CircleID

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ICANN: A Concrete "Thin Contract" Proposal

• Comment posted Aug 20, 2003 10:10 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Escrow of registration information has been a failure - it simply never got started. An easier approach is to require that TLD operators engage in good business asset preservation practices. In other words, the TLD operator would have to do…

Is Industry Underestimating the Ending Dot?

• Comment posted Oct 16, 2003 7:25 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  The Windoz community seems to have skipped the class titled "Introduction to the Internet" Software that doesn't handle fully qualified domain names (FQDN), i.e. names ending in a dot, is, in a word, broken.  And broken software should a) have…

Bad Journalism, IPv6, and the BBC

• Comment posted Nov 24, 2003 10:20 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  Address blocks are sized by "prefix", the smaller the prefix the bigger the block.  The biggest conventional unit of allocation is a /8 - there simply are not enough of these to hand out one to every country - yet…

ICANN and the Virtues of Deliberative Policymaking - Part I

• Comment posted Dec 31, 2003 8:36 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  This article is based on incorrect premises. First, the article asserts that "ICANN is an experiment in deliberative, rather than 'democratic' or 'representative,' policymaking." Second, it asserts that ICANN is a "coordinator of technical resources". As to the first point:…

TLD Operators: Cleaning Up Lame Delegations

• Comment posted Jan 15, 2004 7:00 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  It isn't all that hard to do a lame check - Go to http://dnscheck.se and run it. The code is in perl and easily downloaded. It would take ICANN only a couple of minutes to create a script that would…

Paul Vixie on Fort N.O.C.'s

• Comment posted Feb 06, 2004 5:56 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  I'm happy to end this thread.  However, your assertion that I'm trying to impose some new kind of regime is rather at odds with the history of infrastructures, whether those be with regard to flight, electricity, food, or medicine.  If…

• Comment posted Feb 06, 2004 12:12 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  Again you are confusing the limited oversight that the State of California applies to non-profits with the degree of oversight that the internet community deserves to ensure that DNS roots are operated in the future as well as they have…

• Comment posted Feb 05, 2004 6:29 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  Your answer demonstrates the fact that there is no control, just a group of independent entites that are answerable only to themselves. Let's take, for instance the F root - you say "Server F is legally accountable to the State…

• Comment posted Feb 04, 2004 8:24 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  In response to Cypher21's question: You've asked a good and important question.  And I agree with you that neither ICANN nor the US DoC have demonstrated either an ability or willingness to provide that oversight. My own sense is that…

• Comment posted Jan 30, 2004 5:25 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  In paragraph #2 you say: "The root name servers are not 'operated on a volunteer basis'" .. "For all twelve of us, operating a root name server is a concrete obligation, and not merely a 'sense of duty'" My question…

Top-Level Domains for Addressing by Physical Context

• Comment posted Mar 31, 2004 5:55 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  I want to extend my previous comment - I somewhat misunderstood what you are proposing. I believe that what you want to do is more in the realm of discovery of local resources than in the realm of the domain…

• Comment posted Mar 31, 2004 5:40 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  It is already possible to define a location for any name in DNS. (See http://www.ckdhr.com/dns-loc/ ) There already is a LOCation resource record defined for DNS. DNS allows many attributes to be associated with a name - this is why…

Protecting the Internet: Certified Attachments and Reverse Firewalls?

• Comment posted Mar 28, 2005 12:57 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  Partial response to Bret Watson and Stephane Bortzmeyer: You are both right that it is very hard to define a good "reverse firewall" set.  But I remain convinced that a few relatively simple things - such as source address protection…

Shambles at the .Pro Registry

• Comment posted Mar 21, 2005 4:53 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  Oops, I mean Encira - but than again I'm not the only one to make a typo - I note that the date on Encirca's letter to ICANN is in year 2004.

• Comment posted Mar 21, 2005 4:49 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  In response to the comments of Thomas Barrett: I am a professional - I am an active, dues paying, card carrying member of the State Bar of California. It matters little to me whether the operators of .pro or ICANN…

Could IP Addressing Benefit from the Introduction of Competitive Suppliers?

