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The Internet Your Rights Online

ICANN Releases New .com Contract 54

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the domain-registration-at-gunpoint dept.
truthsearch writes "The Register is reporting that ICANN has released a revised contract for all dotcoms. The new revision hopes to bring an end to the huge legal fights surrounding the core of the Internet. From the article: 'Significant changes have been made to the deal - which will hand control of all dotcom domains to current owner VeriSign until 2012 - following widespread criticism from the Internet industry. Changes include limits on VeriSign's price-rising powers, reduced scope for VeriSign to sell personalized data to third-parties, and marginally increased control over VeriSign's ability to introduce changes to the existing dotcom business model.'"
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ICANN Releases New .com Contract More

ICANN Releases New .com Contract

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  • and whois? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by qwp ( 694253 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @12:57PM (#14599828) Homepage Journal
    And what about removing the restrictions on the evil corporate whois lookup verisign has imposed?

  • Hey, what just happened? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Celestial Avenger ( 826964 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @12:57PM (#14599836)
    My dotcom all of a sudden has been replaced by a bunch of online poker links.

  • The Important Question (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ZachPruckowski ( 918562 ) <zachary.pruckowski@gmail.com> on Monday January 30, 2006 @12:59PM (#14599847)
    From the Full Article:
    Under the new agreement, VeriSign will seize control of all expiring domains and will be entitled to sell them through its own system - keeping 10 percent of the proceeds. CFIT is, naturally, furious about its business model being blown out the water.

    So how many of the complaints against ICANN and VeriSign represent actual concerns about the Internet as a whole, and how many are about domain-squatters losing their effectiveness?

    • Re:The Important Question (Score:4, Insightful)

      by wfberg ( 24378 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:31PM (#14600122)
      Well, the insane domaingrabbing secondary market is a nuisance, and should be done away with, certainly. But what are verisign's motives? 10% of the proceeds of what? Don't they make money out of being the .com registry anyway?

      ICANN will ALSO auction off domains to the highest bidder. So they're really just taking over CFIT's business out from under their noses. The expiring domain you want will still be unavailable to you. Unless you've got some pocket change.

      The right thing to do would be to not have an auction, but a lottery which anyone can enter only once. Hard to set up in a cheat-proof manner, but at least you'd stand a chance. And Verisign (and ICANN) wouldn't just be raking in cash for doing nothing.
      • Why is having a lottery the right thing to do?

        I mean, granted, this change merely takes the squatter business and adds more legitimacy, but at least it will hopefully have some semblance of order. Using the lottery idea, it would be absolute chaos.

        If I've got a company and I want to register foobar.com, then should I not have more of a chance than some random guy who may just want the name so he can auction the domain off as well?

        I suppose that would take the profit away from Verisign and into individuals,
        • Why is an auction model for expired names allowed at all?
          The previous owners had an agreement to purchase the name for a set period of time, after it lapses what make netsol, or godaddy or anyone think they are entitled to auction it off?
          Expired names whould be placed back into the pool of available names. Period.

          If the secondary names market ends up smashing or grabbing or whatever a name from the pool, good for them. But there should be no secondary, hey look what I have auction for lapsed names.

          expandi
          • I think an auction model is perfect for all expired domain names. Whomever has the temporary contract to manage them can get a token percentage (say between 1% and 5% based upon a sliding scale of value) and the rest can go to a charitable fund for global development. This will help to take out any percieved disadvantge for any country wanting to stick with it.

            The alternate is global mirroring of domain name calls, where in each country direct access to the main domain registers are intercepted and some c

  • The core? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dougmc ( 70836 ) <dougmc+slashdot@frenzied.us> on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:03PM (#14599888) Homepage
    The new revision hopes to bring an end to the huge legal fights surrounding the core of the Internet.
    Um, DNS is not the core of the Internet. It's a very important/useful/popular service, yes, but it's not the core of the Internet. (If you must say something is the `core', I'd say it's the TCP/IP protocol itself.)

    Now, perhaps .com is the `core' of DNS, but even that's not really accurate. It's just the most popular top level domain ...

    But then again, if you think that the WWW is the Internet, then you might think that your domain name is the core of it. (It's not, and it's not, but it might be a popular misconception.)

  • And if you believe that... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Billosaur ( 927319 ) * <wgrother AT optonline DOT net> on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:11PM (#14599939) Journal
    Without that issue to get angry about, much of the fire against the agreement will be quenched. VeriSign has clearly refused to budge on it being given lifetime control of the dotcom registry, but ICANN is willing to let this go because it believes the importance of dotcoms will diminish as it releases new top-level domains and the Internet becomes more search-engine led.

    Apparently ICANN has suffered some sort of stroke or mental lapse. Can they honestly think that the ".com" extension is simply going to fade into the sunset anytime soon, given that virtually every important company has a website with that extension and vast marketing tied to their ".com" address? I haven't noted a boom in the number of ".info" domains lately. ICANN has sold out to VeriSign and is bring this out in the hopes that it will appease most of their critics, since anyone with a brain in their head will see it's a sham.

