"You'd still wind up dealing with typo squatters like this guy. The Usenet example is a good point though and I tip my hat to you on that one.
In any case, I wish people would wait and see what happens rather then using it as an issue to further divide the World over. If DoC or the US Government actually blocks it then you'll have a point. Right now it looks like are they doing is slowing it down to allow more time for comment."
I'm not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater; theres always be people that have, uh, a different vision of what a domain name is for. In general terms I think having lots of tlds and lots of domains will lessen then to it's boring and not a big deal. Not my idea, that was Postel's, but I think he's right about this.
As for allowing time for comments, that's ICANN-ese for "we have no other optins so we'll form a committee to look at it". The Bush administration bitch-slapped them and they're trying to get other governments to put pressure on the US.
Cause, you know, that works so well.
Morons. The thing has been slowed down for 10 years. The ICANNauts always bragged thge DoC rubber stamps anything they pass up to them.
Now perhaps they get it. It's not like this wasn't pointed out them a decade ago.
"Oh, give me a damn break! With all the issues that are important to that group of zealots do you really think that.xxx is one of them?"
I'm not offering an opinion, I'm explaining what happened. I urge you to check for yourself, as with anything you read ahywhere.
The purpose of.xxx is a porn sink. Over time, porn sites will gravitate to.xxx voluntarily. Who wants to be name.com when they could be bettername.xxx.
Then, a large number of people could filter out.xxx (we call these people "our parents" and "accountants") and would see a different internet than, uh, the rest of us.
This worked on usenet. Alt.sex created to siphon off the sex from mainstram usenet that threatened the talk.* and soc.* hierarchies. Two decades has shown that to work pretty well.
People will make money off porn domain names, that's a given. Verisign gets less with.xxx, they don't control this one.
"Who said the US was attempting to do any such thing? Because the US Commence Department asked for more time to hear objections?"
Let's look at what actually happened:
A religous organization that had the ear of George Bush walked into Carl Rove's office. They had a shopping list of three things, 1) stem cell research, 2) same-sex marriages 3).XXX
Rove went "Uh, about that third one, lemme make a phone call" and.xxx was shitcanned. Note the DOC has a new administrator. I would not expect.xxx to be in the lagacy root under a Bush administration.
And that, ladies and germs is what's wrong with the technical adminstration of names and numbers in the TCP/IP protocol suite. We've hit the seventh layer of the protocol stack - the political layer - and the ooze, scum and congealed evil is dribbling down into the lower layers and making a mess.
A large and well funded ICANN makes noise..xxx could have been deployed years ago (modulo some testicular augmention the ICANN board lacks, they could use them on the rare occasions they're awake)
Is this the 3 or 4 guys operating in the light that used to do the very job icann does now? And for $15,000/yr as a part time task, not as a $15+M boondoggle? No. Instead there's physical meetings, bars, 5 star hotels, hookers and enough booze to fill a football stadium. Oh, and it's never 4:20 at an ICANN meeting, these boys are old school. A map of ICANN meeting locations reads like a book of the great beers of the world.
So no, this is not the online sythesis of ideas among the worlds brightest technologists to solve technical problems associated with adinistration of names and numbers. It's a slow moving government sponsored toga party parody of itself. It's face to face, real world, behind closed doors where people who know nothing, do nothing modulo the occasional very expensive press release.
Ironically ICANN was created to give legal personality to IANA - that had none, it couldn't sign anything. Imagine if Jon Postel were alive today: he would get nothing done with ICANN in the picture.
If you primary the root for yourself you're immune to this nonsense and other minor annoyences like the legacy root servers dropping packets.
"It's ok not to like Ayn Rand but talking about killing her is either a really bad joke on your part or makes you look like some kind of a kook......George W. Bush..."
Fuck no. First, the sheer length of the tome is enough to prevent almost anybody from reading it. Second, it's a *fairy story*, the sort of thing 9 year old girls obsess on. Geek books have science, spies or aliens in them.
Besides, the correlation between "geek" and "bible" seems to be awfully low from my observations.
