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The Internet

Afternic Sues ICANN, Claims Unfair Treatment 127

Posted by timothy from the have-you-seen-my-goose-sauce? dept.
gfoyle writes: "The NY Times is reporting (free registratration required) that the cash strapped Icann is being sued by Afternic for being denied entrance into the domain registration market. This is believed to be the first suit challenging Icann's authority over domain registrations." The NYT article points out that both Network Solutions and Register.com now offer domain resale services -- services on which basis Afternic says ICANN rejcted their application to be a top-tier registrar.
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Afternic Sues ICANN, Claims Unfair Treatment More

Afternic Sues ICANN, Claims Unfair Treatment

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  • is now the domain of the corporations that have turned the web from a text-based, dull place into the multimedia experiance that people want to see today.

    In other words it's turning into a pile of useless, moronic shit just like the crap the said corporations churn out in their TV and print media. Oh, hooray, that is an improvement.

    The irony is, of course, that today's "multimedia experience" is as dull as ditch-water and twice as predictable.

    TWW

  • If yoru serious about getting rid of "official" "regulated" corporately controlled domain names, etc you can. Slashdot has enough technically oriented individuals to make it happen, as least as far as the individuals are concerned.

    No you can't fix your workplace's DNS and your MS using co-workers name resolution (unless your in charge anyway). But you can set your DNS servers up the way YOU want them to resolve. You can subscribe to whatever top-level DNS server you want, including your pal Taco's.

    If you want whitehouse.com to resolve to whitehouse.com the pron site (as opposed to whitehouse.gov the pornographers site ;) you can. Ditto the inverse.

    If your serious, willing to dedicate time, effort, server/badwidth use, let me know. One individual's DSL line isn't enough to do it all. HTTP mirrors will be needed.

    Please though, only serious replies, not "Me too, brain dead AOLers" for the sake of my poor little yahoo mailbox (hint hint for people who dont know pig-latin).

  • I just went to joker.com and registered a dot com for 12 euros/year. No bullshit, no $70 NSI ripoffs, no mandatory fucked up hosting fer MAXIBUXX crap, just CLICK CLICK CLICK it's mine for 10 dollah SUCKY SUCKY.

    I plug again, joker.com.

    PLUG PLUG PLUG

    JOKER.COM
  • What a pile of fscking horseshat!
    Why the fsck do people on Slashdot seem to think that the net has gone from a government toy to a corporate tool? The one place I would not expect to see repeated .com madness is here but time and again I see this same opinion trotted out, and every time it is clear that the author wants a commercialised net.
    The Internet (IMHO) was created by government for the army and used by the only people who could figure out how to make it do something useful and then improved upon by them until eventually even stupid corporate managers could start to remember that they just had to open the right program and type in a domain name, then the net got spamdotted to hell. What is the corporate signal to noise ratio online (i.e. complete bag of poo sites to something with a modicom of sense) and is it any better than the signal to noise ratio of joe blogg's homepages? Lets face it the net is a pile of poo with a few plants thriving in the manure, it doesn't matter how any DNS system is organised, the cream will float and the dung will drop out of view. The only people who care about this rubbish are the fools who belive that the "magic" of having many people staggering over their site by accident is worth an IPO. Lets leave this behind here on Slashdot and start accepting that the net is not anyones and should never be anyones, it is a co-operative system where barriers of entry are minimal and we can all stick up our own signal or noise. Lets stop debating how we should help corporations structure the Internet to service their needs (like the current RIAA battle to corrupt the net to preserve their market).
    The simple question is this, if the RIAA get a ban on the transferal of copyrighted material over a digital interface are you going to stop stripping your CDs onto your file-server so you can play them at any workstation in your house; and if Afternic get accredited as a reseller are you going to stop typing in domain names and start learning IP addresses? Let's get slashdot talking about how to create the next generation net based on distributed architectures NOT the last generation DNS system and how it is or isn't suiting corporate americas needs.
    A finally to slightly justify and defend this rant:
    1. I have bought domain names for about $15 including DNS hosting (one email redirected to admin address and a url redirect) and I own the domain. Sounds like a good deal for consumers to me!
    2. The sites that try to do the
      multimedia experiance that people want to see today
      are nearly without fail the worst sites online for s/n. The most brilliant multimedia sites are usually from the fans and hackers.
    3. If you don't want ICANN what do you want? Microsoft? IP? Gnutella based searching to find info? What? If you have a great idea, code it and see if the hackers are ready to split the net otherwise sit down and shut up.
    This may be written as flamebait but I mean it.
  • I'd like to see an anarchic DNS system. You choose who you want to be your DNS server and go with whatever garbage they serve up. And the sam goes for name propogation. And so on, for the DNS servers themselves. Everyone can register any name they want on their own DNS server. Mmmm... people will have to start memorizing more numbers... :)

    So it's crazy. But *I* like the idea. That way there can be more seamus.org's than just the one (why, oh why was I so slow? :) Of course, eventually people would get pissy about having "convenient" IP addresses to type in... can you imagine network card and router sales/manufacturing in this future? Neat...

  • Re: International .tld's (Score:3)

    by Asgard ( 60200 ) <jhmartin-s-5f7bbb@toger.us> on Monday June 26, 2000 @08:52AM (#975791) Homepage
    Well, there is a ".us". For example, there is the State of California [state.ca.us] site. Many US .gov-type sites arein the .us hiearchy. It is true that you don't see too many US .com's in ".us" though.
  • Next time, try quoting a line or two from the post to which you are responding. I never mentioned 'peer to peer' DNS. I don't even know what that is.

    By contrast in a peer to peer DNS network, in a world with many hundreds of thousands of DNS servers, to find an unknown, not commonly accessed
    domain would require tens of thousands of lookups if it were possible at all.

    This IS a world with many hundreds of thousands of DNS servers.

    I was being flippant in my call to people to start their own DNS servers - but a well designed root server heirarchy could very well be made that would allow for arbitrary TLDs without killing the 'performance' of DNS. In fact, I specifically mentioned that you could simply extend the existing BIND mechanism. There is no change to the method, merely an addition of an infinite number of TLDs.

    At a tenth of a second per lookup, it would take about two hours to resolve the average domain name.

    What's that one-liner about statitics being made up on the spot? Are you implying that it would take 72,000 searches to find an arbitrary domain name/ip address pair? Are you planning on searching these domains with the famous 'Ransack Search' algorithm?

    Good computing isn't about math 101 - linear and iterative algorithms are almost always the wrong way to do anything complex.

    It's a technologically illiterate suggestion. Anyone who made it, go back and do maths101.

