The Race Is On For .net

mikrorechner writes "As reported previously, ICANN is looking for a new registrar for the .net tld. The biddings are in now, and The Register has a lengthy article about the five contenders. Their guess is that only two really have a chance: VeriSign and DeNIC. We will know more in two months."

Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of domain registration, I found this [nsswitch.com] website that allows you to register the domain slashdot.org

What a fraud!!

Anybody knows who to complain or what to do to take this idiot down?

Not for profit

[wertarbyte]

As you can see here [denic.de], DeNIC is an organization that does not aim for profit:

"In Deutschland ist es die DENIC, die diese Aufgabe als "designated administrator" im Sinne des RFC1591 übernommen hat. Sie erfüllt sie ohne Gewinnerzielungsabsicht zum Nutzen und Wohle der gesamten deutschen Internet Community, neutral und unabhängig, fachkundig und verantwortungsbewusst, diskriminierungsfrei und in Übereinstimmung mit den international anerkannten Standards für den Betrieb einer Domain-Registrierungsstelle."

This roughly translates to

"In germany, DeNic took this duty as 'designated administrator' according to RFC1591. It achieves its duty without any aim for financial profits, but for the benefit of the hole internet community, neutrally and independently, competently and responsibly, withouth discrimination and in accordance to international standards for domain registration services."

root for Afilias

[MagicMerlin]

Afilias runs the .org domain on PostgreSQL. It has been pretty smooth, no matter what the article says, and it was a huge embarassment for Oracle who ran a huge disinformation campaign against PostgreSQL and open source in general.

Merlin

The only one that has chance is VeriSign

[Anonymous Coward]

ICANN has become an incredibly corrupt government entity. In reality, all bidders should have a chance. But when you're ICANN, you like to short-circuit the process. I suspect other bidders may not have been willing to give ICANN the $0.75 tax/fee they want from registrations, since it is wrong. VeriSign is the only one they know can control. Hence the contract will pass to them.

Re: Registrars serve no useful purpose

[r5t8i6y3]

from: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.operators.nanog /28565 [gmane.org]

From: David M. Besonen panix.com>
Subject: Re: Registrars serve no useful purpose
Newsgroups: gmane.org.operators.nanog
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 09:06:31 -0800

[a dated, biased (what isn't?), insightful, and
relevant interview]

Published on Policy DevCenter
(http://www.oreillynet.com/policy/)
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/12/05/ karl.html

Karl Auerbach: ICANN "Out of Control"
by Richard Koman
12/05/2002

Editor's note: Strong forces are reshaping the Internet these days. To understand these forces--governmental, business, and technical--Richard Koman interviews the people in the midst of the changes.

This month, Richard talks to Karl Auerbach, a public board member of ICANN and one of the Internet governing body's strongest critics.

October's distributed, denial-of-service attack against the domain name system--the most serious yet, in which seven of the thirteen DNS roots were cut off from the Internet--put a spotlight on ICANN, the nongovernmental corporation responsible for Internet addressing and DNS. The security of DNS is on ICANN's watch. Why is it so susceptible to attack, when the Internet as a whole is touted as being able to withstand nuclear Armageddon?

It's religious dogma, says Karl Auerbach, a public representative to ICANN's board. There's no reason DNS shouldn't be decentralized, except that ICANN wants to maintain central control over this critical function. Worse, Auerbach said in a telephone interview with O'Reilly Network, ICANN uses its domain name dispute resolution process to expand the rights of trademark holders, routinely taking away domains from people with legitimate rights to them, only to reward them to multinational corporations with similar names.

Auerbach--who successfully sued ICANN over access to corporate documents (ICANN wanted him to sign a nondisclosure agreement before he could see the documents)--will only be an ICANN director for a few more weeks. As part of ICANN's "reform" process, the ICANN board voted last month to end public representation on the board. As of December 15, there will be zero public representatives on the ICANN board.

How does ICANN justify banishing the public from its decision-making process? Stuart Lynn, president and CEO of ICANN, said the change was needed to make ICANN's process more "efficient." In a Washington Post online discussion, Lynn said: "The board decided that at this time [online elections] are too open to fraud and capture to be practical, and we have to look for other ways to represent the public interest. It was also not clear that enough people were really interested in voting in these elections to create a large enough body of voters that could be reflective of the public interest. This decision could always be reexamined in the future. In the meantime, we are encouraging other forms of at-large organizations to self-organize and create and encourage a body of individuals who could provide the user input and public interest input into the ICANN process."

Former ICANN president Esther Dyson is also supporting the move away from public representation on the board. "I did believe that it was a good idea to have a globally elected executive board, [but] you can't have a global democracy without a globally informed electorate," Dyson told the Post. "What you really need [in order] to have effective end-user representation is to have them in the bowels (of the organization) rather than on the board."

Auerbach isn't buying. "ICANN is pursuing various spin stories to pretend that they haven't abandoned the public interest," he says in this interview. "ICANN is trying to create a situation where individuals are not allowed in and the only organizations that are allowed in are those that hew to ICANN's party line."