Regulatory Capture at ICANN
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Originally, there was what seemed to be a custodian role, looking after the namespace. Then it seemed to possibly be getting confused as a profit center, with fees. Then ICANN happened. Then there was inexplicably created a bizarre cottage industry of numerous middleperson "registrars", effectively selling or renting domain names they didn't own. And a few big businesses, including Superbowl ads. Plus there were the squatters, of course, since no one was looking after the namespace anymore. Then an explosion of TLDs were sold. So now we have business people talking about "market share" of TLDs, and "consumer" options:
> Allowing .org and future domain names to move to market-based pricing makes sense with today’s healthy TLD market, which is populated with many choices for consumers to choose from. The .org domain name is well known as one of the first TLDs in the market available for public registration, but it still only holds 5.5 percent market share, with just over 10 million names in the .org space compared to almost 140 million domain names and 75 percent market share for .com.
Explain how ideally you think this should have been handled then? Specifically someone wants to register a domain name and how should they go about doing so and what specifically should be required of them prior to registering and what should happen if they don't 'use' the domain and how are you going to define 'use the domain exactly' and how you will review fairly whatever the interpretation is? How would you setup an alternate system for doing so and practically implement it?
Squatters by the way are a myth that was invented in the 90's by the media and used in an obviously pejorative way.
How do you mean it was a myth? You remember all the domain name for sale landing pages, the faux SEO (not really) pages, the domain name marketplace sites full of massive numbers never-used domains (sometimes domains with some token SEO-ing done on them to increase the rank they could mention), the registrars who helped automate massive buying of domain names, and all the people (including people you knew personally, not made up) talking about how they were buying up domain names for their value rather than to use (and the people themselves sometimes said they were "squatting")? Are you saying something else?
So for example let's say you want neilv.com but someone has it figuring they can sell it to someone at some point. There is nothing preventing you from picking (especially today) neilv.somethhingelse or neilvonline.com and so on. But you have decided (most people) they want the .com. Then they feel entitled to having that .com when they come around to needing it. And they also think there should be some perfect system developed to decide who is the valid user and use of that domain when that practically would never happen. Now if the little old flower shop choose neilv.com and was 'using it' but not 'using it' is that more legit? Not really. The average person might still try to entice that owner with money so they could use the domain name.
Lastly people think that as a group others will or should not seek to profit and that trying to profit off an opportunity that you spot (that someone else doesn't; or in advance of them) is wrong in some way. But it's not. It's human nature and it's acceptable it's just that it pisses people off so they try to paint it in a negative way. And if someone decides to take a chance and grab domains with the intent of waiting for the right buyer to come along that is not any different than other ways people will try to make money.
The media of course (and bloggers) feeds into this and stokes it in many ways.
If it was so obvious that buying domains or trying to hoard them was a way to make money why didn't everyone do it? Not because they thought it was the wrong thing to do. Because they didn't think of doing it and/or didn't have the money to do it or weren't around or weren't creative enough. Not because they felt it was wrong.
> the registrars who helped automate massive buying of domain names
Exactly and anyone can do this. It's not tax medallions dolled out by politicians. Anyone can buy up domain names.
I could possibly see your argument, but ICANN's early actions ("Now everyone can get money by being a registrar middleperson, for what's still necessarily a central registry! And sure, one person can buy thousands of namespace entries, to scalp them!") didn't give me the impression that they'd worked through all the possibilities for the goal of managing this resource. The best anyone could come up with was throwing away the prior rules, unhinged profiteering handouts, and assuming an unregulated market will work it out in the end?
FWIW, just a small counterexample to the assertion that people weren't stopped from buying domain names on any possible wrong-ness of it... I distinctly recall being surprised and disapproving when I first heard of someone registering a generic word (not based on the name of their organization) as a domain name. It was like the reaction when the first Usenet spammers started. It's not that nobody had thought of that, but there was some sense of stewardship and respectability that precluded such things (and also, at one point, rules about commercial use). We onboarded a large number of people into some of the thinking with every new college frosh class, every September. I'm not saying that that particular notion of decency was sustainable during a gold rush, but "they felt it was wrong" was the barrier sometimes.
A registry has an 'easy' part, and that is actually maintaining a list of names and associated data, and providing that as DNS zones.
The hard part is dealing with individual customers. Providing service, collecting money, etc.
So the idea at the time was to have lots of registrars competing on what service they provide for what price and having more or less regulated registries that provide a fixed service at an agreed price.
By and large this system worked.
Early on, it was not clear if large zones like .com would actually scale. So there was some restraint of registering silly names, because that could lead to problems.