    Don't be so negative! :)

    --
    blue
  • Absolutely! It would make life interesting... er, at least for about a week, then it would get old and annoying. But what a week!

  • One major difference I see between Afternic and the other registrars: the others are primarily pushing registration with the resale being almost an afterthought, while Afternic seems from thier home page to be mainly aiming for resale with registration primarily to support that resale. To me this makes a world of difference.

  • You must have no concept of how IP routing works across the Internet. I think that the parent post of your comment implies that the box would be moving from one IP subnet to another one. Well, assuming that the entire Autonomous System isn't moving and that Internet-advertised BGP routes aren't changing, the box would have to change IP addresses. That's his point.. DNS makes it possible to transparently move box from one location to another location, changing IP addresses in the process. That is inherently a feature of DNS. You may have other qualms with it, but it's not all bad.
  • So, what's to stop me from running my own root DNS server, that would handle my own made-up TLD's (.biz, .xxx, .scl), and send any request for a real TLD to a real root DNS server?

    Anybody who runs a DNS server, and wishes to, could configure their name server to view my server as the root.

    Then, I could implement whatever policy *I* feel is appropriate for handing out domain names (People Eating Tasty Animals gets priority, BTW).

    I know that most people wouldn't use these servers (businesses, for example), but I bet someone could get a good underground following going (imagine a .sucks TLD - http://peta.sucks/).

    So, why hasn't anybody else done this? Why couldn't I do this?

  • The only one being used right now is .arpa, but they've proposed .firm, .mail, .shop and others.

    .arpa is used for reverse DNS lookups based on an IP address. The IP address flipped backwards and converted into a .in-addr.arpa domain, then queried to get the domain name associated with that IP.

    --

  • You can't just move IPs around like that these says. With ASNs and BGP routing it's not doable (not just impractical). Each BGP router already has some 60mb of routes, and that's for the _backbone_ only.

    If everyone started breaking off IPs from subnets and moving them around on a daily basis the Internet would quickly come to a screeching halt.

  • What if you want to send a clueless user to download package xyz from ftp://ftp.xyz.fsf/, and their DNS isn't configured to resolve the .fsf TLD? (Some people can't even fix their DNS settings because they don't have root...)

    Another problem is dealing with 2 people creating the same TLD - if A creates .fsf and B creates another .fsf, how do you decide which xyz.fsf someone wants? I don't like the idea of getting 2 completely different http://linux.fsf/s depending on what machine I'm using to access it.

    Any (good and workable) suggestions on fixing these problems?
  • Please see my earlier post [slashdot.org] on this topic. It's currently +5, and this whole discussion is so non-specific it's ridiculous. Yes, it would be neat if we could type "alt://" and have different addresses resolve by using a Gnutella-like system, therefore eliminating the need for ICANN. Is it feasible? Well, let's see, no one's even addressed that. How can you throw around ideas without even mentioning any technical aspect of them and get moderated to +4?

    Hey, here's an idea: make it so that every file on the Internet can be downloaded at the same speed, regardless of how fast your connection is. Wow, that'd be neat!

    Comon folks, at least think about the actual content of some of these comments before you moderate them up. Whoever thinks that the super-smart crowd that is Slashdot is collectively coming up with ground-breaking Internet concepts should go write an article for ZDNet about it... I'm sure they'd take it.
  • Different rules apply if you have a monopoly, which the ICANN Does with respect to allowing companies to register domain names in the .com, .net, and .org heiarchies.

    If what they are accused of is indeed what happened, they broke the law and should be punished accordingly.

    Of course, I think a better solution [slashdot.org] would be to simply stop paying attention to the ICANN and develop our own method for mapping names to ip addresses.

  • Re:A simpler solution? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    #^%@ it. accidentally submitted and <pre> doesn't work!

    -- -- -- -- --

    Even simpler. 'Zero Level' to the domain system. Think of it like this...

    You keep the existing DNS, but fill in around it.

    You add two levels above the current search through the '.com' domain. Add an "Alphabet Server", and a "Character Server" above the current "Top-Level Domains".

    The "Alphabet Server", is the master DNS server with a very short list of entries to check through, a list of each valid character a TLD can start with referencing a series of IP addresses for the corresponding "Character Server". It would look something like this:
    a 104.234.34.45 32.34.45.56;
    b 67.89.01.23 45.67.89.01;
    c 45.67.84.32 234.210.198.76 24.56.75.32;
    ... ... ... ...;
    z 24.32.45.76 32.45.87.234;


    Each "Character Server" would have a similar list of TLDs that begin with that character and the IP address(es) of the Domain Servers that handle them. For example, the "c" Character Server might have a list like this:
    cc ;
    com ;
    car 111.111.111.2 111.111.111.3;
    cars 222.222.222.2 222.222.223.2;
    conspiracy 999.999.999.9 911.911.911.1;
    cx ;


    The beauty of this approach is that we don't have to break the current DNS system to implement this, and we could actually MAYBE fix the current .com congestion by way of having companies be able to use their company name as a TLD, but specificly set it up so that any company that can make a valid claim to that name can put a 2LD up in that TLD.

    Lets say Microsoft immediately grabs the .microsoft TLD. Any company that can make a valid claim (trademark, whatever), can go ahead and reserve a 2LD within .microsoft. So "Micro-Soft Dollhouse Mattresses, Co. Ltd." could go ahead and reserve dollhouse.microsoft, while Microsoft had windows.microsoft, explorer.microsoft, Win9x.microsoft, msn.microsoft, etc...

    The .linux TLD could be broken up similarly with redhat.linux, mandrake.linux, suse.linux, slackware.linux, etc...

    With this method, the "Alphabet List" could be EASILY propogated to practically every DNS server, while the Character Lists would only have to propogate to a few widely scattered servers, and each Domain Server would get handled much like they are now.

    What do you think?
  • So if my mom's an attorney, then when did she find out about it?
  • Yes, it would be neat if we could type "alt://" and have different addresses resolve by using a Gnutella-like system, therefore eliminating the need for ICANN. Is it feasible? Well, let's see, no one's even addressed that.

    So, according to you, in order to even be permitted to express an idea in this or any forum, one must have already worked out all of the technical specifics, else said ideas should be ignored and derided?

    Please.

    Hacking a browser to call an alternative domain resolution service in response to an URL beginning with alt:// would be fairly simple. There are already modules to deal with ftp:// (FTP), mailto:, etc. Most of the code needed for the alt:// appraoch is already present, one needs to simply rip out the DNS resolution code and replace it with whatever the alternative approach would be.

