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The Internet Security Your Rights Online

VeriSign CEO on Commercializing the Internet 546

Posted by michael from the when-idiots-speak,-people-listen dept.
mdj writes "CNET has an interview with VeriSign CEO Stratton Scalvos, who says it's time to commercialize the internet's infrastructure and 'pull the root servers away from volunteers who run them out of a university or lab.' He admits that's going to be 'unpopular.'" Because, after all, taking the root servers away from bright, educated comp-sci longbeards who have nothing better to do than to make them run well, and putting them in the hands of MBA bean-counters who don't know what TCP/IP is, is a sure-fire way to improve reliability.
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VeriSign CEO on Commercializing the Internet More

VeriSign CEO on Commercializing the Internet

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  • Approval rating (Score:5, Informative)

    by turg ( 19864 ) * <turg AT winston DOT org> on Friday October 17, 2003 @02:52PM (#7243065) Journal
    Last month Mr. Scalvos's approval rating [forbes.com] went down to 3%. Think it will be lower this month? (vote here [forbes.com] - bottom of page).

  • right..... (-5 sarcastic) (Score:5, Funny)

    by mike77 ( 519751 ) <mraley77NO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Friday October 17, 2003 @02:52PM (#7243073)
    Sure, I'm entirely confident that the good people at Verisign know what's best for the ineternet... why don't we get the good folks of Enron to manage our national debt?

    • It would be a step up. The goverment doesn't follow the same account rules that it makes everyone else.
    • why don't we get the good folks of Enron to manage our national debt?

      I'm not sure I want the cleaning staff managing the national debt.
      • I'm not sure I want the cleaning staff [of Enron] managing the national debt.

        I think they'd do a better job than say, the accounting staff of Enron or the Government. After all, they have to get by on $6.00 an hour, they know how to stretch a dollar.

    • Nah, microsoft is good at innovation, we should get them to help out. I'm sure they have some fresh new ideas about how to run the core of the internet.
    • Read about it here [bizjournals.com].

    • 'Commercialization' of the 'net (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mu*puppy ( 464254 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @04:46PM (#7244465)
      telling qoutes:

      We'd prefer ICANN to become more of a trade association that promotes the growth of the network rather than a regulatory body - Of course you would, as those 'trade assosciates' would have commercial interests on the line. 'Hey, if someone mis-spells a domain, they get a search page. We could sell advertising space, search placement, etc. Anyone disagree with this idea?' Riiiight...

      How do we build a commercial business with ground rules that seem to shift based on personal agenda and emotion versus any particular logical data set? - Of course, that 'particular logical data set' = 'profit!' When 'agendas' and 'emotions' express things such as 'This network should be free of censorship, free of centralized control,' then yes, they ARE anathema to corporate profit philosophies.

      Are we going to be in a position to do innovation on this infrastructure, or are we going to be locked into obsolete thinking that the DNS was never intended to do anything other than what it was originally supposed to do? - Getting into evolutionary dead-ends is generally a Bad Thing, yes. However, most 'innovation' I hear discussed is for the benefit of corporate interests, rather than improvements of underlying functionality.

      A few years ago, there was the talk of making 'Internet 2', making a completely new infrastructure to replace backbones, etc. It would be 'the way of the future,' where we could have 'content on demand,' 'accurate, real-time tele-conferencing,' etc, etc, ad infinitum. Well, after blowing smoke out of their collective a$$es for a time, they've realized the costs and effort involved (back then fiber was being laid down like mad, with no end in sight, so the infrastructure for it would 'just be there'). The talk of a 'second Internet' created/operated/controlled by corporations has dwindled to a trickle. Now, the corporate effort is focusing more and more on the existing Internet. The 'content providers' (MPAA, RIAA), the infrastructure owners (ie. Sprint), 500 lb. gorillas such as Verisign, are now all focusing on the existing Internet, and the 'evolution' and 'innovation' they want are to make the existing Internet into the corporate Utopia that the 'Internet 2' was supposed to be. And it's only going to continue getting worse...

      That base level of DNS (domain name system) response is an obligation we took on when we inherited that contract. But it would be commercially unreasonable for anyone to suggest that we shouldn't be allowed to build incremental services on top of that if they deliver value. - 'Embrace and extend,' as it were... But how much over-head would all these 'features' entail? For example, the following gem: The funny thing about digital security is that we've lived in a world where we only knew someone was attacking us when they hit our firewalls. It's time to evolve that world so that we get the information that an attack is coming before it hits our front door. What the hell?!? So what do you have, 'notification' packets sent before the 'real' packets?? Do you delay the 'real' packets to give enough time between the 'notification' and 'real'? "But we don't know that data's coming until it actually gets here." No shit, really?!?

