John Gilmore and Maddog Hall discuss .ORG bids

TreyHarris writes "Over on SAGEwire, we have posted an email exchange between John Gilmore (EFF cofounder) and Jon "maddog" Hall (Executive Director, Linux International) about the .ORG bids. It's a fascinating read, and goes much further into depth about the issues than I've seen on any news site thus far."

$0.25 a name? Get Real!

[Anonymous Coward]

John Gilmore needs to find out how much a gallon of milk costs these days.

$625k a year to run a 2.5 million name database? In the real world that pays for 5 high end people after you count business expenses. This is a hgih availability application. Lets get network transit and co-lo with security and backup power. You walso want to replicate this database in a remote location so that doubles those expenses. You also want maintenance contracts with relatively short turn around time. Don't forget staff to man the phones for international operations (Perhaps 24x7). Yes, they may have bought higher end hardware than they needed, but that's a small part of the overall expenses. Finally, these folks are trying to do a professional job and do deserve to make some money in the process.

How did Gilmore make his money? As I recall it was from being an early employee in Sun. He seems to think that everyone else should give away their profits and live in cardboard boxes, but he sure lives well himself. Let's also be clear that Gilmore has had a very public feud with Paul Vixie about MAPS. Gilmore thinks he has a right to run an open relay and make life easier for spammers, but MAPS does not have a right to list his system. How's the for libertarian ideals? I suspect that's coloring his review.

Re:Keep it high!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would rather see no speculation in domain names, and no domains registered by anyone who isn't ready to use them, which would make domains much easier to get for people who are ready to use the. However, if the price goes up, it isn't going to stop speculation by companies, it's just going to stop average people from registering domains they have good ideas for. So, instead of all the domains being taken, but many of them being taken by average people who might use them or give them up if they're not going to use them, all the domains will be taken, and all by well funded companies who will never use them for anything but making money, and never give them up if they don't. I think the current price strikes a good balance. Not so low that people register everything, but not so high that average people can't register domains for possible future use. I would, however, like to see more of the proceeds go to organizations that support network standards and infrastructure, and not to private companies who just happen to have won the ICANN lottery.

Re:Keep it high!

[garcia]

I really think you are completely wrong here.

#1, you shouldn't be allowed to register "all the mis-spellings you can think of". You should have to be a valid non-profit organization.

#2, it is obvious to me that the purpose of your buying these domains is to be annoying. There is absolutely no valid reason to have a "misspelling" registered other than to be a pain in the ass.

I registered lazylightning.org with my friend. It's a Grateful Dead reference. We are actually non-profit. It's not a misspelling and it isn't for any reason other than for me to have a webpage and valid name to ssh to.

If I have to start paying $100 just to stop idiots like you from registering shit that would make me even MORE annoyed than I already am about the prices.

It's people like you that ruin it for the rest of us.

Re:Keep it high!

[Ian Bicking]

Defining "non-profit" seems very difficult to me. 503c? That's pretty difficult to get -- it takes quite a while (generally at least a year, I believe), and there's quite a few formal requirements. Because of that, a lot of new non-profit-like organizations attach themselves to a 503c, who collects money for them and performs other (mostly financial) services. But then one 503c will have to own many domains.

Anyway, 503c is silly to require -- it's US-only, and doesn't cover a significant portion of actual "organizations". Lazylightning.org is not a "valid non-profit organization", it's personal, and those aren't the same things (it also doesn't have any valid connection to the Grateful Dead -- it would be more appropriate for you to use your own name).

If not formally non-profit, what then? Perhaps you could ban for-profit corporations from .org. Corporations obviously could get a 503c designation if they were validly non-profit (or the not-for-profit designation which is slightly different). This might work okay, and a "corporation" is a well-defined international concept.

But it's still difficult to determine what the limit for domain names registered would be. There are innumerable valid reasons for one organization/person to own multiple domains. Where would you draw the line?

Mostly, if we could get rid of blatantly invalid domain registrations (e.g., mispellings that point to those stupid search engines) and domains that are registered but not used (or have "under construction" for two years), then it would probably be a lot better. Of course, keeping aggressive trademark owners from manipulating the system is also important.

This is difficult as long as individuals have access to the system, as the system would continue to be manipulated by multi-level marketing companies, who work "through" individuals for their nefarious (or rather annoying) schemes.

And there's nothing wrong with registering a misspelling, so long as it's a misspelling of a domain you own (which I think is what the original poster is refering to). At a certain point it gets silly, but sometimes it is important (for instance, if you used lazy-lightning.org, you'd probably also want lazylightning.org, as it's hard to remember the difference between the two).

Many TLDs isn't the answer

[Ian Bicking]

Quoting John Gilmore:

If we made a hundred GTLDs instead of three or ten, then the price of monopolizing a name for speculation would be 10x to 30x the current price. At the same time, the value of any one of those names would drop significantly, since most of them are replaceable by each other. If the speculators had only bought 90 of the 100 names, a company that wanted to be "CompanyX.something" could become "CompanyX.okay" or "CompanyX.oui" -- without paying a dime to the speculators. They'd lose their entire investment in buying up "CompanyX" names.

That doesn't make sense to me -- sure, you could use CompanyX.okay instead of CompanyX.something, but that's just a way of saying "let's make domains useless and random, then we can't speculate."

.com has been overloaded, obviously. But without clearly-defined alternate TLDs, I don't see how adding more will help. Maybe (though unlikely) after a couple years .com will lose it's canonical identity. But people still won't be able to remember the name of a site. This isn't a question of search engines, but of having a meaningful domain system. If you want meaningless, use IP addresses, or get one domain and create serial numbers below it for every individual site/computer (if you want to be IP-address independent).

Real people, however, want meaningful domain names. If you have a hundred TLDs, many of them will overlap conceptually. Who can remember the difference between .biz and .bus, or .game and .toy? They might remember your carefully chosen second-level domain, but with generic TLDs they won't be able to get to it. Unless you register the name in all related TLDs. But isn't that what we were trying to get away from?

We have been attacked by multi-level marketers and spammers, and those people are damaging the system greatly. But we can't win by trying to beat them at their game -- by diluting the system so greatly that they can't play. That just ruins the game for everyone, and the MLMers and spammers will still be there anyway. I don't like ICANN, but I do think that well-defined, meaningful, sometimes regulated, and non-overlapping TLDs are essential. This makes ICANN all the worse, because something like it is essential, but done the wrong way (with the wrong people influencing it) it will again damage the system.

Domain names aren't stupid

[yelvington]

Some kid who wasn't around when domain names were invented posts nonsense like "URLs aren't supposed to make sense." Then some undercaffeinated moderator votes it up. Now, who's being stupid?

Network hosts have conventionally borne the names of their organizations since the 1970s -- in fact, before the creation of TCP/IP. The reason the domain name system was created was to facilitate use of easily memorized, meaningful names rather than numeric addresses.

Read RFCs 597, 606, 608, 810, 952, and 1034 for a start.

If you really believe "you do not need a domain name to have a website," then by all means feel free to use numeric addresses. You won't need to pay a registrar one red cent, and no corporations will sue you for infringing their trademarks.

Re:This just bothered me...

[Wakkow]

Of course, the other solution is, do a Google search and avoid the whole issue.

Don't you mean "google dot com"?