    As for a gnutella type system, if you'd even bothered to read my original post, you would have seen my suggestion to use the existing DNS software, perhaps running on a different port, with different root servers. Not that a more distributed and less top-down approach, a la FreeNet, wouldn't necessarilly be as good. Some technical robustness against hoards of lawyers might actually be worth a performance tradeoff, particularly in today's climate.

    Comon folks, at least think about the actual content of some of these comments before you moderate them up.

    Some of us do think. Perhaps you should do likewise before going off half-cocked. (HINT: Actually reading the post you're replying to helps).
  • Actually, your analogy is an accurate description of free enterprise capitalism, which can be ugly and may seem unfair, but is nonetheless the system that big business lobbyists claim to support. It wouldn't be illegal to purchase an 800 number for the purposes of selling it later--in fact, part of the reason for the advent of 888/877 numbers was the existence of an aftermarket whose sales did not benefit telcos. There is a burgeoning aftermarket for domain names (which offers a far broader frontier than 800 numbers) and a host of marketplaces, but registrars, until recently, couldn't get in on the action. It's more lucrative and like any smart businessfolk, registrars want to get in the game, take it over, and run it themselves. Thanks to their close ties with the former government-sanctioned monopoly, they have a shot. While it is technically an illegal shot, their roots stem from the very organization (US Gov) that polices these matters. If you think you can't get good domain names now, wait until the company that used to sell them for $35 (way back when you didn't think to get a good name) now sells them to the highest bidder. Register and NSI are doing it right now. You won't be able to get your name from them any cheaper than you can get it from any other aftermarket nexuses. But the more of these marketplaces that exist, the better your chances for a fair, open market. Monopolies always hurt consumers. True competition always helps consumers. Nuff sed.
  • Damn straight.

    Another poster to this thread suggested that we get rid of the big 3 current TLDs and force companies and people to register domains in the appropriate country TLD. This would certainly limit confusion (Is that .com I'm looking at in the States, UK, Belgium? Where?)

    I think active management by a set of domain registrars who have purchased name space off a TLD is the way to go. Don't just let any dipshit register any domain. It might make the process more expensive and increase waits, but ultimately that's the only way any semblance of order is to be had.

    LDAP would probably be better suited for this sort of thing, too. Anyone feel like rewriting gethostbyname?

  • I think that is why a number of US registrars got out of the US hierarchy "business". I know of two organizations that were handling .us hierarchys for two states that handed the role off to other entities.

    The admins that were in charge of maintaining these hierarchies simply did not have the time to do it.

    And if you have ever dealt with the folks at ISI.EDU before, than you can tell they don't really have the time either (if they still do it, I have not done dns in a while).

    Then there is the problem with .us registration being free. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
  • No you don't know what you're talking about so just shut up and go RTFM.

    Come back and talk when you DO know what you are talking about.

  • Domain name mil, edu and gov have always been supposedly restricted for the exclusive use of USAn organization. Cf this [iana.org].

    You can notice that the three counter-example you give me are canadian. An ICANN guy may have estimed that Canada was sortof part of the USA.

    I dare you to find any south-american, african, european, asian, oceanian or antartican (?) counter example.

  • Hmmm, so I apparently read that wrong... which would be the problem with the English language, it's dying. One of the things wrong with it is people are shortening out 'un-neccisary' (sp?) parts of sentances. ie, the line I commented on should be (for clarity sake) "In a (press) statement issued by Icann, they denied treating Afternic unfairly".

    I apparently read it wrong, and have been amused by the total lack of ettiquite/elegance with which you have all responded.

    Please allow me to try to clarify how I read that line.

    "In a statement..." In one sentance, in summary, etc. "... Icann denied treating Afternic unfairly" the part I was picking at.

    Now, if none of you can see it being read that way, I suggest you go back to school to gain better knowledge of the English language. The English language is NOT the best language in the world, it's probably one of the worst/ugliest, and I'm pretty sure it's one of the hardest to learn.

  • I don't see a clear reason why my machine has to use a particular method of resolving a text address to an IP address. Why can't we add our own top level domains by making our machines use a different DNS server to resolve, say, *.fsf or *.slashdot or even *.natalie ?

    If someone with a machine that can be a DNS server just appoints themselves head resolver honcho, then everyone who chooses to use the service can. Of course, perhaps Bruce and Eric might both start resolving *.communityloudmouth, but people will choose whose service to use individually, and I think that's the way it should be.

    What would be needed is to set up the whole plan carefully, so that it was easy for users to assign different DNS servers to different blocks of domain names. This continuous annoyance would be fixed as people simply voted for the DNS servers they trusted. I for one would be delighted to point my DNS requests at a server that pledged to resolve etoy and etoys correctly, and ignored whatever judicial injuctions that the "official" top level DNS's choose to respect.

    What has to be set up carefully is the tool which allows users to do this. If we make it easy for people to do what they want instead of what an incompetent committee rules, then the right things will happen. If you put useful information on machines with .fsf names, and make some simple java plugin that will cause the browser to resolve those correctly, then people will use it and these recurring domain name stories will become pointless noise.
  • ... I got spammed by afternic today. I'd never heard of them before and they emailed my work account with some drivel I had no interest in (they were auctioning off a domain name vaugly related to our business). So I'd say they've shown why they aren't deserving of tld registration rights. Sod 'em. And Gomorrah, for that matter.

    TWW

  • If portability is the only real issue for finding a solution to get us out of this mess, then how about two IP's a static and virtual one. The virtual one is portable. I'm not sure someone should have exclusive rights to Love.com anyhow. How is anyone supposed to compete in a mainstream intenet if entire companies are devoted to sucking up the best domains and extorting people who have valid uses. Ditch the name issue entirely. Then again, I'm pretty sure a better solution will come along someday. I just hope that too much money doesn't get tied up in current domains to kill the evolution.
  • You still could, just set up the missile silo box with the IP that the SPARC had before it went down. Done.

    Do we really still need to keep the Internet robust vs. large-scale nuclear war?

  • In other words it's turning into a pile of useless, moronic shit just like the crap the said corporations churn out in their TV and print media. Oh, hooray, that is an improvement.

    You want to see something pathetic? Go to Pizza Hut's Web site [pizzahut.com]. Two "front pages", one of which is Shockwave. I don't even see why they have a Web site; it's not like they let you order pizza online [papajohns.com] or anything.

  • I would imagine a peer-to-peer system would introduce much longer delays in synchronization and also exponentially increase conflicts/duplicate registrations between DNSs without the most up-to-date data. The complexity and confusion would be astounding. There must be one or a few master controllers.

