More About The .org Reassignment

Joel Rowbottom writes: "After ICANN 'awarded' ISOC with the running of .ORG in the Draft Staff Report, public comments regarding the process are starting to come out of the woodwork. Eric Brunner-Williams has commented on the flawed scoring and ICANN allegedly using the process to financially shore up ISOC and Afilias; the dotORG Foundation have posted some comments and questions (quote: 'we are perplexed by the Academic CIO Team's rating of our bid's technology as marginal'); Carl Malamud has posted the IMS/ISC response; and Organic have posted a rather damning indictment of the process as well (disclaimer: I work for Organic Names). For the $27,000 it cost each bidder to 'participate' (and that's just the entry fee), we'd have expected a little more professionalism than just getting some 'free' t-shirts! Comment to ICANN today [e-mail] and make a difference."

What will it take?

[unsinged int]

Anyone who pays attention to this stuff has to know by now that ICANN is seriously flawed. What's it going to take for a large number of people (or just a few very recognizable and important ones) to ditch them and go with something like OpenNIC [opennic.org]?

We really don't need ICANN. Get rid of it, please.

Re:This is probably a really stupid question

[The_Guv'na]

The DNS system is basically a phone directory for the internet. It takes a domain name and spits back an IP number.

What prevents somebody from starting their own TLD and just claiming it for use?

The 8 [I think, or however many there are] big fat hot root servers sitting around the world at various hush-hush locations, the big hard doors they're hidden behind, and the fact that you are not authorised to go and fiddle with them.

Are there laws? Not exactly, AFAIK, but see above.

Trust issues? Yeah, we could never trust people to just make up new TLDs whenever they wanted. Oh, and we don't trust ICANN.

Or is it just that everyone's DNS server would filter out/be incompatable with it? To take a effect across the internet, it would have to be introduced by the root servers, then over the next few hours it would filter down to all the other DNS servers. They could be at ISP's, Uni's, or wherever.

With all this trouble that ICANN('T?) seems to cause, I guess my real question is, who needs them? We do, the same way we need governments. The DNS servers we use [that usually means the ones owned by our ISP's] update their info from the root servers. They could just as easily set their servers to update from somewhere like OpenNIC [opennic.org] as well as the usual servers, but generally speaking, they just don't.

Ali