and not force them to jump through hoops (at taxpayer expense!) to get the data they need to do their job.
It's not as though medical records are being stored on eBay -- just one's bids on beanie babies, or other baubles.
I'd love to see a holographic keyboard, where we can just move our fingers in the air, and the motions would be scanned in by a motion detector or something.
Although, we'd probably have voice recognition (or mind-reading!) before that ever came to fruition....
Slashdot Mirror
I thought I would miss Google Reader, but NewsBlur (see http://newsblur.com/) has been a great replacement, and has actually improved my workflow.
The headline is a bit misleading. What NTIA did was withdraw the RFP. The IANA contract still stays with ICANN (contract extended until the end of September), and there will likely be another RFP.
However, it is indeed a big rebuke, because in the NTIA Notice they stated that " we are cancelling this RFP because we received no proposals that met the requirements requested by the global community" which is another way of saying that ICANN has not been acting in the global public interest.
Thanks for accepting the article. ICANN is still reviewing the proposal. If folks share my concerns, please do send them your comments by emailing registryservice@icann.org (from the top of ICANN's Registry Services Evaluation Process page). You can view comments by others here. EasyDNS has submitted their concerns too.
At a minimum, they should open up a formal 30 day public comment period that is widely advertised, in order that domain name registrants can be heard.
Actually, Amazon now offers instances with GPUs. See their page on High Performance Computing for more details.
ICANN has really dropped the ball on new TLDs. Folks like Tim Berners-Lee were explicitly against new top level domains. The W3 even wrote a position paper New Top Level Domains Considered Harmful. They used the examples of .xxx and .mobi, but the reasoning applied to all new TLDs.
ICANN hand-picked economists to examine the costs and benefits, and their own experts could not come up with anything close to definitive as to whether the benefits exceeded the costs. ICANN is supposed to act in the public interest, and only approve policies where the net benefit (i.e. benefits MINUS costs) are positive. ICANN doesn't even know the *sign* (i.e. positive or negative) of this policy change's impact, let alone know the magnitude. Their pathetic reports didn't even attempt to put a monetary figure on the costs vs. the benefits, i.e. are we talking about millions of dollars of benefits, billions, etc? However, many individuals and companies commented in each of the relevant comment periods pointing out how there would be grave consequences, as there would be huge costs associated with such a change. As is typical, ICANN ignored these concerns, attempting to win a war of attrition, to "tire out" opponents.
Fortunately, the US Department of Commerce / NTIA may not renew its contract with ICANN. There is a pending Notice of Inquiry regarding the renewal. I would encourage people to send comments, to voice their concerns about the bad policymaking from ICANN.
ICANN is also about to renew the .NET agreement with VeriSign despite numerous comments in opposition. VeriSign will be allowed to continue to raise prices by 10% per year, despite falling technology costs, and without facing a competitive tender process (which would certainly result in much lower prices for consumers). The US Department of Justice should investigate both ICANN and VeriSign for anti-trust violations, as consumers are being harmed by these no-bid contracts. Toll-free numbers costs less than $1.50 per year at the wholesale level, yet .com/net/org fees are above $7/yr, due to lack of regular competitive tender processes.
Why has ICANN been consistently making decisions against the public interest? The reason is obvious -- it has been captured by the registries and registrars, who only care about selling more and more domain names, even if they are not needed (i.e. "defensive registrations"). They don't care about confusing users or making it harder to navigate the internet.
They're not "cybersquatters" but you're giving them that label because you are upset that they own something that you want for cheap. They registered and paid for the domain name (they're not getting something for free), before your business even started. Since you have no relevant trademarks with priority rights (i.e. created and used before the domain name, and in the same class of goods/services) that they're violating, they can do anything they want with their domain name. Just because you feel you might be better able to use a domain name then they can doesn't mean you are entitled to anything. There are lots of empty pieces of land in most places that do not have skyscrapers on them. It doesn't mean that I can compel the owners of the land to sell them to me at below market value.
Microsoft owns the domain name juice.com, for example, and currently redirects it to a search page on bing.com (visit www.juice.com and you'll see). Similarly, CNET has owned Kids.com for years, and it is currently a parked page. Microsoft acquired bing.com years ago, before they launched their new site. Smart companies plan ahead, and register domain names well before their product launches. Your company was not smart enough to do the same.