  • What about using Sealand as the site to host this new, international, .tld registrar? This would rip 'ol bill's decision to shreds, throw the ICAAN on it's end, and start us fresh.. Maybe by 'borrowing' the existing records, this could be accomplished seamlessly, then determine some rules, similar to the manifesto posted on this article (it's here somewhere, before my post) Then some volunteers/employees could wade through the mess, and eliminate the current providers.

    Or, go for the gold-rush mentality, and just start fresh, under a new domain hierarchy... Restructured so that .com.us is as likely to be seen as is .com.tw

    -Ever notice that there's a .ca, but no .us?
  • get the article here [nytimes.com]
  • www.gandi.net
    you don't have to pay double to have the domain name hosted unlike joker. Also you actually own the domain and can't have it snapped off you like joker. Read the FAQ and T&C
    The new trend in domain registrations, hidden charges!
  • http://www.microsoft.sex/

    Somebody would do it. You know they would.

    --

  • I am amazed at the degree of ignorance that Slashdot readers show on this subject. Do the math! Suppose I want to visit a website I've never visited before, in a GTLD domain. My client makes a call to my DNS server. If it hasn't got the name in it's cache, it queries my ISPs DNS server; if it hasn't got the name in it's cache, it queries a root name server. The root name server issues it the NS record for the domain, and my ISP's DNS server then queries the authoritative name server for the domain. That's a maximum of four lookups. A CCTLD domain adds one, and each level of delegated subdomain adds another. But you're looking at a very small numbers of lookups.

    By contrast in a peer to peer DNS network, in a world with many hundreds of thousands of DNS servers, to find an unknown, not commonly accessed domain would require tens of thousands of lookups if it were possible at all. At a tenth of a second per lookup, it would take about two hours to resolve the average domain name. In the mean time, because the load on DNS servers would have increased by three orders of magnitude, either far mor powerful servers would have to be used, or the DNS system would grind to a halt.

    It's a technologically illiterate suggestion. Anyone who made it, go back and do maths 101.

  • Deny: Verb - opposite of admit.

    NYT: Did you treat Afternic unfairly?
    ICANN: No.

    Therefore, they denied treating Afternic unfairly. "In a statement, ICANN treated Afternic fairly" does not mean the same thing. In fact, they did not do anything towards Afternic in the statement. They merely denied the allegations that they treated Afternic unfairly. Do the extra words make it clearer for you?

    Grammer troll. :)
  • I think it's been determined that TLDs should be limited to no more than four characters, to avoid breaking things.

    --

  • This sort of shows their support for squatters, which, while it seemed like a good idea a few years ago, is kind of a slimy way to make a quick buck.
  • Even granting the premise that ICANN violated their bylaws in not approving Afternic's application, so what? Since when it is the job of the federal courts to hear cases about corporate bylaws brought by outside parties, not by employees, officers or stockholders?

    Oh, since about the time people started bandying the word "justice" about.

    It is called illegal restraint of trade, and it will get your ass fined and a substantial portion of your assets handed over to the offended party in this country if you are found guilty. If the ICANN did indeed do what they are accused of, there is a very good chance they are guilty and will have to make financial ammends for their behavior.

    As much as we gripe about the justice system here in the US, it often appears to be the only functioning branch of government left, where there is at least some semblance of justice, occasionally, at times. The Legislative and Executive branches are, to all appearances, already a lost cause. The leading question is, of course, how long can a government stand on only one good leg (or branch).
  • Almost any USAn educational instituation could get an .edu

    The University of Waterloo [uwaterloo.ca], in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, used to be "waterloo.edu". They later changed to "uwaterloo.ca". So it wasn't limited to "USAn" educational institutions, at one point in time.
  • I'm a little lost on this "whoring for karma" business. If I post something that's useful to readers, should it matter what my internal personal reasons are for posting it?

    I'd hate for someone to avoid posting something useful because they didn't want to look like they were seeking out karma.

    [not to mention, if I was desperate for karma, I would've bypassed the +1 bonus. The comment would have still been moderated to 3 and I would have received an additional karma point.]
    -----
  • You mean this idiot posts at +2. Oh shit, I figured he posted at 1 and got modded up. Most of his posts are modded at 1. Does this mean he gets modded down a lot.
  • If you are dissatisfied with a particular DNS entry or set of DNS entries, you can change them for yourself (at least, you can change it on the computers you have root/administrator access on). Every TCP/IP implementation that supports DNS that I have ever heard of has a hosts file (under Linux, /etc/hosts, surprise, surprise). Before your TCP/IP stack goes and asks the local DNS server what the IP address for a particular name is, it checks in the hosts file. Usually, hosts files are used in networks that don't have DNS servers, but, you can make any entries you want in your own hosts file. As a matter of fact, this can provide big performance benefits if your local DNS server is overloaded (not a single network packet needs to be sent to resolve a hostname in the hosts file), so "shadowing" real DNS entries could be useful as well (at the cost of automatic updates if the site moves). Thus, if you REALLY want www.microsoft.com to point to 206.132.41.231 (one of RedHat's webservers), you can make the entry in your hosts file and your system will be fooled. -Iota (Thomas Wenisch)
  • Including that default option was explictly one of the points I made in my original post. I agree, most users wouldn't bother to type alt:// if http:// were the default.

    Even those who do not change their default to alt:// could be led there, via URL links of the form "A HREF="alt://myantimicrosoftsite.microsoft.com".

    The notion is that the most common application of DNS today is with respect to the web. This solution does not address issues with respect to shell accounts, telnet, ssh, ftp, etc., although a more comprehensive, alternative name resolution system is probably called for.

    As for techies forgetting about Internet NEwbies and AOL dorks, well, why not? They can educate themselves, just like the rest of us.
  • Ah, but you can't keep a trademarked domain. Suppose I decide to register maxwell.com. I don't have a trademark to the name Maxwell, but if I get it first, according to your rules, I get to keep it. Well, no. I'd be sued and forced to give it up to the first party to file suit.

    If, however, I was representing something with a valid Maxwell trademark (and I can't help but think of Maxwell House Coffee, even though I can't stand the stuff), then yes, it would be first-come, first-serve.

  • I'm with you. Let's just dump the whole DNS concept and use IP addresses for everything.

    Yeah, that will work great with IPv6...
  • Clueless users figured out the first domain name resolving sceme. I remember having to tell my TA what http:// was all about, back in the days of Mosaic. If your users are clueless, and you don't have an alternate URL, then you have to give them a clue; that's how the internet grew so big in the first place.

    And as for two people with the same top level domain, the point is that each individual can choose how to handle that (all though the majority will go along with the default of their setup). We don't want to replace domain name disputes with tld disputes. The idea is to simply put the power for each person to decide for themselves out there; I expect ICANN and friends will get their act together under threat of competition.