In 1998 I was in the office of the CTO of the company than ran the A-root. At the time they were not getting along with ICANN. They wanted to sell domain names in any tld they could and didn't see anybody else being able to handle running a 30+ M name com zone file. Other than that they didn't care what happens.
The goverment, IBM and ICANN were exerting pressure on them to sign an agreement with ICANN which placed them under ICANN's aegis. Up to this point they had nothing to do with them.
It was feared NSI would "go rouge" and I guess it's ok to say now that there were root servers at NSI that did not carry just the legacy root. Only a handfull of people knew about these but they were a beautiful thing to run dig or dnsq against.
If there was no accord reached with ICANN and NSI was effectivly out of the business it built then one scanario was they'd just keep going and ignore the USG and ICANN and expand the root zone. They owned the IP's the root servers ran on in more than enough cases.
I asked what would happen if they did this before a fallout with ICANN occurred and was told the a.root would be declared a national security resource and the Army would simply come in and run it so don't even think that. Since this CTO used to be in Army intel. I figured he had a good understanding of this. IBM coerced NSI to sign with ICANN (at the famous secret meeting nobody can talk about because of an IBM NDA) and this stuff was all dropped very quickly.
But the lesson is there: the DNS is whatever the US wants it to be, period.
If you rely on somebody else to tell you where the.com nameservers are then you are vulnerbale to games like this. Administration of a net of network numbers so we can find computers on the network is not supposed to leak into the political layers of the TCP/IP stack. Mercifully there's a software patch for this.
"Someone has to have central control to some degree... like managing domain names, etc."
Coordination != control.
IANA never controlled anything, it just coordinated lists of names and numbers. This was seen by people that didn't understand how IANA worked as "control". It's not.
"Central control is happening, and will happen.. like it or not. Simply because people want government to control who uses the internet. For example people branding themselves "social conservatives" don't want porn on the internet. The police want to be able to catch "cyber criminals". As the story on slashdot this morning, the french don't like people blogging certain views on the riots. Chinese want to arrest anyone who says democracy is a good thing. RIAA doesn't want piracy. I don't want spam./b"
None of those things have anything to do with central control. The internet is edge-controlled, sees control as damage, and routes around it. What those people do to their networks dos not affect mine thank you.
""The fact that people complain means that it's broken. QED."
Un, no. That people complain means that they THINK it's broken. It's up to said people to explain how and why they think it's broken."
How much time ya got? Pull up a chair.
In a nutshell, in 1996 Jon Postel came up with a plan after months of fiddling with, and paying attention to the mailing lists on the topic and work in progress in this area and it was agreed 500 new tlds were needed as an adjunct to the 300 or so already defined (although a much smaller number were actually deployed back then).
The grey haired guys from the socities that start with "I" and thge Intellectual property goons (with a measure of ITU interference and EU governmental back deals) derailed any chance the communy itself had and drafted a secret deal that led to stronger rights for trademark owners in cyberspace than in meatspace and a system for creating new tlds so constipated it's only shat out a handful absolute winners like.museum and.pro while.web sits, ever waiting in the wings where it has since 1997.
That's how I think it's broken. If you think this is the way identifiers should be coordinated on the TCP/IP network then I would cordially invite you to devolve to Fidonet.
Plus, the USG was supposed to have given ICANN control over the root zone, istead the current administration gets to play net.god and not congress or (the) state (department); BUT - the DoC is not the correct agency to be dealing in the international policy arena! It served american business interests and if you follow the money for the last 10 years you can see that all worked out wuite well.
Imagine if a German or English compnay had.com instead.
"The internet succeeded because of the lack of regulation. "
If you check the history you'll see it actually succeeded in spite of government resistance to TCP/IP. This was part of a ITU(UN) sponsored agenda to foster the braindead-and-never-actually-worked OSI protocol suite with such winners as X.400 mail addresses:/dom=slash/tld=dot/name=cowboyneal/u=matrix/c=us; is that cute or what? Ironically when the ITU got involved in "Internet governance" (ie, "domains") the fellow they sent had to his credit exactly one technical publication to his name: "how to write x.400 addresses on busines cards", but I digress).
