Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman • Hacker News Board

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#21

Post by marcinzm » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

doublerabbit wrote: post #20

marcinzm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a democratic non-profit foundation Isn't that what Nominet basically was and here we are? >Why are we still paying >10$/year for less than a kilobyte of information hosting just so that shady businesses can make a profit? To provide a minimum barrier to people simply writing a script and registering literally every domain in existence. Either to resell or troll. Probably also to provide a financial paper trail in ca…

> To provide a minimum barrier to people simply writing a script and registering literally every domain in existence. Either to resell or troll. Probably also to provide a financial paper trail in case of abuse, illegal activity or other reasons. But that happens anyway, what has it discouraged?

>But that happens anyway, what has it discouraged?

Just because something isn't great doesn't mean it can't become worse or that the current solution isn't making it better than it could be.

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#22

Post by southerntofu » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #18

southerntofu wrote: post #6

ICANN has failed us, Nominet has failed us, Public Interest Registry has failed us. We definitely need some better system where a single entity going rogue can't affect millions of domain owners. I can see two approaches. One is where we make it technically impossible for DNS operators higher in the tree to mess with us. That's what the GNU Name System proposes with the "hyper hyper local root", a petname system whic…

>a democratic non-profit foundation Isn't that what Nominet basically was and here we are? >Why are we still paying >10$/year for less than a kilobyte of information hosting just so that shady businesses can make a profit? To provide a minimum barrier to people simply writing a script and registering literally every domain in existence. Either to resell or troll. Probably also to provide a financial paper trail in ca…

>>a democratic non-profit foundation > Isn't that what Nominet basically was and here we are?

Nominet was a non-profit, but not a democratic one. Democracy is not "choose your rulers", but "choose your rules". Having a board/parliament is by definition the opposite of government by/for the people. The simple fact the community has to fight against the board is proof of that.

> a minimum barrier to people simply writing a script and registering literally every domain in existence

That's just not true. First, because that was definitely not the argument presented when administrative fees for domain registrations were brought up. Second, because bad actors usually have a lot more resources than good actors... Sure you may stop a random teenager from registering many domains, but random teens is not who i'm afraid of personally. I don't know of a single time where economic barriers have stopped bad actors from engaging in malicious/hurtful activities. Third, because some TLDs are actually already fully free-as-in-free-beer because they're operated as a public service and they are not facing the problems you mention (to my knowledge), if only because their terms and conditions disallow parking spaces.

> Probably also to provide a financial paper trail in case of abuse, illegal activity or other reasons.

Not sure about that either. In most jurisdictions responsibility for illegal content falls on the hosting provider, not the registrar/TLD. In the rare cases that your TLD is going to seize your domain for whatever reason, whether there's a paper trail or not changes very little because the content is effectively taken down as was requested. Whether that's a feature or a bug depends on what kind of stuff is being censored and for what kind of reasons.

Personally, i'd be interested in a more democratic take on domain seizures. I'm pretty sure most people are opposed to wikileaks/scihub having their domains seized, despite what a board may think.

> or other reasons

Yes, to grow a crazy lucrative business out of infinite resources nobody should be competing for. I'm calling that an anti-feature.

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#23

Post by southerntofu » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #21

doublerabbit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To provide a minimum barrier to people simply writing a script and registering literally every domain in existence. Either to resell or troll. Probably also to provide a financial paper trail in case of abuse, illegal activity or other reasons. But that happens anyway, what has it discouraged?

>But that happens anyway, what has it discouraged? Just because something isn't great doesn't mean it can't become worse or that the current solution isn't making it better than it could be.

Sure, it might get worse. But it may as well get better. Implying that changing paradigm can only make things worse is a fallacy.

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#24

Post by southerntofu » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

robalfonso wrote: post #16

southerntofu wrote: post #6

ICANN has failed us, Nominet has failed us, Public Interest Registry has failed us. We definitely need some better system where a single entity going rogue can't affect millions of domain owners. I can see two approaches. One is where we make it technically impossible for DNS operators higher in the tree to mess with us. That's what the GNU Name System proposes with the "hyper hyper local root", a petname system whic…

Quote>>> They're half a dozen lines of text (counting glue records and DNSSEC anchors) in a database, it's OUTRAGEOUS we have to pay for that at all. This is not what you are paying for. Every time this argument comes up it hides the real problem...what you are paying for is the legal wrangling, security overhead and general compliance that comes with the internet. Phishing, trademarks, spam, business disputes,and va…

> Phishing, trademarks, spam, business disputes,and valid legal requests will all still exist no matter who runs things.

