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The Internet Your Rights Online

RIPE NCC Responds to ICANN CEO's Proposal 146

Posted by michael from the playing-for-all-the-marbles dept.
An anonymous reader sends in: "RIPE NCC (the European IP address registry) responds to the ICANN proposals for reducing their own accountability even further whilst spending millions of everyone else's money." ICANN will be meeting next week in Ghana - ought to be a feisty meeting.
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RIPE NCC Responds to ICANN CEO's Proposal More

RIPE NCC Responds to ICANN CEO's Proposal

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  • It seems to me this could be a good thing, to open up the full flood gates of complaints towards ICANN. I mean seriously, I think almost every organization affiliated with them, plus many of us (cough /.) is just about fed up with them and some of the not quite brilliant things they're doing.

    Let's just hope this gets something rolling, because obviously our voices are next to unheard.

  • run you r own nameservers (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I've said it before and I'll say it again - what's stopping people running their own nameservers? Most people seem to have trouble remembering _not_ to run 'em on Linux :-)

    Screw ICANN. DNS itself is a bad idea, anyway, recentralising a decentralised network...

    • Re:run you r own nameservers (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      DNS is no use at all without a root.

      Maybe some other mechanism could prevent conflicts and name hijacking in a completely decentralized system, but it aint DNS.

    • Re:run you r own nameservers (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Snootch ( 453246 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:35PM (#3113965)
      Screw ICANN. DNS itself is a bad idea, anyway, recentralising a decentralised network...

      Hmm...and how exactly would you look up a web server's address? I know, remember an IP for each host you'll ever visit, and get that IP in the first place from...well...good question, isn't it? Even the old HOSTS.TXT file was centralised, and, by your logic, a Bad Thing.

    • Re:run you r own nameservers (Score:5, Informative)

      by Aanallein ( 556209 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:52PM (#3114060)
      People are actually running their own nameservers outside of ICANN in a quite ordered way - there's a host of .ocean, .dot, .children, and similar top level domains out there - all you need to do is use one of those nameservers. Go take a look at OpenNIC [unrated.net] - through which you can also use the top level domains from PacificRoot [pacificroot.com] and AlterNIC [alternic.org].
      • *blinks* I wonder where the .dot came from... I'm sure I meant to type .god - oh well, doesn't really matter anyway - chances are there's actually a dot-dot out there as well. :)
        (Ooh, and the .xxx I saw mentioned in some other posts also exists in those alternative top level domains.)

      • It doesn't scale (Score:4, Insightful)

        by keithmoore ( 106078 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @04:25PM (#3114251) Homepage
        This doesn't cause too many problems on a small scale. But if everybody picked his own root, it would be a disaster.

        If you want domain names (and URLs) to work reliably and consistently from one location to another, there needs to be some mechanism to sort out conflicts over the meaning of a name. That job is inherently fraught with controversy, because it will pit people with vastly different interests, cultures, and expectations against one another. I don't particularly like the result of UDRP, but the bottom line is that dispute resolution is a difficult job no matter how it's done.

        On the other hand if everybody picks his own root (or his own root search path) then URLs won't have the same meaning from one client to another, and instead of having ICANN handle disputes about who owns a TLD or SLD, we'll have the same disputes being handled by people trying to tell random users to change their root servers. or by interception proxies forced on users by ISPs. In some parts of the world there will be government edicts insisting that a particular root be used, with different roots required in different parts of the world.

        Granted that ICANN is seriously screwed up and that its current proposal is not a step in the right direction. But having one authority responsible for dispute resolution at the TLD level makes a lot more sense than inviting wide variation in the meanings of DNS names.

        RFC 2826 [rfc-editor.org] still says it pretty well.

        • If, however, your browser checked out *all* of the roots and then presented you with the results when more than one identical name came up (e.g., "there are three identically named web sites, the first for root x, etc."), you could then link to the site and change the name in your bookmarks to reflect which was which according to your own method of organization.

          In the case of a conflict this would provide an extra step to finding out which of the sites you wanted (unless, of course, you got the name from a search engine or a friend, which is what I would guess most people do), but it really wouldn't be a "disaster". In fact, it might add another minute or two to your browsing, assuming that a) there was a conflict, and b) you didn't get the URL from a search engine, friend, or another site that correctly identified the root.

          I'd prefer this system to what we have now.

          Max
          • several problems with this idea:
            1. the browser isn't the only internet application that uses DNS names, not by a long shot.
            2. not all net apps are interactive. should a MTA have to ask someone to disambiguate a DNS root conflict everytime it wants to route an email?
            3. if you don't have stable IP addresses (and you don't), and you don't have a single DNS root, how do you specify which root servers to use? what's to keep root X from providing bogus results in response to queries for the addresses of other roots?
        • There is no disaster if everyone picks their own root system. In fact there is a very definite benefit - the data is distributed more widely, points of traffic concentration are reduced, and the vulnerability of the entire system to data polution via bad root zone files is reduced.

          The issue is not whether there are multiple systems of roots - the issue is whether they are consistent. Right now those who are operating root systems the compete with the ICANN/NTIA/NSI legacy root are offering supersets. How one views an enhanced service depends on whether one is in the "I chose not to move forward with the times" camp or the "I upgraded to a more complete service" camp.

          DNS has largely failed on the real issue: invarience.

          There are three questions:

          - Does the meaning of a DNS name change depending on who utters the name (client invarience)?