On the US side the NTIA was the nexus of all things OSI.
Fast forward to 15 years later, and these two groups - DOC/NTIA and ITU/UN are now vying for the ability to edit the IANA root zone file.
This never fails to crack me up.
The UN is not really dong this, it's the ITU working through the US as the ITU has a bad track record when it comes to the net.
The UN thing is probably a better idea. The ITU angle is a bad thing (tm). Lose that and we'll talk. That is I can see a place for a charered UN treaty organization performing technical (only!) coordination (only!) but as a peer to, not a part of or a task of the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva.
No, I do not think turning ICANN into that newco would be a very good idea.
and make each one maintain a manual list of the IP addresses of the other country code TLDs. Each would then have a list of 300 or more entries, but that's maintainable by a human.
Bang! Instant 20% error because of the human factor.
People should primary the root on their own network. Problem solved. EU who?
If you can get the file currently at this address: ftp://internic.net/domain/root.zone.gz then the internet will work for you no matter what the US EU or UN do. Ten years from mow that very file will still resolve 90+ % of the internet - and will as long as just one of either com or net tld servers doesnt change ip's - that could be decades. or longer. As long as 1 of 13 works, it'll get the others automagically and from there (it's been shown that) the entire DNS tree can be built form this; the subset which is the root zone even more trivially so.
The internet will actualy work for you no matter where you get this file Usenet, say. It's been available via telnet in other places for over a decade. The sky is definitly not falling. But it is raining and you might want to tighten things up a bit.
The US and the UN think the internet is under their control because they edit this file. You can always edit it yourself in a pinch. Trust me on this.
Go get your own copy of the root and put yer thinking caps on and ponder a while and make your network part of the internet that routes around government damage.
"A shared parent would be required for the two "Root" systems to interoperate. That parent would then be a single "Root". Then you are right back to where you started"
Depends how you think of it. If you think of it more as "where the guy with.com exchanged information with the guy with.net" you'd be a bit closer to right.
The root zone is very simple. It's a collection of TLD pointers. That is, NS records that point to the sets of nameservers for the various top level domains.
Just FYI, there about 8 different root server networks that I know of. Most have been around 5 years, some 10.
The goal here is to all agree which way to do it. Resricting it to country code was summarily rejected in the mid 90's. It's still a dumb idea; it's good for making up a name for a statue in a park but it's not good at naming things that move. Like people.
It was stolen by intellectual property attornies working for primarily three letter multinationals, mostly US based. They outspent everybody and captured the root zone via the DoC. You have no idea of tens if not hundred by now of millions or dolars they spent to do this.
Just out of curiosity why the gag order on Lessig about IP rights? Cough.
If you primary the root zone for yourself, this governance quesiton is not an issue.
Why indeed? In a world where there's mysql, mysql and postgressql and god knows what else corporate stuff the only reason I can see to keep Ingress alive is legacy support. Perhaps that's worth millions?
But...
A any mature technology that doesn't have an O'Reily book about it by now is a loser headed for extinction.
Around 1995 or so Bayan Elashi was given.iq by Jon Postel (apparanly on the basis of a phone call simply asking for it) I worked at a small company which Bayan was the president of in 1983/4. We talk every few years, or we used to.
The company Bayan ran that I worked for built 100 CP/M S-100 Z-80 based Bilingual English/Arabic computers. They had MS BASIC and Wordstar and nothing else. This was in Torance, California.
I moved to Canada, the Elashi's moved to Texas and opened a computer store in the early 1990's.
Bayan's sister married a guy who six years previous could be pinned as belonging to Hamas, but was guilty of apparanly nothing more than that. Just after 911 in the anti-Arab furor, the Elashis (there's a half dozen of them) were also running a Palastinian relief organization. They had all been born in Palestine and had Palestinian passports, but when I worked with them Palestine didn't technically exist. The government tried to show they were funding terrorists but could only find receipts for medical supplies.
Not being able to pin anything actually terrorst related on them they popped them for sending mice to Turkey dropshipped through Italy. or Libya or something. Somebody we didn't like that week. Was it Iran when we liked Iraq or Iraq when we liked Iran - don't remember.