• Comment posted Apr 29, 2005 9:06 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  In response to Suresh Ramasubramanian: You wrote: "ICANN, both the board and its At Large component, is fully open to people from any country, anywhere, standing for election" My opinion and experience (I was the only board member ever to…

• Comment posted Apr 20, 2005 5:30 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  I don't think that the word "competition" is really the right one to use; in the context of IP address allocation it is not a word that I would use. I agree that rational allocation of IP addresses is important.…

An Infrastructure TLD: Avoiding the Side Effects of Today's .Net

• Comment posted Jun 02, 2005 1:55 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  To Joe Abley: A. .arpa would make a handy infrastructure top level domain.  There could be some national and cultural difficulties, however, because ARPA refers to a part of the United States Department of Defense. B. As for the hints…

Effects of ICANN's Legal Presence in the US, Under California Legislation

• Comment posted Jun 21, 2005 5:09 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  1. Jon Postel was never designated as ICANN's CTO.  It was clear during ICANN's formation that the position was likely to be filled by Jon.  However, it is incorrect to say that there was a formal decision to chose Jon. …

Hope for Human Resources with .Jobs Domain

• Comment posted Jun 21, 2005 4:45 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  100% of the benefits you claim for .jobs could have been obtained years ago simply through a subdomain of of one of the existing top level comains - where you say "companyname.jobs" it could have been "companyname.jobs.existing-tld". Or, as others…

Twenty Myths and Truths About IPv6 and the US IPv6 Transition

• Comment posted Jun 22, 2005 4:06 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  In your point #2 you say that IPv6 lacks QoS - I've stared at a lot of IPv4 packets, and every one of 'em contains an 8-bit type-of-service/quality-of-service field.  So I would not agree that IPv4 entirely lacks QoS hooks.…

Putting Multiple Root Nameserver Issue to Rest

• Comment posted Jul 03, 2005 8:15 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  I agree that coherency is important.  But you are making an unwarranted leap from "coherency" to "singularity". Coherency - meaning that similiar queries receive similar answers - does not require that there be only one DNS root. The nugget of…

The Internets

• Comment posted Jul 21, 2005 5:26 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  I believe that you are jumping to the conclusion that consistency of naming requires that there be one and only one set of root servers. What is desired is consistency not singularity. The desired characteristic, naming consistency, can be achieved…

A Balkanized Internet Future?

• Comment posted Jul 27, 2005 6:51 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Third response to Suresh Ramasubramanian: You make an assertion that I left ICANN.  That is untrue.  ICANN, contrary to the promises made at its formation, eliminated all publicly elected members to the board of directors.  Had ICANN not eliminated public…

• Comment posted Jul 26, 2005 9:06 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Second response to Suresh Ramasubramanian: You say that "the internet is just too valuable to fragment." That begs at least two questions: The first is what is the internet?  I always define it as the open system that transports IP…

• Comment posted Jul 26, 2005 3:58 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Response to Suresh Ramasubramanian: You say that you "do care if all these little pieces splinter off from the Internet". That's nice. But if I want to be one of those splinters why should your choice prevail over my choice?…

• Comment posted Jul 26, 2005 2:57 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Why shouldn't people be able to create their own internet namescapes? What ever happened to the end-to-end principle?  Why should users (and their proxies, ISPs) be refused the right to chose how they will use the internet. If a community…

IGP on Future U.S. Role in Internet Governance

• Comment posted Aug 02, 2005 1:34 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  It would be useful if someone were to enumerate with precision and specificity exactly those tasks that ICANN does that constitute "technical coordination". As far as I can see it is the IANA function, a function that ICANN performs in…

About Those Root Servers

• Comment posted Aug 12, 2005 2:07 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Reply to JFC Morfin: I have long suggested that because the root zone file is so small - about 15K to 20K bytes compressed, i.e. smaller than many of the cutsie buttons and gifs that decorate web pages - that…

• Comment posted Aug 11, 2005 6:57 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Response to McTim: Why should the root-ops enter into a contract?  Because if they don't the author of the root zone file can point the name/IP address of the delegation to a more willing operator. Yes, it becomes a tug-of-war…

The Non-Parity of the UDRP

• Comment posted Sep 22, 2005 4:08 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Do not forget that the UDRP was railroaded through an an ICANN that was, at the time, incompletely formed.  There were many affected parties who had no say whatsoever in the formulation of the UDRP. Moreover, the UDRP itself is…

Forgotten Principles of Internet Governance

• Comment posted Oct 23, 2005 6:27 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Thanks for so clearly illustrating my point about hidden-agendas masked as techno-speak. The portrait of the internet future you paint is one that is very dreary: Users get neither voice nor choice.  The end-to-end principle is only for the privileged. …

Europe is to the US Controlled GPS as Europe is to the US Controlled DNS Root?