          - Does the meaning of a DNS name change depending on where the name is uttered (geographic invarience)?

          - Once bound to a meaning, does the meaning of a DNS name change over time (temporal invarience)?

          On all three of these counts DNS fails. Content management systems have broken the first kinds of invarience and, among other reasons, our simple inability to distinguish between containers and the information they contain has broken the latter.

          Take a look at my submission to the NRC on these points: http://www.cavebear.com/rw/nrc_presentation_july_1 1_2001.ppt [cavebear.com]

        • Ask the ICANN board member who uses alternative roots and has for four years if he's had any problems.

          The answer is to help the alternative root community: ORSC [slashdot.org], OpenNIC, PacROOT, not to support ICANN over FUD like this.
      • the problem is that they aren't used and not advertised *at all*.

        I have the opennic root into my dns here. I have never encountered a hyperlink pointing me to a place in one of those TDLs. (aside from the examples on the opennic webpage) not once.

        the best way to get people to use them is to advertise them better. if /. would point a story to, say, www.something.god, thousands of people would suddenly learn about opennic, and a few dozen will probably "install" it.
    • recentralising a decentralised network

      And where would you start to look for information?

      Right now there are 13 globally spread root-servers which know all the locations of the ccTLD and TLD servers. Without this piece of centralisation it will be hard++ to add new (cc)TLD, because everybody has to update their root.hints (or equivalent) file.

      Centralisation an sich is not good, but distributed centralisation is good.
    • I've run my own root server - it takes a small amount of work to keep the referral addresses up to date. One easy way is to write a simple script that uses dig to hoover-up delegation information from any of the legacy root servers.

      I find it easier to use one of the competing root systems. I use the ORSC one. It has been quite reliable over the years - in fact it has been better than the ICANN/NTIA/NSI one (it didn't lose .com for several hours a while back.)

      There is already a rather lose group of root system operators who try to avoid doing silly and ultimately unproductive things like having two different versions of the same name but with different contents.
    • Sure, anyone can run their own nameservers, but that does not mean I will use them.

      I know, you can have all sorts of corrupt nameservers, but you will have a hard time corrupting the name servers any real ISP is using as they likely only pull names from a set database.

  • ICANN should have been gone long ago (Score:4, Interesting)

    by afidel ( 530433 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:25PM (#3113902)
    When they refused to create the .XXX TLD they showed complete disregard for the future of the net as a self regulating entity. If they had created an .XXX TLD then we could banish net nany, cyber sitter, government intervention "to protect the children" and many other anoyances in one easy swoop.
    • I agree!

      The internet needs more pr0n.

    • To put it simply you are wrong. You mean to tell me that if they had approved a .xxx TDL that all the porn sites in the world would just change their domain names and live happily ever after quarantined in the .xxx TDL. No, you are out of your idealistic mind if you truly believe this. If you don't and were trying to be witty, then I look to the moderators and ask why oh why is this rated 4 (at the time of my post)

      • Re:ICANN should have been gone long ago (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @04:14PM (#3114179)
        To put it simply you are wrong. You mean to tell me that if they had approved a .xxx TDL that all the porn sites in the world would just change their domain names and live happily ever after quarantined in the .xxx TDL.

        And you're an idiot.

        Pornographers were the ones arguing hardest for an XXX TLD during the TLD proposal a while back.

        First of all, you fail to make a distinction between real porn sites-- individuals and companies interested in selling explicit material to consenting adults-- and scam sites who are interested in trying to get as many eyeballs as they can, frequently with pornographic material.

        Real pornographers know that they are running location-independant businesses. That's why in the real world the best strip clubs and adult bookstores and novelty shops will always be outside whatever city limits you happen to live inside. They have less to worry about in the way of police interference, angry neighbors, and intolerant church groups.

        The intelligent ones *want* to be segregated. Because it is considered a 'vice', Porn is a unique business in that its customers will come to it rather than the other way around. Pornographers are interested in making money, not corrupting your children or your neighborhood's youth, regardless of what your religious leaders. They don't make money unless they sell to consenting adults. They make money off people who know what they want and know where to find it, and not people who 'browse' like you would in a department store.

        By creating an .XXX or .adult TLD, Pornographers get all the benifits of opening a store five miles outside the city limits while at the same time giving those who are intolerant to porn every opportunity to shut them out of the 'communities'. Parasitic scammers who try to lure people to illigitamate sites would quickly find themselves without the stronger, legitimate pornographers to shield their activity, and fade away.

        Now, I'm not saying that Porno is not a dirty, manipulative business without a lot of problems. Most of that, however, is due to the same kind of neglect and intolerance that ICANN showed during the TLD fiasco. Look at the state of Nevada, which has legalized sex work to a great deal. Adult actors, models, and prostitutes in that state not only make more money than sex workers anywhere else in the world, but are also better protected from rape, STD's, harrassment, and abuse. If ICANN had approved the XXX tld, I can't help but think that would have had a little of the same effect on internet porn.
        • somebody mod this guy up!! This is the FIRST intelligent post I've read on /. ... period..

        • Actually I don't fail to make a distinction, I don't need to make a distinction. The intension of the company doesn't affect the impression such material could make on a child, which is what net nanny etc are (in theory) there to provide. Protection from such content, just because the "upstanding" (oxymoron?) porn sites move to .xxx wouldn't validate the original posters comment that netnanny wouldn't be needed. Please pay attention to the scope of the comment you are replying too.