They've been in jail 3 years now waiting trial if memory serves.
Now, the interesting thing is the Elashis have no more or less claim on "their" TLD than the Brits, the Germans or even the Americans do. A phone call was all it took back then. Cf. Nigel and the Pitcairn Island TLD (rolls eyes)
so, if you can get a judge to believe a TLD is worth money, then the US/ICANN arbitrarily taking it away and citing some nonsense about "community purpose" would, I presume be actionable.
ICANN tries to be risk averse. They're terrified of this one. So, the nameservers for.iq still point on Bayan's machines. They will presumably change without warning one day or have an accident.
I know Bayan reasonably well and I know the actors in DC and Marina del Rey. I think the wrong ones are in jail. That is, I'd much sooner trust Bayan with all names and numbers than the clowns and their yelping trademark lawyers who have it now. I mean, at least Bayan can actually configure a nameserver; he was also the one I convinced fund gryphon.com/gryphon.uucp that ran all usenet news and uucp mail in LA in the mid to late 80s from NASA and mejac. For this we taught him unix. Maybe that's his problem.
Slashdot Mirror
"You'd still wind up dealing with typo squatters like this guy. The Usenet example is a good point though and I tip my hat to you on that one.
In any case, I wish people would wait and see what happens rather then using it as an issue to further divide the World over. If DoC or the US Government actually blocks it then you'll have a point. Right now it looks like are they doing is slowing it down to allow more time for comment."
I'm not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater; theres always be people that have, uh, a different vision of what a domain name is for. In general terms I think having lots of tlds and lots of domains will lessen then to it's boring and not a big deal. Not my idea, that was Postel's, but I think he's right about this.
As for allowing time for comments, that's ICANN-ese for "we have no other optins so we'll form a committee to look at it". The Bush administration bitch-slapped them and they're trying to get other governments to put pressure on the US.
Cause, you know, that works so well.
Morons. The thing has been slowed down for 10 years. The ICANNauts always bragged thge DoC rubber stamps anything they pass up to them.
Now perhaps they get it. It's not like this wasn't pointed out them a decade ago.
Once more with feeling:
http://cr.yp.to/dnsroot.html
"Oh, give me a damn break! With all the issues that are important to that group of zealots do you really think that .xxx is one of them?"
.xxx is a porn sink. Over time, porn sites will gravitate to .xxx voluntarily. Who wants to be name.com when they could be bettername.xxx.
.xxx (we call these people "our parents" and "accountants") and would see a different internet than, uh, the rest of us.
.xxx, they don't control this one.
I'm not offering an opinion, I'm explaining what happened. I urge you to check for yourself, as with anything you read ahywhere.
The purpose of
Then, a large number of people could filter out
This worked on usenet. Alt.sex created to siphon off the sex from mainstram usenet that threatened the talk.* and soc.* hierarchies. Two decades has shown that to work pretty well.
People will make money off porn domain names, that's a given. Verisign gets less with
"Who said the US was attempting to do any such thing? Because the US Commence Department asked for more time to hear objections?"
.XXX
.xxx was shitcanned. Note the DOC has a new administrator. I would not expect .xxx to be in the lagacy root under a Bush administration.
.xxx could have been deployed years ago (modulo some testicular augmention the ICANN board lacks, they could use them on the rare occasions they're awake)
Let's look at what actually happened:
A religous organization that had the ear of George Bush walked into Carl Rove's office. They had a shopping list of three things, 1) stem cell research, 2) same-sex marriages 3)
Rove went "Uh, about that third one, lemme make a phone call" and
And that, ladies and germs is what's wrong with the technical adminstration of names and numbers in the TCP/IP protocol suite. We've hit the seventh layer of the protocol stack - the political layer - and the ooze, scum and congealed evil is dribbling down into the lower layers and making a mess.
A large and well funded ICANN makes noise.
Is this the 3 or 4 guys operating in the light that used to do the very job icann does now? And for $15,000/yr as a part time task, not as a $15+M boondoggle? No. Instead there's physical meetings, bars, 5 star hotels, hookers and enough booze to fill a football stadium. Oh, and it's never 4:20 at an ICANN meeting, these boys are old school. A map of ICANN meeting locations reads like a book of the great beers of the world.