• Comment posted Dec 30, 2005 6:07 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  To Suresh: The notion of competing roots, much less the forces that might drive a set of nations to establish a competing root system that is in parallal to (and consistent with) the US controlled root, has nothing to do…

• Comment posted Dec 30, 2005 9:00 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  To Bret: We seem to agree that the real concern is consistency of data not singularity of source of that data. My own feeling is that there is a natural coercive force that will drive consistency as well as a…

Questioning "Net Neutrality"

• Comment posted Feb 11, 2006 8:32 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  What you say is reasonable and sensible - we don't have to quibble over the internet was designed to be non-neutral or rather it was designed with the foresight to accommodate uses that need to differentiate among traffic classes.  The…

The Villain in the ICANN-VeriSign Struggle is the U.S. Government

• Comment posted Feb 26, 2006 9:59 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  In baseball its three strikes and you're out. We see in this thread ICANN being defended by its first president and by the attorney who created it, who created the perpetual right for Verisign to retain .com, and who is…

• Comment posted Feb 20, 2006 8:13 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  I agree that this whole mess is due to fuzzy-thinking from the outset and which continues through the present.  And although the US Gov't has certainly acted with flagrant disregard of even the most basic rules of administrative process and…

China's New Domain Names: Lost in Translation

• Comment posted Mar 03, 2006 2:51 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  This is a very interesting thread, but it leaves me confused. It leaves me confused regarding what name manipulation is being done (in the style of new.net or the /etc/resolv.conf "search" directive) in the user's computer before the DNS name…

Finally the .com Discussion is Over...

• Comment posted Mar 09, 2006 7:04 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  Your comments surprise me. You seem to be blaiming the community.  Yet the internet community, particularly the part involved with ICANN, was very vocal in its opinions (largely negative) about the ICANN-Verisign agreement. Not only has the community been very…

Answers from Vint Cerf: The Road Ahead for Top-Level Domains

• Comment posted Mar 17, 2006 6:21 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  In response to Jayson Vantuyl: You seem to be accepting without question the story that ICANN is engaged in some sort of assurance of internet stability. What is your definition of "stability"?  From what you write, it is a definition…

• Comment posted Mar 13, 2006 7:33 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  Chris McElroy asked why ICANN believes it has the right, and authority, to decide who obtains entry into the domain name business place and who does not, based on ICANN's evaluation of the business plans and assets of the applicant.…

Finding Good ICANN Board Candidates

• Comment posted Apr 12, 2006 10:25 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  We really didn't have any trouble coming up with a number of good candidates when there were real elections back in year 2000. In the election for the North American seat the candidates included the following people, all of whom…

Vint Cerf's Keynote at Domain Roundtable

• Comment posted Apr 23, 2006 7:15 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  You ask: With regards to adding new TLDs, are you suggesting that anyone that meets minimum requirements should be able to start a new TLD? Yes indeed.  I have felt that way for years and years - A half dozen…

• Comment posted Apr 23, 2006 3:42 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Let me respond to three of the points cited in the main article. First. ICANN's chairman says that his position has been misunderstood and that his position is that ICANN should have "a solid rationale for adding new TLDs." Why…

How Domain Name Traffic Testing/Tasting Works

• Comment posted Apr 27, 2006 5:46 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  There are several points to be highlighted. I touched on these issues in my recent blog entry - Internet Gambling, The ICANN Way: Using Someone Else's Wallet at http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000239.html.  I also commented on it in another entry entitled It's Time…

In Bad Taste

• Comment posted May 07, 2006 10:06 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  When the grace period concept was raised to the ICANN board, the only kind of grace period discussed was a "redemption grace" period to help people who accidently forgot to renew.  (The board accepted "redemption grace" at the meeting of…

Domain Tasting Target of US Federal Cybersquatting Lawsuit

• Comment posted Jun 17, 2006 2:22 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Comment to Jothan Frakes: That gathering seems useful. But there are some things that ought to be added to the agenda. First of all, please don't focus exclusively on "add grace" - it is merely one of four closely related…

• Comment posted Jun 13, 2006 6:19 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Response to John Berryhill: Lets make some calculations based on the numbers you give. On a single day this example registrar (the term "nameservers" in the dailychanges reports is misleading) generates 354940 name registrations and has on deposit with Verisign…