      And this is the type of person who's a role model for how 'commercialization' of the Internet is going to work... Yeah, I see great things coming, let me tell ya.........

    • Imagine someone suggesting the idea of turning over the Department of Transportation to a consortium of General Motors, Ford, and Daimler-Benz, based on the idea that non-commercial interests are holding back auto sales. Would anyone take such a proposal seriously?

      There's an old saying that fits here: "Dance with the one that brung ya." If Verisign thinks they can do a better job managing the Internet, let them go out and design Internet II and see who wants to play by their rules. That wouldn't work, be

    • RTFM.
      it's not just about sitefinder but they want to fully comercialize the internet as a whole . They want verisgn to be incharge of the root servers . The site finder situation showd the internet community what verisgn thinks "innoviation" is .
      All in all the anomisity is at a company that wants to turn the internet into one big commercial venture.
      I dont know about you , but that is not what I want .

    • Checks and balances (Score:3, Interesting)

      by tessaiga ( 697968 )
      More like they had a nasty shock when they discovered that they don't have as much power as they thought. The reaction of those running the root servers and their move towards circumventing Sitefinder via the BIND patch made it clear that there are still checks to the power Verisign currently wields. It's not surprising that they're advocating moves which will remove some of those checks so that they won't be as easily stopped next time.

  • Complete Privatization = Death of the Net (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Egonis ( 155154 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @02:54PM (#7243098)
    If we commercialize the entire infrastructure, prices will rise, and reliability will fall.. it has been proven many times; @Home, Privatized Power in California, and Alberta

    If a completely commercial net were created, I can guarantee that underground sub-networks would pop up externally
    • "If a completely commercial net were created, I can guarantee that underground sub-networks would pop up externally"

      and then be made illegal.

    • Re:Complete Privatization = Death of the Net (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs@ajs . c om> on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:40PM (#7243739) Homepage Journal
      And that will probably happen. We're at the point now where it's starting to get a little painful for people who step outside of the black-and-white vision of the Net that businesses tend to have. People like me, for example, who run our own mail server at home. AOL won't listen to my mail. Why? Because I'm residential. A residential user should be sending mail through a business, or so AOL thinks.

      That hurts a bit, but my reaction is to say that AOL doesn't need my mail. But what happens when ISPs start to enforce no-server limitations? What happens when governments start to enforce them?!

      The same thing with name service. There are already several alternate roots, and they will only become more popular as Verisign pushes the "get the roots out of the hands of the accedmics" attitude.

      Eventually, this will lead to healthy competition between the "subculture nets" and "The Internet" (we all know there's no such thing as The Internet, right? that it's just a generic term that we use to refer to consumers of IPV4 address space).

      I'm hoping that wireless networks will eventually replace the default "Internet" that we've known with a decentralized cloud of mini-networks with physical routing information collected dynamically. That will require some major changes in the technology and pervasiveness of its use, but it could easily happen, and would be far more reliable and "ownership proof" than what we have today (lost all the nodes between you and your target? pause a second to re-calculate your routes and continue... self-healing network topologies are not new tech, and many useful designs exist).

      Let's take the root out of the hands of these corporate greed-mongers and give it back to the people who created the world's most powerful computing infrastructure in the first place: all of us!

      • > That hurts a bit, but my reaction is to say that AOL doesn't need my mail. But
        > what happens when ISPs start to enforce no-server limitations? What happens when
        > governments start to enforce them?!

        Here's [fourmilab.ch] what John Walker thinks will happen if these trends continue. I don't like the trend toward a consumer Internet either, since I run a mail and DNS server on my cable modem, not to mention an ssh server so I can get at my stuff from other computers. My ISP has/had? a policy against _file_ ser
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • security (Score:5, Insightful)

      by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:46PM (#7243819)
      The amazing thing is his argument is based on security; he asserts that commercialized root servers will be better for security. What is the evidence of that? Microsoft? He asserts that recent hacker attacks on the root servers (which took out 9 of them at once) were because they're at universities and (one of them) in the military, but offers no argument as to why commercial ownership would be better. The whole thing has the tone of, it's time to grow up and take the toys away from the little kids because they rightfully belong to us grownups, who will do better with them. His arrogance is beyond belief! And then he's got the nerve to point out that security is more important than philosophical debates about commercialization of the net. Well, duh, but the only thing he's got supporting his position is a philosophical assumption (without evidence) that commercial servers are more secure than publicly owned ones.
    • it has been proven many times; @Home, Privatized Power in California, and Alberta

      None of these are proof, as there is extensive government intervention in each one. "Privatized" power in California is a joke.