    One could set up a proxy similar to the anomozier which would allow you to enter a URL such as http://ristroph-gateway.mediaone.net/resolve.pl?na me=ftp.xyz.fsf which would take them to the right place; I would set up such a thing for those in my organization who needed it, although I would have to shut off access to others if it got overloaded. But if it gets big, yahoo or some other portal wannabe will set these up for free.

  • With good reason (Score:5)

    by XneznJuber ( 204781 ) on Monday June 26, 2000 @07:04AM (#975835)
    According to the court filing, ICANN just doens't want to give reseller privledges to Afternic because of past violations of domain registration policies. While Register.com and Network Solutions are themselves not very customer friendly, Afternic went as far as massregistering domain names under made up names of people and companies, squatted on them, and then resold them. ICANN is is worried that if they let Afternic become a reseller, they'll take thier list of 5000 or so choice domains (and their equivants when the new TLDs become available) that ICANN obtained from afternic internal documents and set them aside in a higher priced area. It'll be interesting to see how this one plays out in court
  • my guess is that you'd have to file a case in court against her to find out the truth.

  • It's the whole system that sucks! (Score:4)

    by SecretAsianMan ( 45389 ) on Monday June 26, 2000 @07:12AM (#975837) Homepage

    <IMHO>

    Like the subject says, its the whole system that sucks! I say we need an international entity responsible for domain name assignment and dispute resolution, and that each country that wishes to participate in the Internet must acknowledge the entity's authority. Maybe a UN-sponsored organization? Is this too unreasonable in the long run?

    </IMHO>

  • Perhaps good may come of this (Score:4)

    by vsync64 ( 155958 ) <vsync@quadium.net> on Monday June 26, 2000 @07:04AM (#975838) Homepage
    Remember back in the day, when there weren't that many domain names, a .com didn't run out and grab .org and .net as well, and most personal sites were of the form www.someplace.edu/~thatguy?

    With the whole issue of the trampled namespaces, plus the many legal issues, I wonder if this may push people away from registering a bazillion more domains. Hmm... Nope. "It doesn't end in .com? That ain't a real Web site!"

  • Even simpler. 'Zero Level' to the domain system. Think of it like this...

    You keep the existing DNS, but fill in around it.

    That's an interesting approach, although it does have the disadvantage of allowing the ICANN to retain its domain of authority.

    Prehaps competing sets of root servers would be better, each addressable by either a different URL prefix, or a different "one-off" domain (microsoft.com.ican, microsoft.com.alt, etc...).

    This assumes we stick with DNS, which might be more practical short term, but not necessarilly what we'd want in the long term.

    An ideal situation would be an approach where no central authority exists to say "yeah" or "nay" to a domain name, where anyone can simply register a name, such as "jean-michel.smith" and, if no one else already has it, you get it. Any legal action is betwen you and whoever, as only you can change it (with your secret key, presumably -- this already assumes a slightly more sophisticated appraoch than the current DNS heiarchy.)

    This doesn't necessarilly mean no heiarchy. One idea might be to have a hybrid system, in which each heiarchical level is peer to peer (with automated conflict resolution via timestamp or some other reasonably fair methodology), such that anyone can set up a root server in cooperation with other root servers, anyone can set up a .microsoft server, and so forth.

    This would mean that Micrsoft wouldn't control all names within the .microsoft heiarchy, but once they registered a name (e.g www.microsoft) no one could take it away from them short of a court order presented to the owner of the name, who has sole power (in a technical sense) to remove it.

    There are other issues which would need to be fleshed out, such as what to do if someone forgets or loses their private key (or claims they did) and so forth, but you get the idea.

    As another put it, power and responsibility both reside with the individual registrant, to whom other parties and the legal system could turn if legal remedies were called for.

  • All this is TOTAL BS... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Lawyers are running us now... People are greedy - Money!!! Credit - Fame.... Is that all its about! Sick of lawyers and f'ing lawsuits...

  • It's annoying to have to make this comment all the time on DNS-related stories, but I feel it's worth it to keep this fresh in peoples' minds:

    What authority does ICANN actually have? Sure, they run the defacto standard DNS network. But nothing significant is stopping anyone from creating an alternate DNS network (and thus, an alternate namespace, at least under the TLD level). Heck... AlterNic is the prime example of this. I feel that a DNS network that uses all of the existing TLDs, but with the addition of a .o domain (a previous post of mine [slashdot.org] for more info on my .o idea) or a (usenet-esque) .alt domain is definitely in order.

  • Domain registration & distributed DNS (Score:3)

    by Rupert ( 28001 ) on Monday June 26, 2000 @07:13AM (#975842) Homepage Journal
    Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about.

    It seems to me that instead of having all this ICANN accreditation nonsense, any authoratitive DNS server should be world-writable, with some form of digital signature required to update an existing domain, but unregistered domains go to anyone who requests them. Billing could be done post-facto, or not at all.

    Further, why not scrap the whole DNS heirarchy? Every ISP has at least two DNS servers, and they all talk to the upstream DNS servers until you get to the root servers. DNS should be made peer-to-peer, not top down, and the need for ICANN and it's 5M$/year budget goes out of the window.

    At the time of writing, this was a first post.

  • heiarchical, but peer to peer at each level.

    queries get passed up and down to the appropriate level as now for resolution. Peers would only have to cache databases for their level, not the entire internet.

    Once reaching the appropriate level (e.g. .linux), it is resolved by one of the peers at that level.

    Anyone can add a peer, and manage a name within that level as they wish, with conflict resolution using timestamps or some other, reasonably fair appraoch.

    Thus, no one has authority over any domain, top level or otherwise, yet everyone can remain certain that, once they have registered a name it is theres.

    Possible problems: hijacking of lower level names.
    E.g. you have a network my.firm, and you want to name all kinds of names like mars.my.firm, venus.my.firm, jupiter.my.firm, but some other jerk has gone around and registered millions of names, eating up most of the usable hostnames.

    Possible solution? (This is probably heresy) Introduce a small modification to the standard domain name nomenclature, in which a hostname is seperated from the domain name by a different character than "." Within each domain name each person has complete authority as they do now with standard dns, but without, none.

    So, in our example above, some jackass could go on
    to register mars.my.firm, venus.my,firm, etc., but these point to domains and not specific hosts, which would be resolved as mars:my.firm, venus:my.firm, etc. (a colon probably isn't the best example here, but dashes are out and nothing else springs directly to mind. Maybe commas?)

    I don't know if this is at all workable, but it seems to be a better solution than the centralized system we have now with all of its abuses and centers of authority, while still preserving much of the performance gain in a heiarchical system.

    What do you think?