• Comment posted Jun 13, 2006 2:42 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Reply to John Berryhill: Of course I understand why the "tasters" are doing it - to make a buck. And making a buck is OK ... OK as long as that making of a buck doesn't generate costs that the…

• Comment posted Jun 12, 2006 11:12 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Responding to John Berryhill: You say the 4-grace periods were established for four different purposes. A couple of points: - Since nobody ever said to the board what these were for, everything having to do with purpose is speculation.  (Ah,…

• Comment posted Jun 12, 2006 8:25 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  In response to John Berryhill: You say that some percentage of the tasting results in actual paid registrations. Fine, but the fact that they pay for what they keep is irrelevant. Your calculation of X/Y is also irrelevant, becuse it…

• Comment posted Jun 12, 2006 3:37 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  There are two responses here, first to Ram Mohan and then to John Berryhill First: (to Ram Mohan) You ask why new TLDs ought to reduce costs.  I'm not saying that the existing registries will necessarily incur lower costs through…

• Comment posted Jun 12, 2006 4:15 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Ram Mohan writes above: "there are very real costs that are certainly orders of magnitude higher than the $0.03 that I’ve heard bandied about." I'm the source of that $0.03 calculation.  (There was actually another calculation as well that led…

• Comment posted Jun 12, 2006 2:40 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  .By-the-way, it appears that Appendix G of the 2001 contracts superseded the section 5.4 of the 1999 agreement.

• Comment posted Jun 12, 2006 2:36 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Responding to John Berryhill: You suggest that those who are using the 5-day grace period deserve to pay $0.00 as part of a volume pricing discount. OK, then how come registrars, particularly large ones, don't also get a quantity discount…

• Comment posted Jun 11, 2006 2:27 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  In response to Suresh Ramasubramanian question: "was pushing “add grace” through a creation of ICANN’s staff?  Or ICANN’s law firm?" Is there a difference?  There may be a thin, translucent layer of insulation now, although I'm not sure there is.…

• Comment posted Jun 10, 2006 8:39 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Suresh Ramasubramanian said: In fact, if as John Levine says, this was an ad hoc decision by an ICANN staffer which then slipped through the board without anyone noticing, ICANN might want to find out which staffer it was, and…

Taking Aim at 8 Myths about ENUM

• Comment posted Sep 05, 2006 5:51 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  I think you are missing the point - ENUM is only partially about caller control of where a call lands.  The larger part of ENUM about preserving telephone *numbers* and to a degree about preserving the historical, but obsolescent, hegemony…

• Comment posted Jul 19, 2006 8:02 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  I've been dealing with VOIP since Simon Hackett and my company put out the first Etherphones in 1991.  And I have yet to see anyone express an interest in actually using ENUM. The reason is simple - why should I…

The Blurr-Cade Proposal on Root Zone Oversight

• Comment posted Jul 30, 2006 4:56 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  I find the proposal deeply flawed, for the same reasons that the original actions of NTIA and its creation of ICANN are flawed - they are based on a fantasy about DNS. The only thing that makes a root zone…

USD Renews IANA Contract with ICANN

• Comment posted Aug 16, 2006 6:22 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  This "award" is only a renewall for the "IANA function", a zero-dollar purchase by NTIA (paid for by NOAA!?) of the actual task of maintaing the root zone file, doing number assignments for the IETF, and top level address allocations…

If You Adopt Vista, Your DNS Traffic is Going to Double

• Comment posted Sep 10, 2006 11:56 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  I have long since learned to trust Paul M. on matters DNS. And I have observed actual degredation due to IPv6. The degredation has a large component and a small component. The small component is that on occassion the list…

Response to Inaccurate .travel Wild Card Assessments

• Comment posted Sep 21, 2006 5:43 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Woof. You say .travel is on the net to "serve its consitutiency." Then you say that it is there to the "internet user".  Which is it? Personally I don't give credence to the claims that a TLD, and the years…

Consensus Polling: ALAC Shows the Way

• Comment posted Nov 26, 2006 11:50 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  The current "ALAC" is intendended to be an interim body - as an interim body it is empowered for one thing only, to try to get the ALAC system running. When ICANN was required to create an Independent Review Panel,…

• Comment posted Nov 06, 2006 10:28 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  Not only am I not, as you put it, 'not "in" to the current structure of ICANN', neither are the millions upon millions - probably billions - of people who use the internet. The mechanism you propose does admit of…

• Comment posted Oct 29, 2006 5:15 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  Am "I in" to the ALAC? No. The ALAC is like one of those toy steering wheels that parents put into their cars so that the kids can believe that they are driving. The ALAC is a sop that ICANN…

Why is .EU Trying to Destroy the Internet?

