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ICANN Deep in Debt 49

Posted by Roblimo from the what's-a-million-dollars-between-friends dept.
Milkman Ken writes "It seems that after several months of operating, ICANN is now a million bucks in the hole. Bummer. " Apparently the transition from the NSI monopoly over .com, .edu, and .net domain registrations to a competitive registration environment has been handled so poorly that the whole system may collapse, at least temporarily, without government intervention. And I thought the purpose of ICANN was to get the government out of the domain name registration business. Oy!
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ICANN Deep in Debt More

ICANN Deep in Debt

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  • How in the hell did NSI sneak in and get so much power? The people working there must be more assaholic than mircosoft. No way does it cost $70 a year to point a domain name to a few nameservers. It should be like $5 max to pay for the machines that get the query for the lookup and the bandwidth. They must have millons of names stored on a single machine. Here's a quote from the pages of the *free* .us domain:

    "While each locality domain manager is responsible for setting his own fees
    or billing practices and deciding what is 'small', it does seem that what
    the Internic charges should be considered to be 'large'. Some of these
    companies are charging $10 per year."

    -- http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/usdnr/usdom-overview.h tml

    Although I'm all for it and I think just about everyone else is, I don't think it's possible to start our own free or reasonably cost TLD. NSI thinks the list of existing names is all theirs and the only way we could get a hang of them is by having some sort of a police raid.

    Same thing goes for IP addresses too btw, the prices are way ludirious. A block of 65,000 or so breaks down to costing $0.03 a piece per month. My ISP (@Home) wants to charge me $8. What the hell is that?

    Something has got to change. Non-profit orgs should not be able to run themselves a million dollars into the hole. They need to fire some staff and get JOBS instead of sitting around and hiring their friends so they don't have to get a real job and can all just slack around with their unearned/undesereved power.


    ~Kevin
  • I've been hoping for (semi) unrestricted TLD creation. You want mister.mike? You got it!

    Oh well. I'd settle for the new domains any day. :-/

  • I'm not going to say that i fully comprehend what are the issues here.But this i do understand - the root servers originally belonged of all people to the DoD and when they were transferred the ppl who used to run it came attached (does remind one of IE 4). Thier mentality is the same as that of govt. people all over - it does'nt matter how well it runs or how efficient it is it runs ok so dont mess with it and dont mess with us. In India we had till 6 months back only one ISP a govt. company - that meant waiting 25 mins to login & to stay connected for 5 mins.Today we have 20 ISP's and suddenly i have a new digtial dial in line, i can stay connected for hours on end & i have plenty of other things. Toss out ICANN & InterNIC get everyone in let's see what happens.

  • Re:Related past /. stuff (Score:3)

    by Demona ( 7994 ) on Saturday July 17, 1999 @08:20AM (#1797896) Homepage
    NSI Backlogged, as usual [slashdot.org]

    NSI Closes Top Level Domain Servers [slashdot.org]

    NSI challenged over "obscene" domains [slashdot.org]

    NSI Modifies "whois" agreement [slashdot.org]

    Other related "alternative" DNS and related resources which I have seen mentioned here on /. or elsewhere: Not the European Union: eu.org (free domain names), The Internet Namespace Cooperative [tinc.org] (provides alternative to mainstream root servers), The .us domain [isi.edu] (an often overlooked alternative for those in the united states), Granite Canyon [granitecanyon.com] (free primary/secondary DNS). eu.org recently got very efficient and cleared a backlog of domains; Granite Canyon has had a lot of complaints about spotty service.

    Suggested other readings: In whose domain [harvard.edu], Exclusion and Coordination in Cyberspace [stanford.edu], for the advanced user; Ask Mr. DNS [acmebw.com] and the FAQ for comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains [intac.com].

  • For more information on ICANN check out the ICANN Watch at http://www.icannwatch.org/ [icannwatch.org]

    or for a lengthy critique of ICANN see Gordon Cook's report on ICANN at http://www.cookreport.com/icannregulate.shtml [cookreport.com]

  • Guess it depends on whether political pressure is better than economic pressure. In this case you have a politically appointed economic monopoly.