So no, this is not the online sythesis of ideas among the worlds brightest technologists to solve technical problems associated with adinistration of names and numbers. It's a slow moving government sponsored toga party parody of itself. It's face to face, real world, behind closed doors where people who know nothing, do nothing modulo the occasional very expensive press release.
Ironically ICANN was created to give legal personality to IANA - that had none, it couldn't sign anything. Imagine if Jon Postel were alive today: he would get nothing done with ICANN in the picture.
If you primary the root for yourself you're immune to this nonsense and other minor annoyences like the legacy root servers dropping packets.
http://cr.yp.to/dnsroot.html
"It's ok not to like Ayn Rand but talking about killing her is either a really bad joke on your part or makes you look like some kind of a kook... ...George W. Bush..."
Ok, I am a kook.
How bout a two-fer?
"is the Lord of the Rings not geeky enough?"
Fuck no. First, the sheer length of the tome is enough to prevent almost anybody from reading it. Second, it's a *fairy story*, the sort of thing 9 year old girls obsess on. Geek books have science, spies or aliens in them.
Besides, the correlation between "geek" and "bible" seems to be awfully low from my observations.
" and finding out that those things no longer apply because somebody changed a 1 to a 2."
Comments lie. Code never lies.
awright, so who's gonna do an A1000 tablet?
In 1998 I was in the office of the CTO of the company than ran the A-root. At the time they were not getting along with ICANN. They wanted to sell domain names in any tld they could and didn't see anybody else being able to handle running a 30+ M name com zone file. Other than that they didn't care what happens.
.com nameservers are then you are vulnerbale to games like this. Administration of a net of network numbers so we can find computers on the network is not supposed to leak into the political layers of the TCP/IP stack. Mercifully there's a software patch for this.
The goverment, IBM and ICANN were exerting pressure on them to sign an agreement with ICANN which placed them under ICANN's aegis. Up to this point they had nothing to do with them.
It was feared NSI would "go rouge" and I guess it's ok to say now that there were root servers at NSI that did not carry just the legacy root. Only a handfull of people knew about these but they were a beautiful thing to run dig or dnsq against.
If there was no accord reached with ICANN and NSI was effectivly out of the business it built then one scanario was they'd just keep going and ignore the USG and ICANN and expand the root zone. They owned the IP's the root servers ran on in more than enough cases.
I asked what would happen if they did this before a fallout with ICANN occurred and was told the a.root would be declared a national security resource and the Army would simply come in and run it so don't even think that. Since this CTO used to be in Army intel. I figured he had a good understanding of this. IBM coerced NSI to sign with ICANN (at the famous secret meeting nobody can talk about because of an IBM NDA) and this stuff was all dropped very quickly.
But the lesson is there: the DNS is whatever the US wants it to be, period.
If you rely on somebody else to tell you where the
Primary the root instead http://cr.yp.to/dnsroot.html
"Someone has to have central control to some degree... like managing domain names, etc."
Coordination != control.
IANA never controlled anything, it just coordinated lists of names and numbers. This was seen by people that didn't understand how IANA worked as "control". It's not.
"Central control is happening, and will happen .. like it or not. Simply because people want government to control who uses the internet. For example people branding themselves "social conservatives" don't want porn on the internet. The police want to be able to catch "cyber criminals". As the story on slashdot this morning, the french don't like people blogging certain views on the riots. Chinese want to arrest anyone who says democracy is a good thing. RIAA doesn't want piracy. I don't want spam./b"
None of those things have anything to do with central control. The internet is edge-controlled, sees control as damage, and routes around it. What those people do to their networks dos not affect mine thank you.
"Given the current political climate, I would politely decline the medal."
That would require a backbone.
"He was likely notified weeks or even months prior to the Congressional request that he would be awarded the medal. No conspiracy here."
Oh, thanks Ester. I knew I could trust you two to be honest and open.
""The fact that people complain means that it's broken. QED."