At some point, computers got fast enough and big enough memories that large zones were no longer a serious worry and everybody moved in to get all the nice domains.
Since the invention of anycast routing, it is technically no longer complex.
If a continent fails, then either all BGP announcements are already gone, or you need a way to stop them. Then traffic will be routed to other continents.
It is not trivial, but for big zones if you get 1 euro per domain per year, you can do a lot of stuff.
And that is the sort of prices people cared about back then.
On the other hand, providing support, nobody has any idea how to spec that. What is a reasonable cost? The same goes for payment options.
What could possibly go wrong?
The registry part is easy to specify.
For the registrar, look at how google normally operates: everything they can automate works well and is cheap. As soon as something goes wrong and the they lock you out of an account it becomes hopeless. Imagine that google would be the only registrar for .com or .net
Of course, with a free market come shady parties. But with a bit of effort it is possible to find registrars that work quite well.
With just one monopoly per gTLD, it is likely that bad things will happen in the long run.
Look at the history of decisions taken by ICANN. Contracts get awarded with hardly influence from the larger internet community.
An archive.org search shows it was rented for 2 months in the last 7 years.
I don't agree with ICANNs proposal in the article, but squatting is an issue.
Everybody wants the same popular words, but if you get a little bit creative, the domains are usually free.
So if for example the name you wanted 'for fun' was grabbed years ago by someone else who wanted it 'for fun' that would bother you less? Or you would then think (honestly) 'wow what a waste that person uses it for 'fun' and I have an actual real (and importantly better) use for the name. My point in part is that if there were no people buying domain names to sell them there is most likely going to be a situation where someone will (in year 2019) have gotten to the 'good' name first and it wouldn't be available.
Lastly in a capitalistic society do you feel justified in being unhappy because there is physical real estate in desirable places (not startup desirable either but just desirable like Miami Beach let's say) where someone bought land or buildings years ago before you were born and now you can't afford to live there and have to pick a less desirable location?
But yes, someone buying a domain and using it for something fun, be it just fun for them (and maybe their friends) or fun for the rest of the world (such as https://bad.solutions), is a lot better than someone buying a domain just to squat on it because they think someone else may want to buy it for a lot of money some day. Playfulness and fun is actually important.
> Lastly in a capitalistic society do you feel justified in being unhappy because there is physical real estate in desirable places (not startup desirable either but just desirable like Miami Beach let's say) where someone bought land or buildings years ago before you were born and now you can't afford to live there and have to pick a less desirable location?
I think would be justified in being unhappy about people buying land and buildings with no intention of doing anything with them, just because they think someone else will eventually buy that real-estate for more money. AFAIK, squatting is one of the important problems inherent to housing markets, and there are laws to prevent people from just sitting on empty houses until they can sell them for enough money (although IANAL).
Well for starters, it might be useful to have actual name resolution rather than nothing but a whois record.
Back 30+ years ago or so, I sorta randomly named my home subnet of the form firstinitiallastname.net, then when wifi came out I similarly named the ssids. Then a couple years later I decided it might not be a bad idea to register the name but some guy was using it as a vanity domain. That lasted for about two years and then it got picked up by a domain squatter and has been sitting there completely unused for > 10 years. Today the whois record points at ename.com, which I contacted a few years ago to find out how much it was going to cost to transfer the domain. Apparently they have some kind of bidding garbage, but it counter-bid the $25(or similarly low amount I offered) to something like $15,000.
I have another domain, i've been planning on using, but updating a 100 wifi devices passwords is a PITA.
The simple solution is to prohibit the sale of domain names. This is also how trademarks work in the US -- you can't sell a trademark.
Businesses get around this by transferring the trademark in connection with the sale of the "goodwill" associated with it, and typically also the rest of the company that holds the trademark. They could then do the same thing here -- transfer a domain along with the business that owns it. You're selling the business and not the domain name, the domain name just comes with it. But you can't sell only the domain name, which puts the squatters out of business.
What squatters would then attempt to do is to sell some nominal asset in conjunction with the domain name and claim that the sale is of the other thing and not the domain name, but judges are not idiots. If you're selling a valuable domain attached to a $1 knickknack for $5000, it's clear that the price is being paid for the domain name and not the knickknack. Moreover, even if it doesn't solve 100% of the problem, it makes the squatter's life harder and makes it more difficult for them to advertise the sale of domain names etc., which would at least be an improvement with no major cost to legitimate users.
You can do that (as you are pointing out) so I am not sure why you are even saying that.
> They could then do the same thing here -- transfer a domain along with the business that owns it.
So now you are going to define what 'a business' is and further saying that a domain name can only be used for 'a business' and not by a person? Or are you going to extend this to what you think are 'legit' personal uses of domains?