  • What you have to remember is that the net is no longer the Government's little toy, designed and maintained for the sole benefit of ivory tower academics and covered by an "appropriate use" policy. It is now the domain of the corporations that have turned the web from a text-based, dull place into the multimedia experiance that people want to see today.

    ICANN is a remnant of the Government's long-gone days in which the controlled the net, and I don't think anyone really wants them to control anything. Instead we need to allow market forces to be brought into play in the domain name market, so that consumers can get the best deal possible - something which ICANN seem to be determined to stop.

    No, hopefully Afternic will win this case and ICANN will be consigned to the attic like it should have been. The time for government control over the net has gone, and that can only be a good thing for all of us.


    ---
    Jon E. Erikson
  • If Afternic is suing for "lost business," their damage claims would probably be hight. If ICANN is already strapped for cash and they lose this case, what happens then? If they go bankrupt, what next?
  • Yep, I've been spammed several times by these morons. First, I was a professional in the food industry, then a professional in the science fiction industry. Wow, I wonder what else I'd be a professional in? However, it is not necessarily afternic.com who is behind this, quite clearly, it is mainauctions.com who is behind this, and I'd let afternic have the benefit of the doubt. It seems the guy who put this up for auction has been suspended from afternic, so I'd say they are probably not spammers.

    The rest of the practice sucks, though.

  • Which you can access through this convenient link [nytimes.com].

    Of course, this side-steps the issue of whether it's ethical to take someone's content for free that they are requesting you to register for.
    -----
  • Maybe they should have left everything as numbers. Domain names have becoem hot-commodity property. If they had simply used numbers then 126.125.10.154 could have been called whatever the user wanted to call it. Browsing the web and indexing it would be based on content alone. No easy nobrainer whitehouse.com stuff to snare unsuspecting newbys. It sucks , but at least we wouldn't have all these squatting issues. How would you like it if someone is squatting on you family name as a domain name? Or worse yet, you get sued for using your family name as a domain name? Its happened.
  • But where it gets interesting is in the case where it is your actual name. If your name is Joe Maxwell and you register maxwell.com as your domanin name, what happens when Maxwell House Coffee (or whoever) comes along and tries to take it away? Does the fact that it is their trademark trump the fact that it is your name?
  • who SHOULD regulate domain names?

    There's no reason at all for them to be so stodgily defined. BIND doesn't give a damn what domain name you use. It's a sort of artificially created monopoly, in the sense that only a small number of .tld's are recognized by the commonly used root servers.

    I say we all just start our own root servers, and allow any tld to be posted to it.

    Come on, donate some broadband to the Free The World From ICANN's Domaination! project. :P

    --
    blue
  • ...but rusty has a nice policy of zapping all spammers' comments. You might not like it there :) -JD
  • Even granting the premise that ICANN violated their bylaws in not approving Afternic's application, so what? Since when it is the job of the federal courts to hear cases about corporate bylaws brought by outside parties, not by employees, officers or stockholders?
  • I wish I still had some of the auto-responders from the InterNIC when I used to be the DNS Admin for an ISP. They went like this..

    "Thank you for your submission. Currently, InterNIC processes over 600 domain submissions a week. Please be advised, that your registration will take up to three weeks to process. Also, there is a one domain per organization limit. Multiple registrations will be rejected"

    Back then, all registrations were done by hand, (I remember Robert used to handle all of ours). Only ISP's or similar networking organizations could have a .net TLD (that was the hottest TLD to get, not .com!). .orgs were limited to provable non-profit organizations. Almost any educational institution could get an .edu now they are limited to four-year or graduate schools only. I remember getting .edu TLD's for a stenography school, a technical school, a grade school and a for profit scholarship company.

    It was very different back then.

    Oh well, I used to also walk 8 miles uphill both ways in the snow in July when I was a boy... :)
  • ehhhh....

    No.

    If the root nameservers became world-writeable, how long before some l33t skr1pt k1dd13 comes along and writes a Perl script to automatically register every possible alphanumeric domain name between two to 25 characters that hasn't already been registered? I'd give it, what, half an hour maybe?

    --

  • Re:Domain registration & distributed DNS (Score:5)

    by Plasmic ( 26063 ) on Monday June 26, 2000 @07:55AM (#975855)
    Do you realize how much DNS traffic is passed over the Internet? If there was no central registry that told DNS servers "go to this IP for info on this domain," all DNS queries would somehow propogate in "peer-to-peer" fashion until the appropriate DNS server heard the query (?). That would be remarkably slow and wasteful, similar to the Gnutella search mechanism. Except, in the case of Gnutella, the whole point of the topology is to maintain distributedness at the cost of response time and bandwidth. One cannot make such a case for DNS.

    Okay, so maybe you are picturing an architecture along the lines of BGP (large networks share routing information about each other all over the world with no central "Internet route server"). Well, that's a nice concept, except that every DNS server in the world would have to maintain an entire copy of the DNS database (just as most routers employing BGP on the Internet maintain an entire copy of the Internet's routing table via Autonomous System Numbers). The key difference is that the DNS database is many orders of magnitude larger than a "BGP database." In addition, you can't summarize domain names like you can with IP address blocks (i.e. DNS CIDR = oxymoron).. and remember, you said no hierarchy, which would imply that you don't pull "views" of the DNS database from any sort of central/upstream DNS server.

    When you speak so vaguely ("DNS should be made peer-to-peer, not top down"), it sounds good.. but that statement carries no real weight in any discussion approaching technical viability. If you're merely speaking idealistically (e.g. "in a perfect world, we would be able to implement DNS in a distributed manner in such a way that it didn't suck"), I agree wholeheartedly.

    This notion can definitely be explored further, but it's safe to say that this is not a simple solution, and I daresay that without some fundamental modifications to basic concepts such as "peer-to-peer" and "no hierarchy," very little progress would be made in seeking a superior solution. I don't see any technical merit in your proposal, so the only motivation is "ICANN is bad, now we don't need them."

    The next logical step is to fix ICANN, not break DNS.
  • That is a good idea! If one were to implement a Gnutella like system where there is a sort of self-healing network of interconnected nodes, all of which can search eathother. Maybe something more like freenet where the content moves towards the consumers.
    There are two immediate problems with this, one technical, and one political. First the technical, because it's the most important (politics can go t hell for the moment...). The problem is that things like Round Robin DNS for server pools, and for those poor souls with dynamic IP's who still want to run a server, we need some sort of clever way to prevent this decentralized blob of servers from keeping stale name entries around. Maybe if each entry in the system got a UTC timestamp along with it's signature, and any server that had a previous copy would replace that with the new one, but it still has the capacity to stagnate. Maybe if when aquiring new links A La Gnutella, there could be some specific protocol provision for requesting at least a couple distant servers as peers to keep the average distance between any two servers small... I'm sort of sleep deprived, so i'm not sure if that would work, but how's it sound?
    The political problem is trying to overcome the F.U.D. that will be kicked up by the powers that be when a system is created that cannot be 'sued' and from which names cannot be revoked because they are offensive, or because some stupid corporation is scared of them (think or the etoy-etoys ruckus...).