.museum and .pro while .web sits, ever waiting in the wings where it has since 1997.
.com instead.
Un, no. That people complain means that they THINK it's broken. It's up to said people to explain how and why they think it's broken."
How much time ya got? Pull up a chair.
In a nutshell, in 1996 Jon Postel came up with a plan after months of fiddling with, and paying attention to the mailing lists on the topic and work in progress in this area and it was agreed 500 new tlds were needed as an adjunct to the 300 or so already defined (although a much smaller number were actually deployed back then).
The grey haired guys from the socities that start with "I" and thge Intellectual property goons (with a measure of ITU interference and EU governmental back deals) derailed any chance the communy itself had and drafted a secret deal that led to stronger rights for trademark owners in cyberspace than in meatspace and a system for creating new tlds so constipated it's only shat out a handful absolute winners like
That's how I think it's broken. If you think this is the way identifiers should be coordinated on the TCP/IP network then I would cordially invite you to devolve to Fidonet.
Plus, the USG was supposed to have given ICANN control over the root zone, istead the current administration gets to play net.god and not congress or (the) state (department); BUT - the DoC is not the correct agency to be dealing in the international policy arena! It served american business interests and if you follow the money for the last 10 years you can see that all worked out wuite well.
Imagine if a German or English compnay had
"It's not like the TLD was a good idea to begin with."
.xxx was to be deploted, period.
Whether that's true or not doesn't matter; the interent is ruled by consensus, not truth. Never confuse truth for consensus.
At any rate, icann measured community consensus and
"Exactly. Having things the way they are keeps a lot of the international politics out of the picture."
Boy does it ever. The Bush adminstration just nixed the last tld that was supposed to go intot the legacy root.
So instead we get US federal politics. Whoo hoo!
"The internet succeeded because of the lack of regulation. "
/dom=slash /tld=dot /name=cowboyneal /u=matrix /c=us; is that cute or what? Ironically when the ITU got involved in "Internet governance" (ie, "domains") the fellow they sent had to his credit exactly one technical publication to his name: "how to write x.400 addresses on busines cards", but I digress).
If you check the history you'll see it actually succeeded in spite of government resistance to TCP/IP. This was part of a ITU(UN) sponsored agenda to foster the braindead-and-never-actually-worked OSI protocol suite with such winners as X.400 mail addresses:
On the US side the NTIA was the nexus of all things OSI.
Fast forward to 15 years later, and these two groups - DOC/NTIA and ITU/UN are now vying for the ability to edit the IANA root zone file.
This never fails to crack me up.
The UN is not really dong this, it's the ITU working through the US as the ITU has a bad track record when it comes to the net.
The UN thing is probably a better idea. The ITU angle is a bad thing (tm). Lose that and we'll talk. That is I can see a place for a charered UN treaty organization performing technical (only!) coordination (only!) but as a peer to, not a part of or a task of the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva.
No, I do not think turning ICANN into that newco would be a very good idea.
"make the country code TLDs into root servers"
Close.
and make each one maintain a manual list of the IP addresses of the other country code TLDs. Each would then have a list of 300 or more entries, but that's maintainable by a human.
Bang! Instant 20% error because of the human factor.
People should primary the root on their own network. Problem solved. EU who?
No, the word is "irrelevant" not "no".
If you can get the file currently at this address: ftp://internic.net/domain/root.zone.gz then the internet will work for you no matter what the US EU or UN do. Ten years from mow that very file will still resolve 90+ % of the internet - and will as long as just one of either com or net tld servers doesnt change ip's - that could be decades. or longer. As long as 1 of 13 works, it'll get the others automagically and from there (it's been shown that) the entire DNS tree can be built form this; the subset which is the root zone even more trivially so.
The internet will actualy work for you no matter where you get this file Usenet, say. It's been available via telnet in other places for over a decade. The sky is definitly not falling. But it is raining and you might want to tighten things up a bit.
The US and the UN think the internet is under their control because they edit this file. You can always edit it yourself in a pinch. Trust me on this.
Go get your own copy of the root and put yer thinking caps on and ponder a while and make your network part of the internet that routes around government damage.