• Comment posted Nov 26, 2006 11:42 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  My own top level domain, .ewe, (not found in the NTIA/ICANN root zone) uses a business model that rejects even more of the artifical restraints that have developed under ICANN. For example, in .ewe one registers forever for one price.…

Domain Tasting in the Spotlight

• Comment posted Dec 29, 2006 3:46 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  Responding to Chuck Hatcher's conclusion that tasting is "a private arrangement between registrants, registrars, and registries which ultimately has no discernible effect on the general public." I do not believe that we have the information to support that conclusion. We…

Legal Attack on ARIN Dismissed in Court

• Comment posted Dec 29, 2006 3:07 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  I think one needs to be careful in describing who "won" and who "lost". Yes, Gary Kremen did not prevail on anti-trust claims against ARIN. But at the end of the day, Kremen will walk way with a substantial chunk…

Internet Zombies

• Comment posted Jan 12, 2007 12:28 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  In response to Brett Carr: OK, I'm not locked into the word "luck". However, it is very fortuitious that, as ICANN continues to drop the ball on internet stability, we have an incredible group of root server operators. Fir example…

The Fragile Network

• Comment posted Jan 31, 2007 9:58 pm PST — by Karl Auerbach
  In 1972 I was at System Development Corporation (SDC).  I was part of the R&D;Group.  We worked on what is now called the internet. It was expressly understood by us and our customer that we were building a network that…

Are We Slowly Losing Control of the Internet?

• Comment posted Mar 12, 2007 9:27 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Brett, I really appreciate how well you isolated the essential question whether we want the internet to be a lifeline grade utility. And I do like your suggestion that lifeline grade *applications* ought to utilize multiple kinds of communications mechanisms…

Please, Keep the Core Neutral

• Comment posted Apr 03, 2007 12:29 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  I take it that you now think that no special preference (i.e. non-neutral treatement) should be given for names that happen to be trade/service marks over names that are merely names of dieties, schools, countries, geographic landmarks, people, pets, etc…

ICANN Asked to Adopt Specific TLD for Banks

• Comment posted Apr 03, 2007 12:25 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  As I mentioned previously, the same level of care can be applied to applicants for .bank or for a subdomain of any of the existing TLDs. But as was pointed out, because of the implicit assumption that ICANN will not…

• Comment posted Mar 31, 2007 7:54 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Given that the same stringent controls over who is allowed to put a name into "verysafebanking.com" as would be the case for names added to ".bank", I don't see any difference in the degree of protection that can be obtained…

• Comment posted Mar 31, 2007 5:11 am PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  If the banks are concerned about security, and I hope they are, then they can do what they want today. They can simply find a domain - or spend a few dollars to buy one - and create subdomains in…

Putting Some Circuit Breakers Into DNS to Protect The Net

• Comment posted Apr 03, 2007 11:17 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  After reading the comments above as well as the long thread(s) on Nanog, I'm pretty well convinced that this circuit breaker idea is really full of sharp edges and dangerous corners. But the question still remains in my mind: Do…

Splitting the Root: It's Too Late

• Comment posted Apr 12, 2007 5:18 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  With regard to whether competing roots have been established by China: It depends with whom you are talking whether Taiwan is part of China or not, but when I was on the ICANN board I discovered that Taiwan had established…

• Comment posted Apr 10, 2007 11:43 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  Given the value of the marketing data that can be mined from a root server, assuming that it gets a statistically useful amount and distribution of query traffic, I am surprised that no one has built a system of roots…

• Comment posted Apr 10, 2007 6:41 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  I can understand the concerns of Stephane and Edward. First with Edward's comment: In the more broad definition of "consistency" it is possible that the root that one uses at home contains boutique TLDs that are not found in the…

• Comment posted Apr 08, 2007 9:26 pm PDT — by Karl Auerbach
  There is too much focus on the multiplicity of root systems. The real issue is not whether there is one single root but rather that those roots that are out are consistent with one another. There are differing views about…

Domain Tasting to Go Away for Real This Time

• Comment posted Feb 02, 2008 2:33 am PST — by Karl Auerbach
  In the unlikely but possible category: With ICANN getting $0.20 (or more when that tax goes higher) on every name registration, if a name is tossed about frequently by tasters and drop catchers it could end up that the money…