Your company has choices. It can coin a new term ("google" wasn't a dictionary term, but was a typo, when the Stanford boys registered Google.com). Or, it can get real funding, and acquire a domain name that is within its financial means.
In a comment to a question I posted for the CircleID article, Paul Vixie posted a nice and simple test that people can run to see how vulnerable they are:
FAIR or GOOD means you're ok, but POOR (which is the result I got) means you should be worried.
Q: Would making documentaries offer a superior risk/reward ratio compared to feature films, especially if someone is just starting out? What suggestions would you offer to succeed in documentaries?
I'm astonished. How is this any different from the postal service ripping out all the magazine ads and replacing them with their own ads before they get delivered to your house?
With the "deep packet inspection" technologies, conceivably ISPs can just replace, in real-time, our Google AdSense pubisher IDs with their own. Or, they could simply replace the Google AdSense Javascript snippet with something else.
I would hope that Google and other large advertising networks lead the charge against this, and that they are not partnered with any ISPs involved in this activity. A large class action lawsuit on behalf of publishers might slap sense into any ISPs using this "enhancement" to steal revenues from legitimate publishers.
I swear by the Logitech Trackman Wheel, viewable here. My wrist doesn't hurt like it did when I used a regular mouse.
They have a cordless version, but it's USB-based. If they made a Bluetooth version, it would be perfect.
I was the author of the CircleID article, and had submitted a slightly less technical version on Slashdot on Wednesday evening. It got rejected within 10 minutes. :) But, thankfully one can't keep a newsworthy story down, and there's coverage all over the place now.
Please do post your comments to the official ICANN comments archive. ICANN will send you an email to authenticate your email address, so you'll need to click the link in that email for it to be confirmed (otherwise, your comments won't show up in the archives, but will instead be junked as spam).
[I just submitted my initial comments on the ICANN-VeriSign revised settlement, although it takes a while for them to appear at http://forum.icann.org/lists/revised-settlement/ . See http://www.icann.org/topics/verisign-settlement.ht m for the revised settlement, and send your own comments to revised-settlement@icann.org]
.com registry would have brought the wholesale cost of .com domains to the $2/domain per year level, approximately, a 66%+ reduction in costs. Yet ICANN considers it a negotiating victory for consumers when there's no cost reduction at all, but instead an average price INCREASE per year of 4.7% (i.e. 2/3rds of 7%). In technology-based industries, price REDUCTIONS, due to economies of scale, are far more typical, yet ICANN somehow feels price increases are desirable. It makes no sense.
Hello,
No matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it's still a pig. My lips won't kiss that pig.
The revisions that were made to the proposed ICANN-VeriSign settlement were extremely minor, and the staff has, intentionally or unintentionally, misread and mischaracterized the public comments on the prior settlement proposal.
One of the most misleading lines was in the analysis of public comments, where someone (no staffer signed their name to the document, to take responsibility for it) summarized the feelings toward price increases as "Regarding registrants, there was some expression that there might be some negative effects due to the potential price increases, but, the majority across constituencies expressed that the increase in cost was negligible when compared to the value of a domain name registration." Most registrants, who are ultimately paying the bills for ICANN, registries, registrars, etc, were solidly against the price aspect of the proposed settlement. As I mentioned in my prior comments at:
http://forum.icann.org/lists/settlement-comments/m sg00000.html
competitive bidding for the
The only possible reason one could conclude that price INCREASES are the norm would be if the majority of VeriSign's costs are not technological. If the majority of VeriSign's costs consist of wining and dining ICANN staff at exotic locations around the world, I might begin to see your point....
The sale of traffic data provisions is unacceptable. Notice that the language specifically permits access to data on "non existent domain names" for "promoting the sale of domain names". In other words, if example.com is getting a lot of type-in traffic, and is unregistered, VeriSign could sell that data, thereby promoting low-cost cybersquatting (since a large percentage of those types of names are TM infringements, as various independent analysts of SiteFinder concluded. Instead of monetizing that traffic itself, VeriSign will monetize it indirectly. Furthermore, VeriSign will be able to see the traffic to individual domain names (e.g. to know whether eBay.com is getting more activity than Amazon.com, or more importantly, whether yourdomain.com is getting more DNS activity than yourcompetitor.com).
