Inside the Rise of the Domain Name System 74
Greg Huang writes "Looking back, it's almost impossible to believe that for most of the 1990s, a single company, Network Solutions, had a government-issued monopoly on registering domain names on the Internet. And considering how central the company was to the growth of the Web, it's surprising how little of the company's back story — how it got into the domain name business, or who owned it — has been told. Xconomy has an in-depth interview with two former executives from SAIC, the secretive San Diego defense contractor that bought Network Solutions in 1995 for $5 million and sold off the domain registration business in 2000 for billions of dollars."
Not To Celebrate Network Solutions, But... (Score:5, Insightful)
So in the end, the monopoly was indeed broken up, but the consumer lost, and lost big.
Re:Single entity (Score:3, Insightful)
So do IP address assignments. So do AS number assignments. Why does nobody ever complain about them? If you want something to be uniquely assigned (domain names, IP addresses, AS numbers) then it seems to me that it's going to have to be centrally managed by someone.
I would.
However, IP address assigment is not handled by single entity. Theres separate organizations for north and south america, europe, africa and asia. So you're missing the point there.
Re:Single entity (Score:3, Insightful)
But that someone should be distributed, i.e. a group instead of a single entity
Why?
And the systems should be distributed and mirrored too.
The systems are distributed and mirrored. There isn't a single root server for the entire internet running in ICANNs basement......
Peer to peer db's? (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, I'm not sure some of you people know how the Naming system works. The difference between the Root Zone and some registrars like Network Solutions(at present)are night and day. If you think a single source of accurate data can be distributed between different companies in different nations, you are high. Really, there are so many things you aren't considering that you short start by considering swallowing your tongue. In the end, there can be only one. It's not that they're just so unhip- it's physical reality.
And I would comment further, but I shouldn't because I actually know what I'm talking about.
Re:Not To Celebrate Network Solutions, But... (Score:3, Insightful)
There was a definite advantage in terms of ICANN enforcement of registrar responsibilities when there was only one registrar.
Take off your rose tinted glasses, please. Have you forgotten the exorbitant charges for domains when NetSol were the only player in town? May not seem like a big deal to a business, but it certainly prevented the internet from expanding as quickly as it could have, but sooner, due to the lack of affordable options to people who were online at the time. I sure as hell would have had my own domain a lot sooner if it wasn't for the fees that NetSol was charging... and everyone knew it monopolic overcharging then.
Despite the insane amount of money they were charging for domain registration and renewal, their security was worse even then. They didn't even bother to contact people by phone or mailing address before accepting a SPOOFED EMAIL as a valid request for changing domain ownership.
Re:Single entity (Score:5, Insightful)
Me neither.
Re:Single entity (Score:3, Insightful)
... if that means that megacorps also can't go around buying up dozens of extra domain names for no really good reason -- one for every special deal they ever offer, every product, every movie they put out, every ... whatever, then sure. You get what you get, and that's it. But that's not going to happen.
Trademarks are essentially local. Two companies can even operate under the same name, as long as they're not getting in each others' way, creating confusion -- by being in the same market (by product or area). There's paperwork (and treaties) involved in making those trademarks global. What would make more sense is to get rid of the .com and .gov TLD's and replace those with .co.us and .gov.us . If another country wants to have whitehouse.gov.jp, then fine, let them have it. We have ours. We're not competing on the international scene for the name "whitehouse". (There are many whitehouses, by the way.) If TLDs are aligned with trademark-assignment organizations, we can avoid some (but not all) the weirdness.
Misspellings: how many products are named with cute misspellings? Who's to say that those are intended to be malicious? If you require someone to have a product first, you'll see CocaCola buying every variant of their name, and preventing anyone from ever naming their product C0k3C0l4, even if they might have initially. So you can grandfather in misspellings, but you then section off a whole range of possibilities just because?
Aligning with trademark organizations presents problems for small businesses and personal users, who have no real interest in having a globally unique name, but could use a locally unique one. Maybe no product is involved. Other than DNS, you'd have no reason to deal with trademarks. Why should you? The system we have now essentially says "fine, get your DNS name, but if a trademark holder comes along later, we'll screw you" which isn't fair, but does provide a "rule" (ICANN ruling) for determining priority.
Taking away TLDs just makes it easier for squatters to sign up for names, especially if you automate the detection of misspellings and assign them all to an existing holder. You can kiss creative DNS names goodbye.
Others can probably clean up and add to my arguments, but the point is ... please reconsider. Ridding ourselves of TLDs doesn't help things. Maybe something else would ... but not that.
Re:Get rid of TLDs! (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh good. Then anyone with international interests has to maintain several hundred domains, to make sure they are easily found by people around the world looking for them...
Oh good. Then it'll just be Sporf farm equipment fighting with Sporf housewares, and Sporf online store, fighting it out for control of their mutual namesake...
And the US government is going to drop everything to make sure our domain names stay clean, right? And Colombia certainly wouldn't sell off identically named domains to companies looking to catch the typos of Canadians...