What you are trying to say is that you don't think that someone should be allowed to be 'in the business of selling domain names and we know it when we see it', right? So you are now going to take away all of the property that someone 'in the business of selling domain names' has and then what are you going to do with that exactly? Setup a system to then decide what an appropriate use of those domains are?
There is no need to get into any of that because you can't sell a person. It's only a problem for a business because you can sell a business and thereby try to use a sham business sale to de facto sell a domain name.
> What you are trying to say is that you don't think that someone should be allowed to be 'in the business of selling domain names and we know it when we see it', right?
This is not actually that hard. You shouldn't be able to sell a domain name by itself nor sell "other thing that includes a domain name" for more than the fair market value of the other thing by itself.
Sometimes determining the fair market value of something is non-trivial, but that doesn't stop us from doing it in any other case, e.g. when you receive non-monetary compensation from your employer and it has to have a market value assigned for tax purposes.
> So you are now going to take away all of the property that someone 'in the business of selling domain names' has and then what are you going to do with that exactly? Setup a system to then decide what an appropriate use of those domains are?
Without the ability to sell them, they would presumably no longer be inclined to keep paying the annual fees to uselessly hoard them and they would become unregistered names again.
I don't mind paying a fee for a registrar to handle the task of making sure the world knows that I own a particular domain. The problem is that the fee I'm paying appears to be viewed as me having to periodically re-purchase a domain I already own.
The data a registrar stores for your domain is well under 1KB, including name server records, name, address, etc. This is highway robbery and pure profit to the registrar.
Would you rather have a tld or country code be a monopoly and milked? The Irish domain .ie was famous for this as it was a for a long time effectively one eccentric guy.
>ACT and Comptia have been infiltrating every workgroup, even the one on Open Source (WG 7). They are doing the best they can to drown any initiative that would not only promote OSS in Europe but also that could help Europe create a sucessful European software sector
My thought is that outside of high-risk areas like ICANN, they're not having much success. The OSS community in Europe is far stronger than that in America.
By what metric?
We used to say that fees should be low so that the average person could have their own domain. After all, there is no inherent cost in the sale, so why should ICANN profit? Instead, organizational fees are $0.18/yr for dot com domains, even though the registrars charge at least $8.00. This captures 97% of retail registration proceeds in private hands. Yet at the same time, no domains are available. Who could afford to own so many unused domains at $8/yr? No one, because they establish private registrars and own then at $0.18/yr, covering these meager costs by selling marginally valuable domains for $100 and short dot coms for tens of millions on secondary markets.
If there are thousands of votes that ICANN should not be allowed to raise rates, they are certainly from people who are profiting off their sale, and not people using them for the intended purpose of identifying servers on the Internet. If we are concerned about profits, we should push for them to be assigned to a charity benefiting something deserving.
No. Hobbiests and regular people won't be able to afford domains just because some squatters decided to profit off this. You are probably salty just because a squatter grabbed a domain you liked, and yeah thats irritating but that doesn't mean that millions of people should be denied the right of having their internet presence by making prices so high that they can't afford them.
Instead DNS is basically useless for the average person who uses search engines and bookmarks to find things.
PS: The Phone number system oddly enough is far more user friendly in practice.
Sure, but if there are no price caps, what makes you think .org domains will be available for that price?
> DNS is basically useless for the average person who uses search engines and bookmarks to find things.
Um, you do realize that when you click on that search engine link, you're using DNS to find the actual site, right? Search engines point at URLs, not IP addresses.
Isn't the usage of that on the way out (likely long tail though), due it being a security nightmare?
eg you never know if some url shortener is pointing to malware, bouncing through trackers, (etc).
Even if the same url "seemed ok yesterday".
DNS is incredibly important infrastructure, but the protocol is more than just a name. Getting a geographically local IP from a universal name is independent of what the name is. Replace Microsoft.com with MVKVS or other short string and that still works.
Indeed. Which means it's not "basically useless for the average person", since the average person needs it in order to find the websites they want to visit.
HTML lets you hyperlink to an IP address.
So, useful but not needed.
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." - Anatole France (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France)
Any regulatory organization should constantly be on their toes about possible capture. Anyone who rejects research on the matter with actual data and earnest intentions as "insulting" and "incivility" is very concerning.
But ICANN has no actual source of legal "authority" over domain names. Their position is maintained only through the willingness of authors of DNS software and network adminstrators to use the ICANN root.zone. What keeps the world's DNS resolvers pointing to ICANN's approved root zone is simply consensus. Unchanged default settings and the tacit agreement of network administrators.