  • I thought Inman withdrew himself from candidacy. At least that's what he told us (I also asked him if there were really aliens. He said "no". Made me sad.)
  • Um, ICANN is the new person on the block to be the over all controller of sub registrars, one of which will be NSI. That's why there is the issue; NSI is loosing it's monopoly and they're like "Fuck you, we'll make it a bitch to happen. You got it on paper, come and take it in real life."

  • I looked into getting something under .us, but information was relatively hard to come by, compared to InterNIC. What's more, they seemed to want to tie names to a geographic location. I am not tied to a location; I will probably move and would feel silly with a domain named after a place I used to live. Besides, my server is hundreds of miles away from my residence.

    Actually, though, it is rather silly that I got a .org for a single individual. .pers would be more appropriate, if it existed. I guess back in the days when reason was in charge, nobody imagined that people would live in ``houses'' with their own ``addresses'' as opposed to high-rise apartments like mediaone.net [mediaone.net] and skyscrapers like ibm.com [ibm.com].

    I sure hope the world finds a reasonable solution to the DNS squabbles. Why doesn't IPv7 just scrap the binary address and let routers do string lookups? IP headers should be like HTTP headers, a few lines of text followed by a blank line. Your kernel grows by 1k or so, but your resolver and the whole DNS become just bad memories.

  • That many people feared would take over the Internet. Everyone thought it would be Microsoft, but they only buy money makers, NSI has a leash on EVERYONE. From what I've read of their practices it sure seems like they are just a bunch of nerds who have way too much power. I dont know how they ever ended up with the TLD contract, but it should be revoked. It's horrible paying 70$ for two years, then if you need to change the address of a name server or have it point somewhere, they sit on their asses and take their sweet time. One would think that 70$ would be enough to pay for the domain for several years, considering the volume of domains registered every week. I know other people have suggested it but i will too just to show I'm in favor of it. A set of free TLD's owned by a non profit organization. Instead of trying to get support from the community at large we could work on the linux community, both commercial and personal, for support. It would even be pretty nice publicity for linux: "New TLD root servers run on Linux"
  • Why doesn't IPv7 just scrap the binary address and let routers do string lookups? IP headers should be like HTTP headers, a few lines of text followed by a blank line. Your kernel grows by 1k or so, but your resolver and the whole DNS become just bad memories.

    Yeah, and the traffic on the net quadruples or so. The average IP packet on the net is less than a hundred bytes long; turning IP headers into text gains very little - someone still has to coordinate names, after all - and really adds to the load.
    --
  • ICANN has been spending money right and left. Their president/CEO is being paid $18,000 a month. A month! The three meetings they've had have been in locations such as Berlin, Singapore, and Boston, for an estimated cost of $600,000. Their legal counsel has so far billed $585,000. This is from a company who was retained to incorporate ICANN, which should only have cost $175.

    If this non-profit organization would conduct its business in a manner reflecting its lack of funding, it wouldn't have this problem.

    For example, using things like the Net to hold teleconferences, instead of spending $10,000 or so to hold one.

  • I have a hard time believing the average IP packet is so small. Can you back that up?

    Anyway, a text header wouldn't have to be much bigger than what we use now. If you really want to scrunch it, we could leave all fields the same except replace the host addrs with (variable length) host names. "slashdot.org\0" is actually shorter than the 16-byte IPv6 address that's to come. Plus you'd save out on all that DNS traffic.

    No, the only technical reason I think people really wouldn't go for this is the novelty of variable-length stuff at such a low level. Maybe Cisco routers would cost more, or maybe some hardware-level optimizations would become impossible. But we're going to get HTTP request parsing in the kernel before too long, so I don't consider it an unreasonable idea.

    Of course, there are non-technical reasons to oppose such a change, such as costs of transition and NSI's fudmaking ability.

  • Looks to me like NSI's scare tactics and general inteansigence are working...they may succeed in keeping their monopoly at this rate. If ICANN succeeds, NSI loses, and there's no reason for NSI to cooperate in their own demise.
    --
  • Hmmm ICANN Gone Pear Shaped?, i would have never have guessed it, well i would have but i was to busy doing stuff....
  • NSI, in the last 6 months, has become almost unbearable to work with. 2-3 days for host changes to go through. Mistakes in billing (being billed 2x for same domains). The change to the website has made hunting for pertinant information even harder than it was before.