          Because there are all the other sites out there that are either scams or just get a chuckle out of posting nude pictures of something on the web. Take the explosion of personal websites + cheap webcams in consideration. Do you really believe that every teenage girl that decides to do naughty things in front of a webcam is going to spring for a .xxx domain before doing so?

          • Ok, I know this is off-topic, but...

            What do you perceive the effect of porn to be on children? I have a vague recollection of stumbling on some porn when I was a child, and it didn't traumatize me. I was curious for about 30 seconds, and then decided it was boring and a little gross. Kids are like that.

            Right now I'm living in Finland where there's tons of porn on regular late-night television. Kids aren't going to be exposed to the stuff constantly (it's past their bedtimes), but I'm sure they all see it occasionally. It doesn't seem to have much effect on them.

            My conclusion is that it's the parents who are traumatized by porn - kids just couldn't care less.

        • Pornographers were the ones arguing hardest for an XXX TLD during the TLD proposal a while back.

          There are actually two distinct overlapping issues here. The first is do the pornographers want a .xxx domain, hell yes they do! It is a great advertising mechanism.

          The other issue is, will pornographers allow themselves to be confined to .xxx? Here the answer is absolutely not. They are not going to agree to any mechanism that supports censorship as long as there are politicians out there trying to outlaw their business entirely.

          Ponography is on balance a force for good. Look at what western society was like when the censoship gang were in charge, women had no rights over their bodies, not even the right to use contraception. As Simmone de Beuvoir pointed out, conservatives put women on a pedestal to control her, not to worship her.

          If we are going to effect change in the brutal regimes of the muslim world pornography is the best tool we have. The dictators of Saudi Arabia are rightly fearful of the effect of sack loads of Western porn comming through the Internet.

        • To put it simply you are wrong. You mean to tell me that if they had approved a .xxx TDL that all the porn sites in the world would just change their domain names and live happily ever after quarantined in the .xxx TDL.

          And you're an idiot.


          Sorry, but he's got a valid point. Just because legitimate adult entertainment producers want that TLD doesn't mean that there aren't others who will continue to run their operations elsewhere. Have you forgotten that .XXX domains would immediately become hot properties as soon as they get introduced? This would create barriers to entry in the market for some legitimate businesses who can't scramble fast enough. Not to mention that many of the purveyors of pop-up (and under) ads and "hot lists" typically redirect to servers with only IPs, etc., and could care less about getting domain names.

          By creating an .XXX or .adult TLD, Pornographers get all the benifits of opening a store five miles outside the city limits while at the same time giving those who are intolerant to porn every opportunity to shut them out of the 'communities'. Parasitic scammers who try to lure people to illigitamate sites would quickly find themselves without the stronger, legitimate pornographers to shield their activity, and fade away.


          This is simply not going to be the case. Do you recall the rules for the top three TLDs open to public registration? .COM is for corporations, .NET is for networks, and .ORG is for noncommercial organizations. If we apply your logic to current rules, all legitimate companies use .COM unless they're ISPs or other networks. However, this is not what happens in reality.

          Here's the comment that started this thread:

          When they refused to create the .XXX TLD they showed complete disregard for the future of the net as a self regulating entity. If they had created an .XXX TLD then we could banish net nany, cyber sitter, government intervention "to protect the children" and many other anoyances in one easy swoop.


          If you believe that government legislation now protects kids from "predators" or even just overzealous marketing, adding a .XXX domain will not affect the need for that legislation. If you believe that censorware exists to keep kids from wandering into areas mommy and daddy don't want them to go, adding a .XXX domain will not affect the need for restrictions elsewhere (porn isn't the only thing being censored now, for example).

          There will never be an easy solution to the problems we have as a consequence of the openness and availability of the Internet. While I personally believe that parents are ultimately responsible for what their children are exposed to, the censorware packages and legislation in theory are there to cover the holes that inevitably will occur. In practice, of course, these measures are unwieldy and can limit the rights of adults as well. However, the suggestion that a new TLD will take care of all the problems that the current measures attempt to address is naive at best.

        • No Way Man (Score:2, Insightful)

          by dnoyeb ( 547705 )
          No way pornographers want XXX. Why? They enjoy legal battles?

          Why? because now religious groups would leave porn sites alone and go after Comcast and AOL, etc. And you know DAMN well comcast would comply and block .xxx from its network. So would AOL. they do NOT want to be seen as porn advocates. Porn would suffer HEAVILY. Sure they would win their court battle, but it would be LONG and protracted and the whole world would be against them.

          They just dont need it. Well unless it came with guarantees that it would not get blocked.

          Dont get me wrong, its stoopid, especially since comcast has porn channels anyway. But you know how hyped the net is. Come election time, they would get roasted :D
        • Pornographers were the ones arguing hardest for an XXX TLD during the TLD proposal a while back.

          As a fan and patron of XX-rated movies, I resent this implicit discrimination. Anyone can put in an explicit love scene and get a cheesy single X. Anyone can show hardcore penetration and get two more. Achieving the coveted XX rating requires a subtle sense of artistic balance, combined with a grand vision -- yet .xx doesn't get a TLD? A travety.
    • So all the porn sites are going to be lumped together into one top level domain that's completely easy and 100% effective to filter against.

      I'm sure they'll jump on that possibility. After all, we have so much trouble trying to find porn on the net.
    • Hear, hear!