It could be that the author is currently maintaining a significant number of regsitrations, possibly doing a little "domaining" in his spare time. If so, that is motivation to protest any increase in prices. The truth is that domain names should cost almost nothing. The real cost of maintaining a domain name is not even close to what is being charged by registrars.
If I am not mistaken, the story behind the privatisation and commercialisation of domain name registrations can be traced back to President Clinton, certain Clinton staff members/advisors, and an ICANN-precursor, called "NewCo" at the time. "NewCo" is shorthand among lawyers for setting up a private company.
I think "regulatory capture" is a misleading way to describe the very old problems with ICANN and its conflicts of interest. There is no governmental regulatory agency acting in the public interest to "capture". ICANN, both the idea and implementation, is a private company. Adept at fending off any legal challenges.
However, all that's needed to completely obsolete the existing domain name system is for any significant part of the total population of Internet users to agree to use a new one.
It's not even necessary to change the software used for DNS or change how the system works. Just agree to change, select new master servers, configure the software and start resolving.
Because of the way the system works, the old and new DNS trees can even coexist, all that's needed is to list members of the new system as servers for resolution, to be checked in addition to the ones for the old system.
Thinking about it, it's quite likely that this has already been done, and that independent DNS systems are already in use for things like the "Dark Web".
The major purpose of having an organization manage the name and number spaces is to organize them and avoid collisions... I don't think the people at ICANN really understand how replaceable their function is.
OpenNIC
.pictures
.photo
.photos
.photography
ICANN jumped the freaking shark and made an irrevocable mess of internet naming.
As long as we throw out the whole 'memorable' part. Which has both branding and security implications.
We need to either commit to a limited set or unlimited set. Being stuck in between in the worst of both worlds. If it's unlimited we can treat domains more like phone numbers and rely on 'contact book' style systems for personal reference instead of memory. Which would help solve both branding/security issues.
You could even diff the URLs against your URL "contact books" (I'm trying not to say bookmarks), to warn against possible phishing too.
So then we can throw out the DNS and just use IP addresses or some IPFS-esque scheme.
...so then the nodes operated by the FAANGs would be authoritative just by virtue of popularity. Dangit.
I guess we're back to HOSTS files.
We already have security implications, a domain name should never been the only proof.
> This appears to be a case study in regulatory capture. Beyond public outcry, there appears to be very little stopping ICANN from simply pushing through these contracts despite overwhelming evidence that the average internet user isn't in favor of these changes.
The whole internet naming system in place right now has issues due to this fact. DNS and naming have become a critical part of the internet infrastructure and deserve to be owned, controlled by and/or operated for the best interests of the people.
People only use DNS through public facing DNS servers. You can run your own if you want, whenever you want (and many routers are already doing just that, creating .local domains etc with dnsmasq). Practically anyone can operate as a naming system and you don't even need to hard break with ICANNs canonicity - you can still delegate to full ICANN compliant DNS providers if you want, but you can also go against their name policy where you want too if you are operating the name server.
Fixing DNS is probably one of the easiest "sea change" movements possible - many devices get their DNS delegated, so rather than convincing every grandmother to change their phones DNS server they often just need to change the DHCP provisioned DNS servers.
Of course, being "one of the easiest" doesn't make it actually easy. You need to convince a critical mass of DNS provisioning routers, devices, etc to stop respecting ICANN as the naming authority and pretty much every large corporation that would have a stake in this has already sunk cost with the ICANN / registrar mafia to get theirs. At this point, the monopoly often benefits them by shutting out competition through exploitative pricing and name restrictions.
The only practical way to ever get that critical mass is through automatic changeover systems. Updates to routers, phones, computers, etc that replace their priority DNS servers. Good, uh, luck with that, especially if the replacement you are pushing is going to be incompatible with (some) ICANN registered domains.
But anyone can run their own DNS server. And they can advertise whatever names they want. They don't have to listen to ICANN, but a replacement needs to gain enough adoption to displace ICANN's authority, which like with many monoculture monopolist services (Twitter, Facebook, Blink, etc) is extraordinarily difficult even in one of the easiest instances of it to fix.
The hard part of domains is dealing with trademarks. In recently years it has been remarkably quiet in that area. Which means that ICANN is doing something right.
I don't particularly like ICANN, but the ccTLDs and legacy gTLDs are very stable. Which is a good thing.
[0] https://git.gnunet.org/bibliography.git/plain/docs/gns2014wa...
Honestly, I agree with ICANN on this. But then ICANN contradict themselves when they introduce URS, PDDRP and all of that, which blatantly goes againnst the free market and competition.
You can't make IP holders happy and have a competitive market at the same time.
ICANN want to have their cake and eat it too.