      If one brand of infrastructure becomes crap, then there's satellites, WLANs, microwave towers, HAM radio, etc. There's lots of ways to tell crappy company to go to hell with the loudest message of all: money.

      Also, the key is for privatization to not imply proprietary communications methods. All p
  • He doesn't seem to give any reason for the switch other than it would add "maturity" to the internet. What the hell is "maturity" and how is commercializing the internet going to make it so?
    • I'm sure it's "maturity" in the sense of Verisign crying about the BIND patches that were to be implemented to counter their sitefinder. And it's "maturity" in the sense that they think the root servers are their toys, and they should be allowed to play.
    • I assume he means maturity in the sense of cheese: the most obvious difference is that it stinks.

    • Re:Praytell (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Mahrin Skel ( 543633 ) * on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:41PM (#7243750)
      Any plan to switch over to metered, "tagged" network transfer where you buy different grades of network performance on a connection by connection basis, requires that both the primary backbones and the routing control lie with entities who want to make the switch. The backbones alone can't do it, because they no longer transfer most of the traffic. But if you controlled the routing, you could make sure that only "content flagged" traffic had any real chance to arrive.

      To control the routing, one of the pieces you need is control of DNS, *complete* control with no viable alternatives. Another piece is that you need to either be ICANN, or you have to break them.

      That's the conspiracy-theory version, anyway. It's another episode of the same old fight, "The Internet won't be safe for business until business runs it." From that point of view, this is a fight between ICANN and Verisign over who gets to be masters of a "mature", commercial from the packet level up, internet.

      --Dave

  • Who actually controls the internet? Who is the "ruling power"?

    Who could decide to take the entire thing down?

    Someone please explain to me who "owns" the internet, and how anyone could make the decision to commercialize it.

    Also, theorectically couldn't we just create a secondary internet (is that what Internet 2 is?), create our own rules, and let that be that?

    Would we have to follow laws like allowing a company to take the domain of their copyright on "our" internet?

    A lot of questions.. excuse me.
    • Exactly. I think that is what scares a lot of businesses/corporations. They have no idea who "owns" the internet, so they have no one to make out a check to. They have no way to gain a foothold by undermining their competition (selective IP blackouts?) Businesses like control. They like to know how a system works, so they can find ways to maximize their advantages. With random "egg-heads" in control, they'd have to rely on good products and excellent customer service on which to compete. We can't hav
    • The US government technicaly owns the internet they paid for the research and the network.

      Lots of people could bring sections down. By design the internet was built to surive war it's fairly resilient but people dont like how it runs when bad things happen. In all fairness you cant realy take the whole thing down.

      Not realy the internet as a collection of networks the closest that the rest of the world got non commercialy was fido net it worked. As to DNS yes it's trivial to get rid of the current DNS s
      • Yes as the internet lives inside countries you would have to follow laws.

        I'm not saying ALL laws, but specifically that one.

        If I make a private internet, can companies force me to use it?
    • Who actually controls the internet? Who is the "ruling power"?

      Whoever pays the bills.

    • I am not a data comm. expert, but I have always wondered if it were possible to make a 2nd internet out side of the current one. I guess a Fork, if you will. What would it take? A different set of cables and infrastructure? Could this new Internet have a EULA like:
      By using Internet 1.2, you will not use unrequested pop ups on your site, blah blah blah.. Just a thought...
      • An AC post below you had this to say.

        You don't need to create a new Internet, just a new series of root servers make your own TLD. I vote for ".fuq"

        Piggy back your new TDL over the Internet infrastucture.

        Would that really work? Could the EULA that Rudy mentioned really work?
      • too late, http://www.internet2.org/

        it's not separate TLD's, but it is separate network infrastructure.. my university has a 655mbit I2 link through abilene. This connects me to a bunch of other U's, much faster than normal I1 stuff.