      Jesse Berst first began talking [zdnet.com] about the ICANN and the .XXX domain proposal back in the spring & summer of 99. I remember thinking to myself, "Man, that is a great idea, I wonder why no one thought of it before."

      And yet, nothing came of it. Moving adult content to a .XXX server would be ideal for so many reasons, I fail to see why they wouldn't do anything with it. Is there any way to get that movement started back up?

    • Re:ICANN should have been gone long ago (Score:4, Insightful)

      by room101 ( 236520 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:51PM (#3114047) Homepage
      Sorry, I don't think so.

      1. the porn sites aren't going to switch just because there is a .xxx tld.

      2. the ICANN can't/won't enforce any kind of consistency for consumer/civilian based tld. (that is, you won't be able to know for sure that a XXX site didn't try to "slip in" with a .com tld)

      The ICANN has been asked to create content-based tld before and they have refused because they don't want to play policeman. I for one agree, I don't want them to decide what goes on the web and what doesn't.

      • No content based .TLDs...so they're doing away with .com (commercial content), .edu (educational content) and .mil (military content)?
        • No content based .TLDs...so they're doing away with .com (commercial content), .edu (educational content) and .mil (military content)?

          If you look carefully, you'll find that .com, .edu and .mil are not organized according to content. .com is not organized at all, .edu is restricted to some educational institutions, and .mil is restricted to some military organizations. The contents of each of these varies widely.

        • Sigh,

          for consumer/civilian based tld

          That is, .edu, .mil, and .gov (forgot one) are not consumer or civilian based tlds. This is my definition, but I find it good enough. Basicly, anyone that can get a tld can choose between .net, .org or .com, they don't really care in most if not all cases.

          Hope that clears up my points.

      • I do agree with your point in that I don't want ICANN playing policeman to the domains, but then again, I think that if someone doesn't do that, there is really no point in having seperate TLDs at all...

        It doesn't have to be ICANN, they could give out the contract to run the TLD to a couple different registrars who would actually do the policing. Maybe we could simply move all the porn sites presently in .com into .xxx space. Something like that will have to happen if .com is going to return to any semblance of organization.

        If ICANN doesn't want the job of policing for content, they should've done a better job in the past of preventing the situation we now have where everything commercial is all in one TLD.

        And, I think that the porn sites would be more than willing to switch over (at least the legit ones). It could be a way for them to escape more onerous regulation and only serve their content to those customers who want it.

        • It doesn't have to be ICANN, they could give out the contract to run the TLD to a couple different registrars who would actually do the policing.

          The mind boggles.

          It appears that you would have the .xxx registrars carefully check the sites in their domain to make sure that they all had sufficiently pornographic content. While I could see that VeriSign could probably find a willing army of applicants eager to perform that task at minimum wage I cannot see what purpose would be served that could not be served by a quality control association such as the Germans set up in response to complaints of insufficiently hard core porn.

          What I suspect you mean is that companies in the dotcom domain should be scanned to see if they have porno content up. That is a considerably harder prospect and you would not find registrars willing to do it without a substantial increase in the registration fee.

          Maybe we could simply move all the porn sites presently in .com into .xxx space. Something like that will have to happen if .com is going to return to any semblance of organization.

          Why on earth does there have to be any semblance of organization in dotcom? There is no technical reason for having the namespace partitioned at the toplevel. The DNS could be run perfectly well if registrations were offered into the root directly. It would require considerably more resources than it does at present but it is certainly feasible from an operational point of view. There would still be hierarchy but that would happen below the name you registered. So slashdot could use www.slashdot as their web address if they chose, or they could use just slashdot and a NAPTR record.

        • Yep, I agree with most of this. I say that they either do a good job of policing the tld's, or they just don't bother, making tld's meaningless, which isn't a totaly bad thing, just different.

          I wish we could fix this mess.
    • I dont know. Personally I thought it was a good idea as well.

      The chief complaint seems to be "well the porn sites won't do it", combined with "they'll sneak in under .coms"

      Neither of which seems insurmountable. The sneak in problem is fixed by either an official body responding to complaints (and there will be plenty of those) or by the isps.

      As for the "they won't do it" argument: yes they will. If the option is they do it, or they don't have a site, my guess is that they'll choose to do it. It's the same thing that most city ordinances provide by either disallowing strip clubs next to schools/your home or federal law (i think) requiring movies to be rated and theaters to confirm the age of attendees.

      In the more general sense, those two arguments fail because they presume there will *never* be a means to categorize sites based on content. If it's not done by the use of tld, then something will take it's place sooner or later. The industry might as well figure out some way to make it happen and the tld .xxx seems to be an easy to implement effective solution.
      • So...what qualifies as a pornographic site ? Nudity ? Does this include medical sites ? Art sites with nude paintings ? How about sites that just tell obscene jokes ? What if "jenny cam" gets a bit racey some night ? Might as well call for a board of censorship to judge the content of all web pages. While I can see your point, I think you've failed to think through some of the consequnces of being human, frail and ultimately corruptable.
    • Personally instead of .xxx I think they should have created a .cum
    • Cultures vary widely about what they consider obscene, indecent, prurient, or suitable only for adults. There are enough disputes over domain names already - the last thing we need is to deal with arguments over an .XXX TLD that tries to apply to everywhere on earth.

      OTOH, Any country can create .XXX.CC (where CC is the country code) if it wants to do so.

