ICANN Updates

ICANN is meeting in Bucharest next week, which means they're floating all their usual smoky-room schemes just prior to the meeting. leto writes "The three RIR's, ARIN, APNIC and RIPE-NCC have just released a joint statement that basically tells ICANN that their Evolution and Reform plan is unacceptable, and tells ICANN to go play elsewhere, and leave the address space in the hands of the well working bodies." An interesting mailing list debate has been going on between ICANN's critics and ICANN's extremely well-paid and extremely sleazy attorney: critic, attorney (sleazy!), critic again, another critic, attorney again, critic's response, still other critics. And finally, note that the .org TLD is up for bids - the New York Times has a story, Newsforge has another.

Repeating myself

[catfood]

Nobody's yet explained why it takes a raft of lawyers, eighty million dollars, and meetings all over the world to accomplish what Jon Postel did in his spare time on his office workstation.

The Internet has gotten bigger, but damitall, IP addresses are still IP addresses and DNS is supposed to be a hierarchical, delegated system. What's the big problem? Jon just ran a root server and kept backups like it was the most obvious and natural thing in the world. What else is there to do?

Re:"Sleazy Attorney"

[Anonymous Coward]

> Good idea, Michael, call an attorney sleazy on a public forum. I'm sure he won't mind, especially if you're right.

"Sleazy" is not libelous, it's an opinion. Slashdot's OK here. You have to state a deliberately known false assertion of fact to be libelous.

Re:English, please

[bourne]

• RIR - Regional Internet Registry - org that maps IP blocks to their owners.
• ARIN - American Registry for Internet Numbers, an RIR.
• APNIC - Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre, an RIR.
• RIPE - Reseaux IP Europeens, an RIR.

All except the first can be found at www.----.net. An IP is attacking you, and you want to find out who it is registered to? Look it up at the various RIRs.