  • Raising prices (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Council ( 514577 ) <rmunroe AT gmail DOT com> on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:14PM (#14599953) Homepage
    marginally increased control over VeriSign's ability to introduce changes to the existing dotcom business model.

    The business model here being the sale of dotcom names, which wasn't immediately clear to me. So it means "VeriSign will be able to raise prices on dotcom domains, though not quite as fast as they WANT to."

    This might be a wise time to buy a long-term plan on your domain, if you own one. A lot of services have a feature where you can buy X years at a low price. It's unlikely that prices would inflate fast enough to make it seriously obnoxious, but it gives a nice feeling of security to know that your domain is yours, all paid off for the next X years.

    (Well, safely yours with the exception of things like that locking snafu a couple years back. But nothing you won't hear holy hell raised about.)

  • Alleviate legal concerns? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dada21 ( 163177 ) * <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:17PM (#14599983) Homepage Journal
    I'm not sure if it will truly be possible to alleviate legal concerns regarding ICANN and management of the domain name system. ICANN is one of those pseudo-government entities that is fairly impervious to legal mandates it seems. Sure, we hear that changes will be made, but who is reaping the benefit of these changes?

    In most situations where there is true competitive (closer to a free market than a regulated one), the end user AND the service/product provider both profit from the competition. Any changes that are made are done so to favor the user -- you don't see price increases in a truly competitive market unless there is a real supply or demand curve change. You also don't see products getting shoddier for no reason. Most things that occur in a free market of competition occur because the customer demands it, and the provider much make the changes or they'll lose out to the providers who will accept the future.

    ICANN doesn't have to embrace any changes based on their monopoly status. Just as we had a telephone monopoly in the US for decades (to the disadvantage of the consumer), we're seeing the same things happening with ICANN -- a lot of political wrangling, promises to do better, and guarantees that the bad days are long gone.

    Guess what? Nothing will change. The biggest way to change a bad company is to scare them out of their mind that someone will come and provide the same product or service in a cheaper way, faster, or at a higher quality.
    • Most things that occur in a free market of competition occur because the customer demands it

      Perhaps products are getting shoddier because the customers are putting up with it, or preferring cheap products over ones that are well-made. Yes, I realize there's tons of socio-economic stuff that I'm not taking into account, but this does happen/is happening.

  • What a scam (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:18PM (#14599994)
    "A new direct contribution that VeriSign pays to ICANN direct"

    So ICANN failed to convince everyone it should get a hefty tax on .COM sales, so instead they appoint Verisign and Verisign levies the fee instead and nobody complains about the straight conflict of interest in that?

    "However, the new agreement still provides VeriSign with a presumptive right of renewal - meaning effectively that it is given permanent control of the dotcom registry, and it also allows the company to seize control of all expiring domains - something that has become a large secondary market."

    They force you to use their Netsol Whois, if you query a domain on their Whois the domain does not expire when they say it will, they hold it in limbo because you used their Whois. They offer it to you at their inflated price.

  • Lipstick on a pig doesn't make me want to kiss it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GeorgeK ( 642310 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:28PM (#14600100) Homepage
    [I just submitted my initial comments on the ICANN-VeriSign revised settlement, although it takes a while for them to appear at http://forum.icann.org/lists/revised-settlement/ [icann.org] . See http://www.icann.org/topics/verisign-settlement.ht m [icann.org] for the revised settlement, and send your own comments to revised-settlement@icann.org]
    Hello,

    No matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it's still a pig. My lips won't kiss that pig.

    The revisions that were made to the proposed ICANN-VeriSign settlement were extremely minor, and the staff has, intentionally or unintentionally, misread and mischaracterized the public comments on the prior settlement proposal.

    One of the most misleading lines was in the analysis of public comments, where someone (no staffer signed their name to the document, to take responsibility for it) summarized the feelings toward price increases as "Regarding registrants, there was some expression that there might be some negative effects due to the potential price increases, but, the majority across constituencies expressed that the increase in cost was negligible when compared to the value of a domain name registration." Most registrants, who are ultimately paying the bills for ICANN, registries, registrars, etc, were solidly against the price aspect of the proposed settlement. As I mentioned in my prior comments at:

    http://forum.icann.org/lists/settlement-comments/m sg00000.html [icann.org]

    competitive bidding for the .com registry would have brought the wholesale cost of .com domains to the $2/domain per year level, approximately, a 66%+ reduction in costs. Yet ICANN considers it a negotiating victory for consumers when there's no cost reduction at all, but instead an average price INCREASE per year of 4.7% (i.e. 2/3rds of 7%). In technology-based industries, price REDUCTIONS, due to economies of scale, are far more typical, yet ICANN somehow feels price increases are desirable. It makes no sense.