  • Ebay? (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by NiftyNews ( 537829 )
    Sounds like it might be time to start gathering up some ICANN drink coolers and Ethics Manuals...

  • In Ghana? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Coward Anonymous ( 110649 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:27PM (#3113910)

    And this is because Ghana is a world Internet power, right?

    For kripe's sake, just look at their "meeting" calendar [icann.org] - it looks like a travel agency billboard.

    What additional proof do you need that ICANN is into frittering other people's money for their own entertainment?

    • Re:In Ghana? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Alkaiser ( 114022 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:32PM (#3113946) Homepage
      They reason they meet in obscure locations is because everyone who signed up to vote and stuff gets to vote at meetings. If they have them where you, me, everyone in the pissant public can't get to, then they pretty much eliminate the possibility of people discussing pertinent things at their meetings, and instead get to wonder, "What the heck do you call people from Ghana? Ghana-reans?"

      Then they'll vote on it and go home.
      • if that's the case, why do they meet in places like las vegas, miami, san diego, amsterdam, and london? nowhere is easily accesible to anyone, but all of those are easily accesible to many. wouldn't they be attempting to stay away from all metropolitan areas if they needed such privacy?
      • Ghanaians
        GahNayAns
        I never learned to spell phonetically. Sorry.
      • A better reason is that ICANN wants to demonstrate that it wants to be representative of the whole world. If they meet only in the US and EU, then they're Euro-centric, but then they meet outside of the US, and they're trying to party it up in Africa....can't have it both ways.

        Also, one of the heads of the steering committee (I think - one of the heads of ICANN, anyway) is from Ghana.

        Thanks,
        Matt

    • Re:In Ghana? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by SubtleNuance ( 184325 )
      And this is because Ghana is a world Internet power, right?

      Um, they are going to Ghana hopefully because* ICANN is meant to serve as a World Body, the International Congress of Nations. Which the honourable and respected nation of Ghana is a member.

      Holy-f'ing-christ, do you two (this and a post below) not realize just how myopic and jingoistic your posts are(!!)?

      *PLUS the Plutocratic-whore$ of ICANN love a good boon-doggle, Im sure it wasnt hard to sell to themselves (who would probably align with the mindset/thinking, with-regards-to Ghana, as the two of you.) a fun trip to that backwards-3rd-World Ghana.


      • Um, they are going to Ghana hopefully because* ICANN is meant to serve as a World Body, the International Congress of Nations.

        I'm glad you explained it.

        Here was me, clueless, wondering if Ghana was going to become the country of choice for "registration of new TLDs" due to cozy licensing and restriction terms.

        That is, they're jealous of Liberia getting to register all those supertankers, freighters and cruise ships in the maritime industries and wanted to make sure that they got a cut of the new pie, having missed that old one.

        Imagine those newly-registered, lumbering Ghananian-registered Pr0n sites on the high seas of the Internet, running aground and leaking due to lack of stringent registration requirements...

      • Nope. Sorry. Holding the meeting in Ghana is designed to keep the public at large and other interested parties out of the ICANN Star Chamber. ICANN has proven absolutely ineffective at being anything other than a political whore to the interests of the Corporate Plutocracy that wants to take the internet away from everyone.

        It's really good to see that RIPE NCC is standing up to these losers.

      • "myopic and jingoistic"

        No, not myopic or jingoistic, just a cold realist in contrast to your new-age, mushy, self-righteous political correctness. Ghana is about as important to the Internet as fish are to bicycles and no matter how many meetings you convene there, the simple fact of Ghanian irrelevance will not change.

        • Re:In Ghana? (Score:1, Flamebait)

          by SubtleNuance ( 184325 )
          new-age, mushy, self-righteous political correctness

          Sorry, your 8th grade, Rightist knee-jerk idiocy about "political correctness" is pretty sad.

          Saying "Ghana is about as important to the Internet as fish are to bicycles and no matter how many meetings you convene there, the simple fact of Ghanian irrelevance will not change.

           perfectly illustrates my point. This isnt about how important Ghana's internet interests are to *you*. That is EXACTLY what im talking about. Dont you think that Ghana may want to partipate, as a full and equal partner in the "Global Information Village"? Further, why wouldnt their partnership be valuable? If your retort is 'they are poor, 3rd world nation' you have a very limited and select world-view, myopic and jingoistic is EXACTLY the right way to describe it.

          I personally welcome a larger presence of ideas and perspectives from other cultures... backwards and 'poor' ones included. If you leave the fantasy that is NorthAmerica (if not physically - then figuratively) you'll realize some important things about the world, and your participation/position in it.

          Further, Im not talking about feel-good-pop-PC-equal-funding-for-womens-field-ho ckey bullshit here, im trying to tell you that Ghana, as different and 'irrelevant' to the American Internet Industry as it may be, has a great deal of value, wisdom and knowledge to TEACH US.

          Come down of your High Horse pal, you might be convinced the NorthAmerican consumo-culture and American Cultural /Physical/Financial Imperialism is just fine, but others (myself(canadian)) completely and wholly are opposed to it.

          Inspite of what the Television tells you, American "progress" is not Welcome Everywhere... eat a little huble pie and listen to someone(where) else a while.