    • We NEED to create an internet over the existing structure to return the internet to its previous state of not being shit. Back when eBay was a reliable service, Google had a hideous logo and most websites red top to bottom with no side panels because tables were too advanced.

      Forget about the design I mentioned; I'm not talking about the HTML of it. Remember the time frame - back when AT&T gave diskettes of Netscape to customers so that they would have a web browser. We can create this Internet over th

  • ... Please let me know exactly what it is you're smoking, because I know I can get at least $200 an ounce for it on the street. You and I can split the profit 50/50.

    What are you going to do when some PHB marketing genius does something stupid to increase market share and exposure... like... say... hijack unregistered domains? Oh wait... Verisign already tried that.

    What a great example of why the Internet's Infrstructure should not be commercialized: Verisign's little Sitefinder stunt.
  • Lock in.

    That's all this is. More BS for the world to become dependent on Verisign. After their recent fiascos, this is the very LAST thing we need...

  • Richard Clark came to us two days after taking the job following 9/11, and I told him, "There are 13 geographically dispersed data centers. You really couldn't take it out." And he said, "What if I drove a truck up to each one and blew them up at the same time?" OK, then you'd take them out. So, there's this notion of what's resilient enough and what's your recovery time.

    The notion that Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group would launch a coordinated strike to take out DNS servers is totally absurd. Ev

    • The notion that Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group would launch a coordinated strike to take out DNS servers is totally absurd.

      I don't see what makes the notion so absurd at all. I'd wager from my layman's perspective that it'd be much easier to take out any given data center, than it should be to take out just ONE of the WTC towers,and we saw how easy THAT was. If such an attack hamstrung Net traffic for at least a few days, it'd do a ton of economic damage, and I'm sure there are more than a few (
    • The notion that Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group would launch a coordinated strike to take out DNS servers is totally absurd. Even if they had the ability to launch a co-ordinated bomb strike with this kind of sophistication and ingenuity (highly unlikely), I'm sure they'd go after targets that had a bit more of a visible impact.... for example, the power grid.

      Heh, yeah. It's not only a visible impact, but come on: if the Internet went away nobody would die, no extra money would have to be spent on
      • um, if the internet were to go away tonight, all my clients would be dead in the water. They all have telecommuters and colocated servers situated all over the world.
        They do secure business transactions over the internet day in and day out, moving _very_ large sums of money so the janitors and the parking attendants and the CEO's and the secretaries get paid.
        You take out the internet and you don't get paid. Thanks for playing.
    • So, there's this notion of what's resilient enough and what's your recovery time.

      And a commercial solution, due to its obligation to its shareholders, cannot spend a great deal on redundancy. Look at your electricity system: redundancy has been shelved in favour of lower electricity charges but higher risk of system failure. A commercial root name service will be forced along similar lines.

      (Anyway, how's progress on independant internet naming systems?)

    • And if those 13 were corporate-owned data centers, would they really be safer? Ultimately, what you want is more redundancy, and that can be done with non-profit, for-profit, or a mixture of the two.

  • Nice Work. Sure Has My Rants Beat... (Score:4, Funny)

    by RobotRunAmok ( 595286 ) * on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:00PM (#7243203)
    Because, after all, taking the root servers away from bright, educated comp-sci longbeards who have nothing better to do than to make them run well, and putting them in the hands of MBA bean-counters who don't know what TCP/IP is, is a sure-fire way to improve reliability.

    Who doesn't Michael insult in that l'il editorial blip? Wow...
  • or did i miss the point of the previous article?
  • Yeah, he's a tool, but he has a point. There are SO many people/businesses (including man ISPs) out their running servers, and routers, that have no clue how to set them up correctly and securely. And god forbid there's a PROBLEM, because they won't know how to fix it. I'm all for requiring all kind of hoops,licenses,tests and fees before you are allowed to setup your own mail server, or DNS server, or router if you are going to let your stuff be accessible by the "world". Let ONLY the people that know w
    • And who should conduct the tests and issue licenses. A company like Microsoft? Besides, the most of the problem lies with the home users with their unpatched machines acting as zombies. Are you going to require all home users to jump through the hoops as well?
      • The thing is, those unpatched users WOULDN'T be a problem if every one of them was using an ISP that was on top of their firewall configurations, spam filters, attachment filters, snort logs, etc. That's what I'm talking about. A properly configured network minimizes damage from errant users, if it doesn't eliminate it completely.
    • Yeah, he's a tool, but he has a point. There are SO many people/businesses (including man ISPs) out their running servers, and routers, that have no clue how to set them up correctly and securely.
      Errr...methinks you've missed his point. He wants to remove control of the 13 operational DNS roots from NPOs, and put them under the control of for-profits.
      In case your rock blocks all EM radiation, you might be interested to know that Verislime's been busy breaking standards left and right to try to turn a
  • Put up your own root servers
    Distribute them properly so there is the necessary redundancy

    Now ask people to change their DNS to use your root servers instead of those old and crufty ones that keep working run by the communistic long haired educational type people.