    Oh well. *yawn*

  • Yes, sure, corporation is good, government is bad. Rightist WTO propaganda.

    Rich multimedia experience is good (with my tiny modem, I sure love all those heavy pages, that take one hour to load). Dull text is information centered, light, quick to load and easy to adapt. Awful !

    > The time for government control over the net has gone, and that can only be a good thing for all of us.
    Bwahahahahah! Bullshit. What control was there ? Control over domain name ? Is that a true control ?
    Why do you think corporation and marketing guys will want to act for the good of us all ?

  • Of course, this side-steps the issue of whether it's ethical to take someone's content for free that they are requesting you to register for.

    Umm, the registration for nytimes.com is free... so you using the other link to 'take someone's content for free' isn't much of a point.

    Being a someone in charge of looking at stats for a web page, the only reason I can think of to ask people to register before browsing, is so you can get more accurate statistics. Yes, of course you can look at the http logs... but having seen that your home page has been loaded 100 times in one day doesn't really tell you much. Was it 100 people? was it just a few people who reloaded the homepage a lot (a-la slashdot homepage)? By having people register, you can find out how many different people visited your site on a day. That information is much more usefull, although, still, not wholy accurate.

  • from our beloved pranksters:
    JB: Well, why don't i just sue you?
    Lawyer: Sue who?
    JB: Sue you.
    L: Sue me?
    JB: Sue everybody!

    brought to you by a bored intern

  • > Almost any educational institution could get an .edu
    Almost any USAn educational instituation could get an .edu

  • A simpler solution? (Score:4)

    by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Monday June 26, 2000 @08:40AM (#975861)
    The political problem is trying to overcome the F.U.D. that will be kicked up by the powers that be when a system is created that cannot be 'sued' and from which names cannot be revoked because they are offensive, or because some stupid corporation is scared of them

    This FUD is easilly gotten around.

    Hack Mozilla and other browsers to recognize a different prefix as html, but using the new Name Service. Perhaps something like "alt://" instead of "http://" Allow the user to define one or the other as the default.

    Then, whenever someone tries to look up alt://fucktheicann.com they'll get the anti-icann site, while http://fucktheicann.com isn't resolved because the ICANN has "reserved" it. (Disclaimer, the previous example is entirely fictional, I have no idea if such a domain exists or how ICANN would respond to it if it did).

    One could go a step further, in inviting all of the country code TLDs to participate in both systems, such that the integrity of .us, .de, .uk, etc. remains intact even while .com, .org, .net are subverted and countless new TLDs emerge.

    This could probably be hacked using the existing DNS system, or an improved version with better security features. Names could be given on a first come, first serve basis (automated), with no provisions for arbitration whatsoever (take it up with the other party, if you get a court order, send the police to there house, don't bother us).
  • But you're forgetting the all-important "In a statement.." This implies that ICANN released a statement, which DENIED the allegations that they "treat[ed] Afternic UNfairly." Hence, no misspell/bad grammar in the first place...
  • I like that idea. So the person who actually has the power and can be sued is the person who holds the secret that the update to the name record must be signed with to be accepted by the network. That puts the responsibility, and the power (they should go hand in hand) with the guy who registers the domain, and nobody else.

    THat sounds like a nifty idea.
  • My origional point was that by letting people register meaningful words as domains you made domains a rare commodity. The DNS system could easily have restricted allowable characters to a fixed length string of numbers.
  • And when will we ever see a 4-letter TLD(if there is already one, tell me)?
  • The Internet Namespace Cooperative [tinc-org.com] does something similar to what you propose. They support backwards compatibility with the "official" recognized TLDs, but add a number of their own.
  • IP addresses and domain names work pretty well for figuring out how many unique page views there were. Most people don't get a page, disconnect, dial-in, get the page again, etc. And for people with more permanent connections and domains (cable, DSL, any DS type connection, so forth), there's little difficulty. The only problem is when a bunch of people who show as a single IP (proxy, firewall, etc.) all view the page; only then are cookies useful.

    No, what the cookies are really used for is tracking how often any given person accesses the page, and which pages. Thus the ads can be targeted based on interests, and the company can develop a demographic profile of its userbase through the use of pageviews, surverys, and referrer URLs.
    ---
  • So Maxwell Technologies would have to give up their domain maxwell.com if Maxwell Optical Industries challenged it? Not at all. They both have valid 'Maxwell' trademarks, just in different markets.

    So who gets maxwell.com? Whoever got to it first, that's who, and to fuckall with latecomers.

    A trademark is not an exclusive right to be the sole user of the word or name in every conceivable form in every market and in every corner of the world. It allows exclusive right to use the name for a product or range of products in a specific category, and that's all.

  • Actualy, there was some disscussion of DNS over Freenet sometime back. Check the Freenet-chat archives [geocrawler.com].

    The idea got passed around a lot. Eventualy, we just decided that it was a good idea but there was no reason to implement it now, but maybe in the future. Freenet would also have to get a lot faster at doing requests (hey, its only in 0.2 beta!)


    ------

  • In other words it's turning into a pile of useless, moronic shit just like the crap the said corporations churn out in their TV and print media. Oh, hooray, that is an improvement.

    You want to see something pathetic? Go to Pizza Hut's Web site. Two "front pages", one of which is Shockwave. I don't even see why they have a Web site; it's not like they let you order pizza online or anything.

    You probably aren't living in the right area. Pizza Hut does deliver [pizzahut.com]. Not like Papa Johns (I didn't know they did. Thanks for the link.) but it is coming. Pizza Hut's splash page is pretty, but pointless.
  • That site would just keep returning 404: Not Found errors :-)
  • hey DNSjunkie, dont you in fact work for afternic????
  • If portability is the only real issue for finding a solution to get us out of this mess, then how about two IP's a static and virtual one. The virtual one is portable.

    Good job; you just described what DNS is--except your idea uses numbers, which are harder to remember than names are. You deserve a medal.

  • 1. I agree needed are more TLD's, but they need to be logical ones. Sex sites on .sex, Map sites on .map, ISP's on .net or .isp, only real companies as .com's etc.