          • I'm 8th grade? Your spelling is horrific and your ideas are a muddled mess of America-bashing, feel good platitudes.
            1. Ghana can and should "partipate" in the Internet. However, that does not turn it into a major player in the arena. Try as it may, it is not as important as the U.S. ... Or Canada. To illustrate, if Ghana disconnects tomorrow, 99% of the internet's user's will not notice. If the U.S. pulls the plug, there is a good chance the internet will cease to exist.
            2. Ghana's wisdom, values and other "cultural" feel-good stuff is of no import to ICANN and its proceedings.
            3. I've spent most of my life outside North America so I do know about other parts of the world. I've noticed that most people hate America not because of the retarded culture and values it exports but out of envy. In a broad stroke I would say people love all things American but hate America. You seem to be one of this group. If not, may I suggest you disconnect your American designed computer, disconnect your American invented phone, be rid of your American pioneered cellphone, etc.
    • Looks like they enjoyed Amsterdam so much, they decided to go back a second time, just two months later.

      Wonder why?

  • Oops... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Schwamm ( 513960 ) <laurie_riley@ya h o o . com> on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:27PM (#3113914) Homepage
    Finally, let us say that we are quite surprised by the way this proposal was published. The document contains proposals for change of such fundamental scope, in a field that is of utmost importance to our community, that we wish that you had discussed these with us beforehand.... Seeing that you are proposing fundamental changes to ICANN and the principles behind the ICANN - RIR MoU, signed in 1999, we believe that in the interest of our members, we have to thoroughly re-assess our relationship with ICANN.

    We are looking forward to discussing these issues with you at the earliest possible opportunity.

    In general, it's a good idea to let the people you're working with know things before you make them public.

    ICANN can't like how the note ends... The tone makes it sound like it's buh-bye for ICANN...
    • I love it. It's "Dudes, you don't have all the power you think you have. You'd better play nice, or we'll take our ball and go play somewhere else."

      Someone's been needing to tell this to ICANN for a long time.

  • an issue of fault tolerance... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dj_whitebread ( 171775 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:29PM (#3113927) Homepage
    Binding them contractually to one entity, ICANN, would create a single point of failure, possibly subject to capture.
    This is a fabulous point. From a technical standpoint, one of the fault tolerance features of the internet is its inherent sense of "multiple backups." Abstracting this to the organizational side, it becomes clear that to put all of the power into one group's hands is a weakness. There should be one standard way of doing things, but several different groups doing it.

  • ROFLMAO (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dr Kool, PhD ( 173800 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:31PM (#3113940) Homepage Journal
    FOUR acronyms in the story title. Compared to three non-acronyms. That's some kind of record, IIRC.
    • FOUR acronyms in the story title. Compared to three non-acronyms. That's some kind of record, IIRC.

      Actually, it's worse than that.

      RIPE NCC -> RIPE Network Cordination Centre
      RIPE -> Reseaux IP Europeens
      IP -> Internet Protocol

  • Uh...Ghana? (Score:5, Funny)

    by waldoj ( 8229 ) <waldo&jaquith,org> on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:34PM (#3113956) Homepage Journal
    This is a country with 8,000 Internet users, 110 hosts, 82 domain names, 4 ISPs and a 2,048bps connection to the outside world. They don't have much going on [apc.org].

    So, why are they meeting in Ghana?

    -Waldo Jaquith

    • Re:Uh...Ghana? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by qslack ( 239825 ) <qslack@pobox.cFREEBSDom minus bsd> on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @04:00PM (#3114113) Homepage Journal
      Maybe it's to foster the growth of the Internet in Ghana?

      Imagine how much richer the Internet would be with a whole new set of opinions from Africans and members of other countries that are currently too poor to offer their citizens the Internet.

      Not everyone in Africa is starving, some live like "normal" people. The Internet might just bring in commerce to end the starvation in Africa, too.

      It's not completely pointless to meet in Ghana!
      • Imagine how much richer the Internet would be with a whole new set of opinions from Africans...Not everyone in Africa is starving, some live like "normal" people

        Your prejudice is showing. That's right, folks, not EVERYONE in Africa thinks like a third-worlder...some of them think just like you and me! Imagine how much richer the world would be if we could communicate with "normal" people in Africa without actually having to see how funny-looking they are! (Oh, and for the humor impaired...&lt/sarcasm&gt)

        The Internet might just bring in commerce to end the starvation in Africa
        News flash...Africa can produce enough food to feed Africa. Governments who control the food supply can control the population.

    • This is a country with 8,000 Internet users, 110 hosts, 82 domain names, 4 ISPs and a 2,048bps connection to the outside world. They don't have much going on

      The UN does not find it necessary to spend as much time globe trotting, in fact they do most of their work out of their NYC and Geneva hubs.

      Most people in the third world would probably prefer to have meetings at places that are near to first tier air connections. Cairo is much more accessible than Ghana if you are going to have a meeting in Africa.

    • It's called "stacking the deck".

      Since Ghana does not have a 1st tier air connection, it is MUCH more difficult for "at large" users to attend (and complain). Only the current power holders (who can use ICANN funds to fly there) will go. Poor geeks who want to have a say, won't be.

    • ISOC (Score:1)

      by rs79 ( 71822 )
      They're "reaching out", as an international, uh, thing. The host is on the hook for the vast majority of the expenses.

      They are paying roughtly $13K US for first class tickets to get to Ghana for each of the board members from the US; the Yurrupeans presumably pay less.

      The thing is spearheded in Ghana by Nii Quaynar who is a great guy but has been sucked in, IMO by ISOC to toe the party line. Remember Sean Dorans great screeds in the 80's: ISOC = "It seeks Overall Control" - same poeple, different I* organization.