    Step back and watch the flood of traffic come to your machines because you're willing to guarantee reliability.

    (later, we can discuss that us who still use the old ones just not have your address space in ours and have a nice segregation of In

    • That's quite interesting.

      You've just described, more or less accurately, the way AOL and Compuserve used to work.

      So why not let Verisign, AOL, BT Openwoe and friends run their own little privatised network, while leaving the sane and sensible rest of us to have ours?
      • I've long advocated that AOL, Compuserve and the trailer park of consumer services, Prodigy should have OC-12s between them.

        and a 56k line to the rest of the Internet.

        Me? I'm about to stop my MX boxes from listening to anything but IPv6 and to mark as spam anything that touched an IPv4 machine.

  • The primary interest in business is profit. Many times innovation and advancements are not in the best interest of profit. Since the internet has been revolutionizing society and culture for the last 10 years, and will continue to do so at exponential rates, we don't need corporations governing such important parts of it. Imagine one day having to enter a code from under your Sprite bottle cap to access information that is otherwise not related to Coca-Cola. If this happens, the benefits are far outweighed
  • He states that the internet should be commercialized, and infers that Verisigns servers are more resiliant because they are commercial, yet he says regarding the root attack last year: "The reason the root server problem was a big one was because they were attacking the underbelly of the addressing system. Yes, we could have lived 24 to 48 hours. You could say that in that time, we can fix anything--but maybe not. Microsoft was down for four days with a much simpler denial-of-service attack. " So the co
  • While the commercialization of the Internet was inevitable because the Internet is a good thing and it didn't take a teccie to realize that, there's no doubt that along with the gains, much has been destroyed.

    I don't think that this is a biggie though, but merely part of the cycle of things. Now that we're reaching the point where life on the Internet is distasteful owing to control by the corporate clueless, it's time to move on and build our next network.

    And you know, that actually sounds interesting.
  • I mean, who controls the nameservers is less important than who tells users to contact those systems, right?

    We, the IT and OSS community, route users to those systems. We set up the BIND and DJBDNS instances that make those queries. We're the guys who tell these software packages to check with *.GTLD-SERVERS.NET or *.ROOTSERVERS.COM when they don't know. Telling them to look elsewhere should be trivial.

    I mean, the whole point of using a centralized domain name service is that we can trust the rootserve

  • Symtomatic of a larger problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by El ( 94934 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:13PM (#7243386)
    I've suspected for a long time that MBA-types hold techies in contempt. Offshoring IT jobs is another symptom of this. Sclavos' comments demonstrates the utter contempt he holds for the people that built the internet -- the very same people that made him rich!
  • Its not even a question of who can do the job better, the internet is a tool of free information exchange first and foremost, and a commercial opurtunity secondly. You can still make cash without takling every single aspect of the net, and squeezing it dry.

    As much as corps like VeriSign hate it, standards need to be enforced, and core infrastructure that everyone needs access to, technically oriented, or not, needs to stay in the hands of non-profit volunteers.

    There is also the issue of their awful take o
  • From the article:
    Are you looking to monetize DNS lookups?
    No. That base level of DNS (domain name system) response is an obligation we took on when we inherited that contract. But it would be commercially unreasonable for anyone to suggest that we shouldn't be allowed to build incremental services on top of that if they deliver value.
    --

    So what is next? Building ads on everyone's domains because they "deliver value"? Or maybe they should just redirect all the domains to their "site finder," because anyon