    The only possible reason one could conclude that price INCREASES are the norm would be if the majority of VeriSign's costs are not technological. If the majority of VeriSign's costs consist of wining and dining ICANN staff at exotic locations around the world, I might begin to see your point....

    The sale of traffic data provisions is unacceptable. Notice that the language specifically permits access to data on "non existent domain names" for "promoting the sale of domain names". In other words, if example.com is getting a lot of type-in traffic, and is unregistered, VeriSign could sell that data, thereby promoting low-cost cybersquatting (since a large percentage of those types of names are TM infringements, as various independent analysts of SiteFinder concluded. Instead of monetizing that traffic itself, VeriSign will monetize it indirectly. Furthermore, VeriSign will be able to see the traffic to individual domain names (e.g. to know whether eBay.com is getting more activity than Amazon.com, or more importantly, whether yourdomain.com is getting more DNS activity than yourcompetitor.com).

    With regards to Appendix W requirements related to R&D expenditures (including universal WHOIS), there continues to be a total lack of transparency, due to ICANN's continuing refusal to disclose the annual reports of VeriSign. I did a search of the 2001 main agreement at:

    http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/verisign/regi stry-agmt-com-25may01.htm [icann.org]

    and the word "confidential" appears a total of ZERO times. The number of times the word "private" is also ZERO. Yet, somehow, we are led to believe that ICANN can't release these annual reports? Why? Yet,

  • Keeping corruption at home (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SilentOne ( 197494 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:30PM (#14600114) Homepage
    This is better then the UN overseeing DNS servers how?
    • This is better then the UN overseeing DNS servers how?

      Because it at least limits the number of people that you need to involve to make changes. Think about how hard it is to get Congress off its fat, lazy ass to improve the system, and then multiply that times 100. The other thing is that at least in the US you have a somewhat business friendly climate. I can just see turning this over to the UN, only to have the French attempt to mandate that domain names only be issued to businesses that limit worker

  • ICANN't control myself (Score:5, Funny)

    by digitaldc ( 879047 ) * on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:31PM (#14600120)
    When VeriSign was asked why they were handed control of all dotcom domains until 2012, they replied, "Why? Because ICANN!"

  • The campaigning against it has begun (Score:3, Informative)

    by K-boy ( 778847 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:41PM (#14600200)
    The organisation that has created the most fuss about this agreement - the Coalition for ICANN Transparency (CFIT) has said that the new agreement does not answer its three main concerns and has promised to fight it "with every option we have".

    Those options are quite plentiful. It is suing ICANN in San Jose and has discovery until mid-March, it has got the EU investigating the agreement, and it has a 1,000 or so documents that it got through the Freedom of Information act that it is looking into as we speak.

    CFIT also reckons that the agreement will serve as a recruiting poster for it - with people signing up to make sure deals like this don't get agreed.

    You can read more on my blog post [kierenmccarthy.co.uk]. I wrote The Register article btw.

    Kieren

  • What about domain name protections ?!?! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GamesNET ( 786409 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:45PM (#14600233)
    It's obvious the "business" of TLD's is what drives ICANN. It's a shame there is not a way to force ICANN to enact reasonable domain name protections, a functional domain dispute process, or a method to assist victims of Domain Hijacks directly (re: gamesnet.net). Following the gamesnet.net domain hijack, ICANN refused to get involved in any way. Although GTE's domain hijack got immediate attention and quick resolve. I've been advised it would take a class action lawsuit to obtain their attention. However, their status in the state of California protects them from this as well.

  • FYI : Alternative DNS Root (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mpapet ( 761907 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @02:06PM (#14600398) Homepage
    Widipedia has a nice summary of the alternative DNS roots.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:FYI : Alternative DNS Root (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I know about these alternate root servers but would anyone trust them. The problem is that we need an absolute trusted authority similar to the international weights and measures that one could assure if I lookup an address it will route back to the real IP address and to the correct person or company. With crackers and other criminals waiting for just such an oppertunity to re-route you personal information to their fake servers and steal your personal information. Pharming is too scary to think of and onc
  • Hasn't Verisign demonstrated that they are evil? Why should they get a contract renewal?
    -russ

  • We're Saving You Money, Really (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dekortage ( 697532 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @03:04PM (#14600822) Homepage

    From the article: The headline issue that VeriSign was going to be able to raise dotcom prices by seven percent every year has been reduced to the fact that it can only raise them for four of the next six years and that it needs to demonstrate evidence of the fact that the price rise comes as a result of additional expense on its network to make it more secure.... Without that issue to get angry about, much of the fire against the agreement will be quenched.

    A 7% increase every year for six years comes out to roughly 150% of today's price. If it's only four out of six years, that's around 131% of today's price. I'm sure this is being posited as a 19% reduction in price over the next six years, but it is merely a reduction in a proposed and rather egregious price hike. I don't see how this quenches the fire. They still look like money grubbers.

    And I have a hard time figuring out how their security costs are going to go up by 30% in the next few years... shouldn't they have a security budget that can be reviewed by ICANN?

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