  • My biggest annoyance with the ICANN (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kiwi ( 5214 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:36PM (#3113969) Homepage Journal
    My personal biggest annoyance with the ICANN is that they have been dragging their feet with regard to support for internationalized characters in domain names. The problem is this: Domain names traditionally only had English language letters [A-Za-z] and the '-' symbol as part of domain names. (The '.' character signifies a delimiter in domain name labels; it isn't there in the DNS packet sent over the wire.)

    The problem with this is that this has a western-centric point of view which does not take in to account the writing systems that foreign languages use.

    Now, the ICANN was in a position to officially push forward some specification, any specification to allow international characters in domain names. Unfortunatly, they were too busy spending million of dollars on international conferences, staying in five star hotels, to actually do anything about this problem.

    International domain labels work right now with current DNS servers and DNS client software. One can type in, say español.example.com in Mozilla, and MaraDNS, not to mantion DjbDNS, will correctly resolve this domain name. The trick: Mozilla uses UTF-8 to encode international characters in domain names, and both MaraDNS and DjbDNS can handle domain names with UTF-8 characters.

    - Sam

    • See Inside risks: The homograph attack
      CACM vol 45 issue 2 (Feb 2002)
      http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/503124.503156
    • My personal biggest annoyance with the ICANN is that they have been dragging their feet...
      Well, the RIR's (APNIC, ARIN, and RIPE) can certainly handle policy without dragging their feet. Check out ARIN's last trustee meeting [arin.net]:
      >John Curran called the meeting to order at 10:20 a.m. EST.

      [new officers elected]
      [multihoming and address space issues decided]
      >Scott Bradner moved to adjourn the meeting at 10:40 a.m. EST.
    • But the problem is, what happens when I want to go to a site in a different language, but the URL has chars that aren't even in my code page? What do I do then? Yes, I won't understand the page, but I can sometimes translate it using tech found on the web; but if I can't even type in the address, it is lost to me. And there is no way I can have all of the characters of all the character sets active at once. What's more, I couldn't remember what those characters were.

      My point is that these should have some common denominator when it comes to URI elements. Maybe [A-Za-Z] and - isn't the right thing, but it isn't too bad either.

      • Yes, I won't understand the page, but I can sometimes translate it using tech found on the web; but if I can't even type in the address, it is lost to me.

        Ever heard of cut and paste?

        And there is no way I can have all of the characters of all the character sets active at once.

        Welcome to the 21st Century! It's called Unicode (UTF-8 being one encoding thereof that was mentioned in post you responded to), and Windows NT and BeOS supported it inherently, and MacOS and Linux have been getting increasingly better support of it.

        What's more, I couldn't remember what those characters were.

        Then you probably weren't their audience. Yes, if you want an international audience, then you don't have a name that most people can't enter. But if you are a small computer shop in downtown Tehran, and the last time you had a customer that didn't speak Farsi was 1973, then why not get www..com?
    • There's an IETF working group [ietf.org] addressing the very real problem of IDN. It's not as simple as you would have the /. readers believe.

      The DNS protocol itself is 8-bit clean, so even BIND can handle UTF-8 characters. That isn't the problem. Go read some of the drafts for a much better treatment than I could give.

      But let's not start doling out domains before the solution is complete. And it's not.

    • Think twice before you wish for this thing. One of the beauties of the net as it stands is that I can get to anywhere I want to go, just by typing in a small amount of stuff in the location bar. The small allowed character set means that the urls stay accessible for all languages, and that everyone can type them.

      Think for a minute - how am I going to go to a chinese site if I am on an american keyboard? Suppose I know how to read german, but don't know how to type an umlaut? By giving out bastardized urls that only a small subset of the population can even type, you break the internet into cliques based on language, even more so than they already are. In my mind, this defeats the purpose of a net that everyone, everywhere, can use.

      URLs and URIs should contain only characters from a small, standardized set. The english alphabet plus a few other symbols is already the defacto standard, and while not perfect I see no point or advantage to anyone in changing it now.

      -dentin
      • The small allowed character set means that the urls stay accessible for all languages

        Typeable, maybe. Understandable, no.

        how am I going to go to a chinese site if I am on an american keyboard? Suppose I know how to read german, but don't know how to type an umlaut?

        Ever heard of cut and paste? You're welcome to start up an IM or switch keyboards - most modern operating systems let you do that easily.

        Why shouldn't a computer shop in Tehran be www..com? You aren't part of his audience, so why should he have to mangle his shop name so you can access it easier? If you want to attract international customers, you use English names. If your site's only in Farsi, and your audience all speaks Farsi, why shouldn't you have a Farsi name?

        you break the internet into cliques based on language, even more so than they already are.

        Why? I entered www..com from a standard American keyboard. I won't be able to read that page, though, because it will most likely be Arabic or some other language using the Arabic script. Sure, I may be able to run it though Babelfish, and get some meaning out of it, but how did the name stop me from doing that?

    • The holdup on IDN is based in the IETF - the protocol standard for IDN has not yet been finalized, although chances are good it will be at the next IETF in a few weeks. It would be premature and equally bad for ICANN to declare a standard outside of the scope of the IETF, where standards are supposed to be made.

      And while Mara and Djbdns may support UTF-8 encoding within the DNS, as far as I know, that is not the IETF's proposed standard solution.