  • $150M in infrastructure (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mosch ( 204 ) * on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:14PM (#7243404) Homepage
    He seems to imply that they've spent $150m in infrastructure to run the root servers. Color me stupid, but I have trouble imagining how I could spend that much on the root servers unless I was allowed to count the $750k Sclavos salary (plus his heft options), and those of his crooked cronies, plus a new building or two. (I call them crooked because they benefitted from CSFBs shady IPO allocations) Sclavos sees a way for a single company to monopolize a market (the market of mistyped domain names), and he's in a position to try to grab it. Now he's trying to frame it as a battle between intellectuals and realistic business people, when in fact it's a battle between people who don't want a single company forcing everyone into accepting an ethically questionable service and a single money hungry jackass who realized he found an unraped portion of the Internet. The Internet raises new questions constantly, and now the question is 'what if we just installed wal-marts on every single piece of empty property'. In the real world that's a laughable concept, but on the Internet, it's actually possible, and he wants to do it.
  • I wrote some fake FUD [swiki.net] on this very issue. Enjoy!

  • I agree with him 100% (Score:2, Interesting)

    by PD ( 9577 ) *
    We're stagnating on this intarweb thing. The surest way to kick progress in the pants is to take what we've built and give it to the ego-laden beautiful business boys with the shiny white teeth and small peckers, show them the power switch, and tell them to have fun.

    Surely, there must be something else to build, a new frontier to conquer. Why do we need to pay any attention to what these suits say? If there's an RFC that says to ignore these fools, the filter will be nearly perfect. All of the idiots will
  • Well, this decision could finally destroy the system of DNS. We have seen so many attempts from virii^wadware to abuse it. And - this might be far fetched - the http://www.ebay.com@www.evilcrackerdomain.com could also be seen as one trial.

    What would the result be? Some IT people coming from a university would make the existing approaches to freenet [sourceforge.net] perfect. At least, I find this outcome most likely.

    Please don't misinterpret this as some kind of rant/flamebait:
    Go ahead an destroy this DNS system, which has
  • How many long term stable internet/networking standards have been governed by commercial organisations? Hmmm... Lets see...

    (The best I can think of is Netware.)

    In short, the internet NEEDS basic infrastructure that is not governed by commercial interests.

    In any case, who is working towards alternative naming systems?

  • Wait, they're going to commercial the 'net (or at least want to)? I thought it already was commercialized!

    I still remember the days of gopher and the early web (and I know many people remember long before that). Back then, most of the gov't didn't want much to do with this "new fangled thing". Boy, have things changed. Commerce is alive and well on the 'net and it gets more-so all the time. Most of the original inhabitants are still around but are getting brutalized by the various .coms that file patents

  • WTF? (Score:2)

    by DAQ42 ( 210845 )
    This guy really need to do some freakin research before opening his mouth.

    Directly from the article:
    "Ninety-nine percent of the traffic is pure HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol), and so it handles it the way it should."

    Say that again?
    99% of traffic on the internet is HTTP?
    Um.
    _NO_!

    let's do a little packet scan of the traffic on my ISP's network, shall we?

    Hmmm, there's about, oh say, 40% SMTP, 10% DNS lookups alone. Wait, here's some p2p packets floating in a big cloud all over the place. Hmm, what's
  • but I think his conclusion is wrong. The fact that the infrastructure is held together by a free time collective might not be the best (although I can't think of any solid reason as I haven't RTFA). But if he thinks it should go over straight to private industry to reign freely he's got a couple of screws loose. What infrastructure has never been regulated by the government?

    There's a reason why: to provide uniform service to all citizens. The problem isn't in providing telephone service in NYC or the

  • While we are at it why not commercialize air, commercialize water, commercialize every spoken and written word, commercialize music, commercialize feelings, commercialize everything. People have no right to enjoy anything unless some company owns it and can get paid for it. People are here to serve corperations not the other way around.

    PS

    This is sarcasm... but that's the way a lot of business people think
  • I think this whole thing boils down to the fact that MBA bean conter types cannot comprehend why other people are motivated by things other than making money.
    They look at the DNS sytem and see a huge expoitable resource and are more concerned about how to make money off of it rather than making sure it works well.
    Free Software and Open Systems run by volunteers are anathema to business types because they refuse to comprehend how someone can look at something without automatically thinking: "How couls I
  • "It's time to take mathematics away from volunteers who run them out of a university or lab," said a spokesperson for the Market. "It's been shown time and time again that the operation of the free market produces better evaluations than ivory-tower academics. If the Market says that two and two make five, then those carping engineers should step aside."