"A shared parent would be required for the two "Root" systems to interoperate. That parent would then be a single "Root". Then you are right back to where you started"
.com exchanged information with the guy with .net" you'd be a bit closer to right.
Depends how you think of it. If you think of it more as "where the guy with
The root zone is very simple. It's a collection of TLD pointers. That is, NS records that point to the sets of nameservers for the various top level domains.
Just FYI, there about 8 different root server networks that I know of. Most have been around 5 years, some 10.
"And I wonder if we didn't discuss it enough ?"
Indeed. Too much talk, not enough action.
Primary the root for yourself. Take it away from the US and the UN and put your self in the drivers seat you lazy sod.
So if we all do it your way it will work?
If we all do it my way it'll work as well.
The goal here is to all agree which way to do it. Resricting it to country code was summarily rejected in the mid 90's. It's still a dumb idea; it's good for making up a name for a statue in a park but it's not good at naming things that move. Like people.
It's broken.
It was stolen by intellectual property attornies working for primarily three letter multinationals, mostly US based. They outspent everybody and captured the root zone via the DoC. You have no idea of tens if not hundred by now of millions or dolars they spent to do this.
Just out of curiosity why the gag order on Lessig about IP rights? Cough.
If you primary the root zone for yourself, this governance quesiton is not an issue.
Why indeed? In a world where there's mysql, mysql and postgressql and god knows what else corporate stuff the only reason I can see to keep Ingress alive is legacy support. Perhaps that's worth millions?
But...
A any mature technology that doesn't have an O'Reily book about it by now is a loser headed for extinction.
Presumably the price goes up because real costs (energy etc) go up while # of .com domains continues to go down. Therefore cost per domain goes up.
Just a guess.
"what's going on with the iraqi domain?r net_domain/?"
.iq by Jon Postel (apparanly on the basis of a phone call simply asking for it) I worked at a small company which Bayan was the president of in 1983/4. We talk every few years, or we used to.
.iq still point on Bayan's machines. They will presumably change without warning one day or have an accident.
Well, since the current owners are in US custody (!??) its in limbo: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/30/iraq_inte
Around 1995 or so Bayan Elashi was given
The company Bayan ran that I worked for built 100 CP/M S-100 Z-80 based Bilingual English/Arabic computers. They had MS BASIC and Wordstar and nothing else. This was in Torance, California.
I moved to Canada, the Elashi's moved to Texas and opened a computer store in the early 1990's.
Bayan's sister married a guy who six years previous could be pinned as belonging to Hamas, but was guilty of apparanly nothing more than that. Just after 911 in the anti-Arab furor, the Elashis (there's a half dozen of them) were also running a Palastinian relief organization. They had all been born in Palestine and had Palestinian passports, but when I worked with them Palestine didn't technically exist. The government tried to show they were funding terrorists but could only find receipts for medical supplies.
Not being able to pin anything actually terrorst related on them they popped them for sending mice to Turkey dropshipped through Italy. or Libya or something. Somebody we didn't like that week. Was it Iran when we liked Iraq or Iraq when we liked Iran - don't remember.
They've been in jail 3 years now waiting trial if memory serves.
Now, the interesting thing is the Elashis have no more or less claim on "their" TLD than the Brits, the Germans or even the Americans do. A phone call was all it took back then. Cf. Nigel and the Pitcairn Island TLD (rolls eyes)
so, if you can get a judge to believe a TLD is worth money, then the US/ICANN arbitrarily taking it away and citing some nonsense about "community purpose" would, I presume be actionable.
ICANN tries to be risk averse. They're terrified of this one. So, the nameservers for
I know Bayan reasonably well and I know the actors in DC and Marina del Rey. I think the wrong ones are in jail. That is, I'd much sooner trust Bayan with all names and numbers than the clowns and their yelping trademark lawyers who have it now. I mean, at least Bayan can actually configure a nameserver; he was also the one I convinced fund gryphon.com/gryphon.uucp that ran all usenet news and uucp mail in LA in the mid to late 80s from NASA and mejac. For this we taught him unix. Maybe that's his problem.