    But, ICANNs problems, are a good bit of their own. Why did they have to fly representatives around the world many times? Instead of acting like a private corporation, they spent money as fast as government bureaucrat. Private industry is not going to invest in a company that can't control its own finances properly.

    As far as the $1 per domain fee, I have no problem with it, provided it helps create competition for NSI.
  • Or is this simply not to be alowed?
  • Hey, maybe they used the wrong acronym?
  • Internet related, in debt quick and much so...


    When's their IPO?
  • The question I have is why hasn't the Justice Department filed suit against NSI for their actions? If I understand correctly, it was a government decision to take away the monopoly granted to NSI. If that's true, and NSI is taking actions to delay the cutover and possibly undermine the government's goal of privatizing domain registration (which I think is obvious), then isn't that actionable?
  • That's why I asked in question #11 [slashdot.org] why they have not been brought to court by the administration. This change from a government sanctioned monopoly to privatization was a decision by our (USA) government. If NSI is taking actions to delay or undermine that process, it seems to me that we could take them to court.

  • Well, it's easy to see why... (Score:4)

    by RISCy Business ( 27981 ) on Saturday July 17, 1999 @05:02AM (#1797921) Homepage
    ...when you look at NSI's practices.

    NSI has a habit of double-billing, 'losing' registrations, 'losing' payments, 'not recieving' the faxes of the canceled checks and so on.

    Think it's a load of bull? Guess again; I used to deal with that on a daily basis. Was working at an ISP that handled some 200+ domains for customers. And on a near weekly basis, one of those domains would be put "On Hold" pending "payment." Even though the whois database showed that it had been paid for and registered less than 9 months ago.

    Then there's NSI's policy on domain name conflicts. They'll give whoever pays them more the domain. Typical practice. But wait, there's MORE!

    For those of you who didn't take note of it, NSI has challenged ICANN's authority over them, saying that they are above ICANN and can basically refuse to allow ICANN access to anything whatsoever. They're paying lawyers ungodly amounts of money to do this. And congress is *REVIEWING* it last I heard. What does that mean? Means another 10 years of NSI if they get their way. At the least.

    NSI was a nothing company before they got the government contract. I don't even know how they got it. They were in the hole, they had very few employees, and now they're a multimillion dollar corporation with I'd guesstimate well over 250 employees, raking in millions of dollars of profit every quarter.

    Let there be absolutely *NO* question that NSI has done MORE than abuse their monopoly; they have exploited it to lengths which have NEVER been seen before. They're worse than AT&T was. Worse than Microsoft. They have a 100% monopoly, they have absolute and total control over every domain they sell, and the government holds them above the law as they blatantly violate anti-trust law after anti-trust law.

    Hell, NSI has even supposedly gone as far as to attack the one existing competitor, AlterNIC, in the past. As if that wasn't enough, to this day, they have refused to allow AlterNIC near the precious root servers.

    And now, they're forcing ICANN to spend what little funding it has on lawyers, so that they can attempt to do what they were *CREATED* to do. The EXPRESS PURPOSE of their existence. And they have to fight with NSI about it. Wasting thousands every day.

    The only question that remains now is how much longer will NSI get to abuse their power? The way things look, it may be for the rest of our lives. This is what happens when you give one little company a government sanctioned monopoly. You get one big clusterfuck that costs the people who have to deal with it millions upon millions every single year.

    And you thought Microsoft was bad. At least they don't tell you that you have to pay for Windows 98 again, right after you bought it.

    -RISCy Business | Rabid System Administrator and BOFH
  • I believe ICANN was setup as a non-profit organization to oversee the other registrars which would be for-profit. It's kinda hard to sell stocks or bonds for a non-profit organization, as by definition they would not have any dividends, right?
  • OK, why is government intervention considered?

    You think ICANN couldn't raise a little money if they sold some stock or bonds? Investment funding, that's just what stocks and bonds are used for.

  • The global Top Level Domains are big waste of all our time.
    The people crying out for ".firm" or ".amusing" or ".bookseller" are missing the point. Truely global classification systems don't work -- pick something arbitrary (and ISO country codes are definitely arbitrary) and then stick with it.
    The most succesful attempts at classifying general "stuff" are probably the library class mark schemes. However there are still at least two competing schemes, totally incompatible and they're both ARBITRARY. We could learn from that.
    If there had never been any gTLDs (not even *.INT, which is a farce anyway) we wouldn't be having this discussion. Making DNS a local issue in each geographical area would reduce the pressure (except maybe in the litigious US of A) on technical organisations to make political decisions.