    Following the news, the value of pi shot up to 3.815, the speed of light topped 400,000 km/second, but the fine structure constant dipped to 110.
  • System works as it is, why ruin it and create the potential for commercial politics and industrial espionage?
  • 2003-10-16 20:49:36 Verisign To Sell Network Solutions (articles,news) (rejected)

    Not sure why Slashdot doesn't think this is newsworthy, but Pivotal Private Equity [pivotalgroup.com] is buying Network Solutions [pivotalgroup.com] from Verisign for $100 million. Pivotal Private Equity is a subsidiary of Pivotal Group, Inc., an investment company based in Phoenix AZ that is primarily focused on real estate (hotels, office buildings, etc.); clearly domain registrations have nothing to do with their business and they are purely interested in maki
  • Dear Stratton Scalvos,
    Pull out your checkbook, build it the way you want it, and see what happens.

    Verisign, the company that just tried to pull some chicanery on people who can't type, and wreaked havoc on a lot of spam filters?
    Verisign, the same company that repeatedly transfers domain name control to anyone who can use a fax machine?
    Hey everyone, Stratton Scalvos says that we need to commercialize DNS servers. What do you think?

    Who would run these servers? Microsoft? How about the government?
  • I wonder how he would feel if the phone company changed it's infrastructure so that wrong numbers to Verisign were redirected to a compeditor. Or better yet, wrong numbers to his house were redirected to a sex shop.

  • Tell them you want VeriSign stopped! (Score:5, Informative)

    by SEE ( 7681 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @03:50PM (#7243870) Homepage
    1. The Department of Commerce [mailto]; VeriSign's contract to operate .com and .org was originally with them.
    2. The Federal Communications Commission [fcc.gov], which oversees telecommunications.
    3. The Senate Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications [senate.gov]; contact the committee itself [senate.gov], the chairman [senate.gov], the ranking member [senate.gov], and any of the other members you'd like.
    4. The House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet [house.gov], including the committee itself [house.gov], the chairman [house.gov], the vice-chairman [house.gov], and the ranking member [house.gov]. Plus any of the other members you feel like contacting.
    5. The Federal Trade Commission [ftc.gov], which hears consumer complaints.
    6. Your U.S. Representative [house.gov]
    7. Your Senators [senate.gov]
    8. Your Governor [firstgov.gov]
    9. Your State Legislators [ncsl.org]
    10. ICANN's wildcard comment address [mailto]
    11. Finally, complain to the media. If they get enough letters on a topic, they'll run stories. Try the New York Times [mailto], the Washington Post [mailto], the Washington Times [mailto], the Los Angeles Times [latimes.com], USA Today [usatoday.com], the Wall Street Journal [mailto], CNN [cnn.com], Fox News [foxnews.com], CBS News [cbsnews.com], ABC News [go.com], NBC News and MSNBC [msnbc.com].

    Remember, VeriSign is busy telling them its side of the story. We need to tell them ours!

  • VeriSign Core Values (Score:3, Interesting)

    by flux4 ( 157463 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @04:15PM (#7244143) Homepage
    So, here I was wondering why VeriSign makes these horrible, actively harmful decisions. Their customers will hate them, the entire community will rise against them, people will avoid them at all costs. Then I realized that the company, like Google, must have their own set of "Core Values". Of course, Google's core value is "don't be evil" [google.com]. I think VeriSign's is just slightly shorter:

    "Be Evil".

    Once you understand the motivation, it suddenly makes sense.

  • Then I suggest two internets (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Friday October 17, 2003 @04:18PM (#7244176) Homepage

    Then I suggest two internets. I've already suggested this very same idea with regard to the spam problem (let there be one with spam, and one without spam, and then the spammers will have their place to speak freely).

    It would be more practical to just create a new internet apart from the existing one (though "circuits" in the new one might just be tunnels in the present one). Some have said "the internet was good before the MBAs came, so we should just kick them out". Certainly it is true, but it really isn't practical to change it now; it's just way too late. What is needed is a new one.

    But wait ...

    We can create a "new" internet using the existing internet. If we just start a whole new set of root servers, and new top level domains, and make mail servers refuse any traffic from any addresses that don't properly validate a reverse DNS under the new name hierarchy, we would have pretty much good separation anyway, without the cost of a whole new infrastructure.

    And I suggest we do this entirely with IPv6 only (starting with tunnels, migrating to raw circuits as backbones finally get IPv6 deployed). We don't actually have to use "their" root servers, so why should we.

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