With regards to Appendix W requirements related to R&D expenditures (including universal WHOIS), there continues to be a total lack of transparency, due to ICANN's continuing refusal to disclose the annual reports of VeriSign. I did a search of the 2001 main agreement at:
http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/verisign/regi stry-agmt-com-25may01.htm
and the word "confidential" appears a total of ZERO times. The number of times the word "private" is also ZERO. Yet, somehow, we are led to believe that ICANN can't release these annual reports? Why? Yet,
This sounds like a smart move, to segment their markets, and thereby avoid losing business to some of the low-priced alternatives. Assuming they don't cannibalize their higher margin customers, it should be a net positive.
I think AOL might want to come out with a version that boots directly from a CD, and doesn't rely on Windows, etc. This would be a nice turnkey system for those who are not very familiar with PCs. Using technology from Knoppix, I bet they could squeeze in everything into a bootable CD.
What might get VeriSign into very big trouble is the admission, in the press release that "ICANN is using anecdotal and isolated issues to attempt to regulate non-registry services, but in the interests of further working with the technical community we will temporarily suspend Site Finder."
I think this is a brand new tactic on the part of VeriSign, to categorize it as a "non-registry service".
That seems to escalate things to a new level, in that it seems to be an admission of abusing their monopoly in the Registry for the provision of a NON-REGISTRY SERVICE.
It had been my understanding that previously their position would have been that it would have been categorized as a Registry service, but one that didn't need approval due to it being "free" (i.e. needs no contract amendment). However, giving advantage for the provision of a non-registry service seems to be MUCH WORSE. Suppose that NON-REGISTRY SERVICE was a REGISTRAR SERVICE, for example, and VeriSign abused its monopoly to advantage one of their partners in that space? Just like WLS.
Clearly, VeriSign's abusive and monopolistic business practises need to be examined at the highest levels of government and by regulators.
P.S. Keep up the pressure, by supporting the Stop VeriSign DNS Abuse petition -- 17,000 signatures and counting.
This would ruin the authoritative nature of DNS. It's not supposed to be an "approximation" system. Doing the above would cause more problems than it would solve, as it would leave to misdirected emails, misdirected websurfers, and big privacy and security issues.
Failed lookups are a good thing. It empowers the end-user to decide how to best handle those errors. Shifting that power to the registry (in the case of Verisign's Sitefinder), or to BIND (hosted by the ISP) would remove power from end-users.
Register.com might be the next one to file suit, given their strongly-worded letter which was sent to VeriSign and ICANN.
The Stop Verisign DNS Abuse Petition is still going strong, with 15,000 signatures. ICANN still hasn't had the sense to post it on their website, though. They have a public forum at the very bottom of the page here at least, with 64 comments (many from the petition site, as we're giving folks the option to forward those along to ICANN too).
It's now here having been Slashdotted last time....on a better server this time, though (we hope!), so be gentle....
It's good to see that PIR is taking the high road. If .com/net are ever redelegated, I'd much rather they run it, than someone who would be looking for every opportunity to squeeze out nickels and dimes ($100 million/yr!) from the internet community, via abuse of their monopoly. Or, perhaps a corporation with a solid reputation (maybe IBM?) would step up, to replace Verisign.
I'm glad the IAB took that position. Hopefully Verisign will do the right thing....but, given their history, they probably won't.
We started a petition on Tuesday, and it got more than 16,000 signatures, before the site apparently got Slashdotted or something. We had to move it to a new server, with backups of the first 10K signatures. The new link is:
Stop Verisign DNS Abuse Petition
We also made announcements here and here, including having sent a hardcopy of the first 10,000 signatures to ICANN via FedEx. Thanks for all the support!
I authored the petition. Seems the old site is Slashdotted, and so it's now on a NEW server. Please change your links to point to:
http://www.whois.sc/verisign-dns/
instead. Hopefully this server survives!
I've made mirrors here too, in case the primary goes down again. We lost some data, but not the first 10,500, as I had archived them.
I also made an announcement on the ICANN mailing list here and here.
