VeriSign Wants Ability To Suspend Domains Without Court Order 123
GeorgeK writes "VeriSign, the monopoly registry operator for .com/.net domain names, has submitted a proposal to ICANN (PDF) describing an 'Anti-Abuse' policy. If allowed to proceed with such a policy, they would become judge, jury and executioner, with the ability to suspend or even cancel alleged 'abusive' domain names without due process for registrants. The proposal even recognizes that legitimate domain names may be taken down improperly, and offers a 'protest' procedure. However, VeriSign does not appear to offer any ability to protest an accusation of abuse before the suspension or cancellation. They intend to 'shoot first and ask questions later.'"
Pretty domain. 'Shame if something were to happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure they will offer a service where your domain is "Pre-Verified" and not subject to abuse takedowns... For $1,000 per year, of course.
Re:Of Course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget to pay your $299.99 VeriSign Domain Protection Reactivaton Fee, you cocksmoking teabaggers!
Re:This is nuts (Score:5, Insightful)
You just have you realise that Goverment and Corporations are actually the same thing, then your job becomes easier.
Re:This is nuts (Score:4, Insightful)
How are we supposed to know which threat to focus on dammit!
Don't. Build the distributed replacement for DNS.
Re:Sounds like a fine idea. . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Of Course... (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you have any assurance that someone else could do a better job? Better the devil you know...
That is the devils argument.
Change, change again, change again and sooner or later you will find something you can tolerate.
Re:Of Course... (Score:4, Insightful)
I was the network guy for a small ISP when Verisign introduced Site Finder. Believe me, at that point my boss and I decided it couldn't be worse if Satan was running those TLDs, and we weren't quite sure if it wasn't Satan running them.
Re:This is nuts (Score:5, Insightful)
No it hasn't. You've just become more aware. You can trace deals like this at least as far back as the building of the railroads in the US. I believe that Britain has records of similar hijinks that go back to the middle ages. I'm sure other countries do too. They'd go back further, but corporations were invented during the middle ages. Before then, and even while they were developing, most of the slimy deals were made by individual wealthy people. Corporations didn't really become commonly dominant until after WWI, possibly as late as WWII. Before then the major problem was tycoons. And before them aristocrats.
None of them have ever been worth trusting as classes, though I'll admit that individual people were sometimes trustworthy. But that was unusual. Powerful organizations are not trustworthy. It's not money that corrupts, it's lack of consequences. You see it in corporations, you see it in politicians, you see it in police, you even see it in anonymous e-mail. It's pretty nearly universal. Some individual people avoid corruption. But it isn't what one should expect.
This is why control in civilization should be decentralized. So that people can't create for themselves "spheres of invulnerability". But this goes contrary to what everyone wants, because everyone wants a "safe space", where they can control what happens. This isn't a problem, unless that "safe space" infringes on other people.
P.S.: Anyone know a cell phone that has a white-list option? (I, too, want a safe space. A space where I can decide who is allowed to interrupt me.)
Re:This is nuts (Score:4, Insightful)
All true, and great for a time when John Postel was what it meant to run a registry. The RFC's didn't anticipate the kind of interference that NetSol is proposing.
There doesn't have to be namespace collisions, though. Why is it that Visa cards are all 4xxx, MasterCards are 5xxxx and Discover cards are all 6xxx? Couldn't Visa start issuing cards in the 5xxx range? Of course, but it's mutually beneficial for all of the players to interoperate. Nobody would trust a name service provider that was purposefully destructive (unless forced to through monopoly) so we would expect they'd operate in a trustworthy manner by default.
Also look at the world BGP routing table. It's all distributed, you have to earn trust to participate, and there are occasional mistakes. Even still, it lets me get these characters from here to wherever Slashdot's server are, and has proven effective, even if there's room for improvement. Imagine if everybody had to go register their routes through a single route registrar and make changes on their website.