    Personally, I think the Official Pr0n TLD should be .xxx. I think the pornsites would like that too, since they already try to get as many x's in their names as possible (at least, so I've heard...not that I'd know from firsthand experience...or anything...er...ahem).

    2. There need to be rules and the registration services need to enforce them. aka if your not a company you don't get a .com

    I'm more concerned about only nonprofits getting .org, no companies (sorry, Hemos).

    5. A new central authority, the current ones don't work.

    My favorite suggestion is to let each country manage their own DNS. So, say, pets.com would mean pets.com.au in Australia and pets.com.us in the USA. To get to a domain in another country, just qualify it with the ISO country code (pets.com.au would always be the same site no matter where you are). Of course, there would have to be restrictions: a country couldn't create a TLD that matched a country code.


    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!

  • history... (Score:4)

    by tensionboy ( 115662 ) on Monday June 26, 2000 @07:20AM (#975877)
    1999 will go down in history as the year your mom found out about the Internet.

    and 2000 is the year that attorneys found out about it.

  • Maybe they should have left everything as numbers. Domain names have becoem hot-commodity property. If they had simply used numbers then 126.125.10.154 could have been called whatever the user wanted to call it.

    Trust me - Domain Naming is a GOOD THING. Having a decentralized system of DNS servers is what makes it possible for you to move your web server from your SPARC box in your office to a co-lo facility inside a missile silo in South Dakota and have users still be able to find the server after the DNS refreshes even though the IP has changed.

    -carl
  • I'm with you. Let's just dump the whole DNS concept and use IP addresses for everything.

    People have been using numbers for their telephones for decades, so it's not like the web would become impossible to use.

  • Re:Good for Afternic (Score:3)

    by vsync64 ( 155958 ) <vsync@quadium.net> on Monday June 26, 2000 @07:28AM (#975885) Homepage
    It is now the domain of the corporations that have turned the web from a text-based, dull place into the multimedia experiance that people want to see today.

    By "multimedia experiance" you mean "crap".

  • Re:With good reason (Score:5)

    by DNSjunkie ( 117410 ) on Monday June 26, 2000 @08:04AM (#975891)
    You are nothing but an ignorant troll. Have you ever been to afternic.com? I've been a member of afternic for a long time now. Afternic is an independent third party exchange for domain names -- they merely provide a platform whereby owners of domain names can auction them; afternic the company itself does not auction any names; they are an exchange, not a broker or domain owner. Afternic has never violated any ICANN policy.

    Where is the court filing that you speak of? I find your claim to be outrageous, and completely un-found.

    In an completely one-sided advisory [icann.org], which is clearly propaganda, ICANN states:

    "In investigating Afternic's application for accreditation, ICANN discovered that Afternic's web site presented many offers to sell domain names based on other company's names, some with remarks reflecting the abusive nature of the offers. One company name, for example, was offered with the remark that it would be an "Excellent domain for a reseller, owner, or competitor of" the company (this example was offered at a starting bid of $125,000)....Currently, Afternic's site is offering many other domains incorporating well-known business, celebrity, and government agency names..."

    Nobody likes cybersquatters, myself included, but how is this different from how Network Solutions or any other company operates in this market? You can go to register.com or Network Solutions and register anything you want, no matter what law or trademark it violates. That is between the user and the entity which feels it is being violated. The same thing is true on afternic. Just like EBAY, with almost 200,000 auctions it would be impossible to actively police everything.

    Afternic did not encourage these people to purchase these names, and they fully comply with ICANN's dispute resolution process, as wells requests from trademark holders, etc.

  • "free" doesn't always mean "no money". The NY Times gets higher advertising rates by showing off their registration numbers. By bypassing their registration, you are lowering their overall registration numbers and (in principal) earning them less advertising money. So, while it doesn't cost you any money to register, it does cost them money for you not to register.

    (and, by the way, the partners link does still appear to be working for me, though it didn't in a previous story)
    -----

  • Icann is right (Score:3)

    by falloutboy ( 150069 ) on Monday June 26, 2000 @08:09AM (#975893)
    With regards to everyone who thinks we should let anyone have any TLD they can add to their own DNS: anarchy is bad, mmmkay? Practically speaking, it just simply would not work. How many people would try to take Hotmail.com and map it to their dialup linux box (or slashdot.org, for that matter)?

    Icann is absolutely right for turning down Afternic. Its companies and people like them that prevent regular people from buying domains with simple, easily remembered names.

    A decent analogy would be if a person or company tried to buy all the 800/877/toll free prefixed telephone numbers that spell something, in order to resell them at a later date. Its irritating at the very least, and although IANAL, I suspect it is illegal.

  • I think that the parent post of your comment implies that the box would be moving from one IP subnet to another one.

    Good point. Subnet transfers would be a problem.

    OTOH BoLean's idea of meaningless random number strings as domain names seems to have no downside, other than the loss of vanity names.

  • I'm not a lawyer. Everything that I have read about restraint of trade is in reference to restrictive clauses in contracts and agreements. Simple refusal to do business with someone is not a restraint of trade. If you want to buy widgets from me, but I refuse because I don't like people who wear green socks, that is your tough luck.
  • ICANN has not rejected anybody's application. Afternic and a few others are on hold. Not granted != denied.
    -russ
  • Can't anyone tell that the system that is currently in place just isn't working out... The Registration system needs fixing and it needs fixing fast.
    1. I agree needed are more TLD's, but they need to be logical ones. Sex sites on .sex, Map sites on .map, ISP's on .net or .isp, only real companies as .com's etc.
    2. There need to be rules and the registration services need to enforce them. aka if your not a company you don't get a .com
    3. First come first served, end of story. If you register xxxx.yyy its yours unless there is a superior claim. ie mcdonalds.com should belong to the company, but if you register mcdonalds.fam because thats your family name no one cna take it away.
    4. Trademarks mean nothing on the internet, and should not be enforcable. see above.
    5. A new central authority, the current ones don't work.
    6. Registration services cannot own domain names, or horde domain names that they do not use as part of their business.
    7. Domain names are the property of the person who registers them, the fee is simply for the up keep of the central domain records, so your DNS server can be found.
    8.Owners have the right to move to a different service if they so desire at anytime.
    9. Anyone can provide registration services, just like networksolutions, register.com whatever.
    10. Domain names cannot be suspended or taken away, unless you can provide a superior claim, TRADEMARKS do not count. You must simply have existed longer doing what you are doing on the internet...first come first served again.
    11. You have the right to a single top level domain. If you have xxxx.yyy you cannot own xxxx.zzz as well unless it is providing entirely different content and services. This is common sense stuff, that personally i had always thought was just standard practice until I really started paying attention to internet politics.

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