There are for profit links on Slashdot, too! The big difference, though, between this and Verisign's planned abuse, is that we *pay* for our domain names, via registration. If someone pays their $10/yr, there's less of an issue. I and Slashdot and others aren't squatting on other people's typos using free domains.
Furthermore, as a registry, Verisign isn't a party to UDRP, but instead would be cybersquatting on *all* domain typos, requiring lawsuits by each relevant domain holder for abuse of their trademark rights.
I wrote the following letter to ICANN when it first cropped up:
Hello,
We already have the example of WLS in Verisign abusing its monopoly (and ICANN not stopping this abuse -- see www.stopwls.com).
Planning to monetize all typos by rewriting DNS error codes to instead point to itself (i.e. instead of returning error codes, it will no longer return errors, but instead bring the surfer to Verisign money-making pages) is yet another example of an abusive monopolist. See here:
Given the huge technical standards that Verisign would be violating, as well as the Intellectual Property and economic issues (e.g. a typo of one letter of your domain name could send a client to a search engine listing your competitor as #1, or worse; John Zuccarini is in JAIL for his typo-squatting!), can someone in the Names Council, or the ICANN Board that has a spinal column please pre-empt this Verisign move by forbidding unilateral action of such a nature by means of a vote of some kind, through the introduction of a motion?
From the comments at ICANNWatch when this abuse last came up, perhaps the way to frame the motion is "gTLD Registry operators WILL return NXDOMAIN for ALL DNS queries for which where there is not a REGISTERED domain name." Period.
Once you start tampering with things at the DNS level, as Verisign is intending to do, you threaten the security and stability of the internet, as I think Vint Cerf properly recognizes (being right at least half of the time; bad call on WLS, but the courts and the US governmet will take care of that one eventually). For a company whose slogan is "The Value of Trust", Verisign makes a mockery of the caretaker role it has been given as guardian of the com/net registries. I trust them as much as I trust John Zuccarini.
If the US government had a problem with Microsoft embedding the Internet Explorer browser into its operating system, what will they think given Verisign has an even greater monopoly when it comes to DNS resolution? The power should belong to the users, who should have the choice (through their own software) how to resolve errors. That's why we have technical standards. Making that decision for them, by BREAKING technical standards and the applications that rely on those standards, as Verisign plans to do, and making loads of $$$$ while doing it, smacks of an abusive father-knows-best monopolist. Verisign is the father you wish you never had! Calling it a "service" adds insult to injury, as they did with WLS, especially when it's a MONOPOLY service, for which one has no choice. When you make a typo for a telephone call, does the 1-800 operator (AT&T, MCI, Neustar?) start playing paid jingles for your competitors, instead of telling you that you misdialled via a message?
Ultimately, folks know Verisign wants to milk every last penny out of its monopolies, and doesn't care who they have to step on to do so. Take a look at Games.TV which shows:
to understand what Verisign's goals are (Verisign runs .tv). Do you think you really own your .com domains? What price would Verisign like to charge you for your domains?? Once they wipe out some registrars through WLS, and other monopoly abuses, who will be left to stop them?
If Verisign is permitted to g
As of last year, Verisign has been running ATLAS, instead of BIND, for DNS. See the story here.
I agree with you that there needs to be at least some confirmation that the requests aren't fraudulent. Perhaps there can be a "white list" of known law enforcement agencies? Those on the white list, e.g. FBI, NSA, CIA, RCMP (Canadian), etc. would get expedited access, whereas those not on the white list would need further proof of their identity, to ensure that the requests are indeed bona fide.
If a competing auction site were to be setup with greater privacy, and was successful, more power to it. As long as eBay fully discloses its policies, then there shouldn't be any whining about it -- folks are free to vote with their mouse, and click on another auction site
Personally, I think it's positive that eBay will cooperate with bona fide investigations, and not force them to jump through hoops (at taxpayer expense!) to get the data they need to do their job.
It's not as though medical records are being stored on eBay -- just one's bids on beanie babies, or other baubles.
I'd love to see a holographic keyboard, where we can just move our fingers in the air, and the motions would be scanned in by a motion detector or something.
Although, we'd probably have voice recognition (or mind-reading!) before that ever came to fruition....