    You may be wondering why I show so much faith in national government. Do I really think they have our best interests at heart? Of course not. But I do know that they have poor co-ordination. If the UK government tries to stop the Fulchester Underwater Canoing Klubb (www.fuck.co.uk) they'll just spring up in .FI or .TW or who-knows-where. Making DNS law stop at geographic boundaries keeps both them and us happy.

    Nick.

  • Is NSI unbeatable under the current set of assumptions? How many people outside of NSI really understand the whole situation? I know some stuff about DNS and the other Internet protocols, and I have registered a .org domain, but when I read these articles, I don't grasp the problem enough to begin thinking of a solution. Surely the majority of lawmakers and business leaders lack even my hazy understanding of the politics involved, let alone the technical issues.

    Will anyone write a thorough description of the real power structure behind NSI, why (or if) it is a Bad Thing, and what might be done about it? Is NSI evil? Can one boycott it? How many of the world's nameservers give access to funky TLDs such as AlterNIC [alternic.com]'s .ltd [alternic.ltd]? Are there any databases of .com/.org/.net other than NSI's? Would it be possible/feasible to create one and let people use it as their DNS server? How much effort would this involve? Could the new database's contents be made non-proprietary? Would such a project amount to any more than a mute protest of NSI's monopoly?

    What about government involvement? The CNN article claims, ``it will be unpopular among Internet users for ICANN to accept government money.'' Is this true? Although no one would have believed it 10 years ago (or whenever NSI got its contract), the DNS is one of the most vital pieces of world infrastructure today. Should any independent company or organization be in control? If not, who should control it? Governments? Treaties? International law?

    I've got a lot more questions than answers, I'm afraid.

  • I certainly have my problems with how ICANN is running, but those problems can be fixed.

    What is going to be hard to fix is NSI's emerging effort to take the DNS private. And if and when they do, then a lot of those net-industry "critics" of ICANN are going to gladly join NSI in the forthcoming industry cartel.

    And that is a movie I don't want to see.

    -------
  • After visiting many of the "private" vendors'
    sites probably NSI is better. Many if not
    most of those "private" vendors charge the
    $70 for 1st 2 years (domain name) PLUS
    a fee like $49 setup. What a crock! I thought
    that's what the $70 was for: adminisration.
  • IMHO, a childish monopoly is better than a gov't run committee.
    A monopoly is less likely to be a tool for personal political gain.
    A monopoly is less likely to lose funding to the knee-jerk-legisation-of-the-week types.
    A monopoly is less likely to staffed with those-people-who-helped-out-my-campaign-a-lot-so-I -have-to-give-them-a-job-but-whom-I-want -to-keep-at-a-distance-from-my-office.

    Don't get me wrong. A childish monopoly is a bad thing, but consider the alternative...
  • and here i thought private industry would be more efficient then the evil gov't. the nsi and icann seem to both be rather annoying entities, and yet when the gov't ran it it all seemed to go quite smoothly.

    maybe it's because gov't agencies and companies can both be run by annoying people that we sometimes get bad service rather then what type of framework offers the service.

    perhaps that's getting too complex for this debate, political things always work better with short mindless statements...
  • Hey man, those big executives always get the big bucks. $18,000 a month only works out to be $216,000 a year; that's not too bad for a CEO! Especially since it's unlikely that he's getting any stock options (stock options in what?).

    Don't get me wrong, I think it's silly. But that's not really very uncommon.


    Using the Net to hold teleconferences requires high-speed connections, by the way (well, I guess not...but ugh). Maybe ICANN doesn't have them? :)
  • Actually, Yes.
    Recent troubles HAVE come from a politician from Virginia.

    "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN) more than 40-page letter aims to quell numerous concerns laid out by House Commerce Committee chairman Tom Bliley (R-Virginia), who late last month opened a probe into the nonprofit corporation chosen by the Clinton administration to manage the Net's core technical functions."

    Ref: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,38955,00.html

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