      Thanks,
      Matt
    • I was on ICANN's original internationalized domain name committee. We pretty much decided to do whatever the IETF says to do. That still feels like an appropriate answer and is consistent with the notion that ICANN ought to merely coordinate rather than dictate technology.

      Although DNS is defined to be 8-bit clean, there are ancient relics in the standards about how some names have to be in a reduced alphanumeric plus hyphen character set.

      What scares me is this: There are a lot of DNS engines out there that might be surprised to suddenly find characters outside of that character set. And some of these engines are in surprising places - firewalls, NATs, web caches, etc. I had an experience in which someone was tunneling audio via DNS UDP packets and for some reason a mongo sized Cisco in the middle was parsing those packets and crashing IOS.

      And internationalized names can creep in even when it appears that standard ascii is being used - imagine an ascii name that maps to an internationalized CNAME.

      I tend to agree with John Klensien that the best way to deal with things is to push for new things to be layered on top of DNS, thus making DNS largely invisible, and to try to get people to start being blind to the semantics of the DNS character strings. Sounds impossible until one realizes that the method adopted by the IETF - ACE encoding - will mean that we start seeing DNS names that look like bq--3kdhyekjayy.org floating around.

      Just wait until gethostbyname() sees some of these things - imagine a domain name that contains things like dots, nulls, asterisks, etc inside each of the DNS "labels". I'm dreding the day when I see see "rm -rf /" as a DNS label!
  • something smells funny about the whole thing.

    Maybe if we just table it for a week, things will look better

    insert more RIPE jokes here

    psxndc

  • "NCC?" (Score:4, Funny)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:44PM (#3114010)
    Am I the only one that thought of Star Trek when they saw that acronym?

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @03:59PM (#3114102)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Hold the meeting on the Space Shuttle... (Score:3, Funny)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Tuesday March 05, 2002 @04:24PM (#3114246) Homepage
    ...THAT should prove an effective barrier to those pesky would-be participants that don't have barrels of corporate money behind them...
  • RIPE was one of the parties pressuring ICANN because they couldn't guarantee the root servers.

    Now in this response they say "The so called "volunteers" operating the rootserver system are well funded and very well co-ordinated. Binding them contractually to one entity, ICANN, would create a single point of failure, possibly subject to capture. The current form of organisation works well, and is resistant to capture through the multitude of different operators and organisations housing and operating the servers. This system has been stable for many
    years. We think that to change it in the way you envision would introduce risks more important than any co-ordination benefits.

    Furthermore, we feel that you would do better not to burden ICANN with the task of financing the Root Server operating system. Rather, ICANN should
    stick to the core mission of coordinating them.
    "

    Interesting

    • RIPE was one of the parties pressuring ICANN because they couldn't guarantee the root servers.

      I don't think this is true. I worked at ARIN and now at the RIPE NCC, and frankly neither organization has ever really tried too hard to influence ICANN.

      The reality is that ICANN wants for the Regional Internet Registries (RIR's - meaning APNIC, ARIN, and RIPE NCC, and soon LACNIC) to sign an agreement with them. Currently, only a Memorandium Of Understanding (MOU) has been signed, to the effect that the RIR's agree that in principle a contract with ICANN would be a good thing. ICANN would benefit from a contract in two ways.

      First, they would get money. ICANN is always slavering for extra cash - something that should set off warning bells. This is a sticking point with me because the only thing the RIR's get from ICANN is allocations of big (/7 or /8) blocks of IP addresses, or blocks of AS numbers. This would take about 2 hours a month to administer. Nowhere near enough effort to justify the huge piles of cash ICANN wants from the RIR's, which are all not-for-profit companies.

      Second, ICANN would get increased legitamacy. Having support from the RIR's, which are inherently bottom-up, would go a long way to making the top-down ICANN palatable to the ISP community.

      There is a genuine place in the world for something like ICANN, but the lawyer-driven, power-hungry organization we have now is not the answer.

  • they learn fast (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    looks like every unsavory organisation of the world (WTO, IMF, WB ... and now ICANN) is discovering the unsuspected advantages of holding conferences in countries where a) nobody knows what they are talking about, and b) anybody who dares to raise their voice in dissent will be heading for some mass grave today rather than tomorrow.

  • TLDs (Score:1, Interesting)

    by roque0101 ( 513601 )
    I never managed to understand why people keep harping about new TLDs.

    While i can see the need for a directory service where one can type the same of a company and have a choice of web sites for companies with that name/service/etc. (yahoo works very well for me when i want to achieve that btw).

    I apears to me that the creation of new top level TLDs is quite silly... the value today of .com is that there is not hierarchy... one may assume that a domain name ends with .com and thus it is unnecessary to query for it.

    Creating new TLDs, assuming they would be succesful would defeat that value... one would be forced to figure out in which TLD a name resides.

    Of corse since users do not care about new TLDs and assume that the Web site for foo is foo.com, new TLDs are largely a bust.

    I've been hearing about new TLDs for years and years and i could simply never figure out what could the rational behind it be.

    DNS is not a directory service, and would suck as one... assume there are 100 top level TLVs. You need a directory service to search them... then wouldn't it be simpler to start by building a directory service ?

    As for alternative roots... that is an even sillier discussion.
    Anyone can have a DNS server that claims to be root... and that will be 100% useless unless everybody else recognises it.

    DNS seems to attract all sorts of insane people... which as every certified lunatic proceed to imagine their own parallel universe with alternative root servers, etc.

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