Of this list, only "valid legal requests" is something a TLD should be concerned with in my opinion. And even that is questionable, given that law is often unjust, favoring the powerful and abusing the powerless.

We already have strong regulations holding internet hosts accountable for what they're hosting, and many countries (like France) have censorship at the DNS level. Isn't that more than enough to deal with abuse?

> It’s been a very long time since domain costs were highly dependent on the technical requirements of the data they represent.

Yes, and that's the problem. When you pay 1$/month for web hosting, you're not paying a thousand times the price because of hypothetical legal concerns. Why would it be different with DNS? Why is it normal that a line in a zone file on some TLDs costs more than an actual VM in a datacenter?!

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#25

Post by tremon » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

fanf2 wrote: post #19

ohashi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nominet (.UK) is a membership organization, basically anyone registering more than a few domains would be interested in becoming one. There are some 2,000+ members. The voting is determined by number of domains registered but capped at 3% voting power (so large players like GoDaddy have a large voice - and board seat). Nominet has been trying to go from a non profit entity which provides registry services into a star…

Yes. A couple more points worth noting: Sir Michael Lyons wrote a report on Nominet some years ago. The Nominet board basically ignored all his recommendations, though his report was widely supported by the membership. Axel Pawlik was head of RIPE, which is an Internet membership organisation with a good relationship with its members and a reputation for doing worthwhile things for the benefit of the Internet as a wh…

Adding for context: RIPE is https://www.ripe.net/ , the European Internet Registry [1] responsible for allocating IPv[46] addresses and AS routing numbers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#26

Post by marcinzm » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #22

marcinzm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a democratic non-profit foundation Isn't that what Nominet basically was and here we are? >Why are we still paying >10$/year for less than a kilobyte of information hosting just so that shady businesses can make a profit? To provide a minimum barrier to people simply writing a script and registering literally every domain in existence. Either to resell or troll. Probably also to provide a financial paper trail in ca…

>>a democratic non-profit foundation > Isn't that what Nominet basically was and here we are? Nominet was a non-profit, but not a democratic one. Democracy is not "choose your rulers", but "choose your rules". Having a board/parliament is by definition the opposite of government by/for the people. The simple fact the community has to fight against the board is proof of that. > a minimum barrier to people simply writi…

> Nominet was a non-profit, but not a democratic one. Democracy is not "choose your rulers", but "choose your rules". Having a board/parliament is by definition the opposite of government by/for the people. The simple fact the community has to fight against the board is proof of that.

That's a No True Scotsman argument since by your definition there is no large scale democracy in existence. Most people would consider a representative democracy to be a democracy.

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#27

Post by southerntofu » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 1:26 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #9

southerntofu wrote: post #6

ICANN has failed us, Nominet has failed us, Public Interest Registry has failed us. We definitely need some better system where a single entity going rogue can't affect millions of domain owners. I can see two approaches. One is where we make it technically impossible for DNS operators higher in the tree to mess with us. That's what the GNU Name System proposes with the "hyper hyper local root", a petname system whic…

But how would that work in practice ? Like letsencrypt ?: what's needed to incite enough people to move on so that it becomes feasible and a reality (while keeping the old system alive for legacy reasons and for the time it takes for thing to settle down) ?

If we're talking about GNS to replace the DNS protocol, it's in fact backwards-compatible and intends to recognize ICANN as root zone, as was the case previously.

If we're talking about a domain name cooperative, that would act as a registrar and potentially as a TLD in the future, all we need is a non-profit organization, some bylaws, and enough good-will people to make it work. Maybe OpenNIC would be it?

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#28

Post by dooglius » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 1:27 PM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #6

ICANN has failed us, Nominet has failed us, Public Interest Registry has failed us. We definitely need some better system where a single entity going rogue can't affect millions of domain owners. I can see two approaches. One is where we make it technically impossible for DNS operators higher in the tree to mess with us. That's what the GNU Name System proposes with the "hyper hyper local root", a petname system whic…

Tor's Onion Services are pretty much ideal for this, and provides additional anti-censorship guarantees by providing anonymization for both parties.

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#29

Post by marcinzm » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #23

marcinzm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But that happens anyway, what has it discouraged? Just because something isn't great doesn't mean it can't become worse or that the current solution isn't making it better than it could be.

Sure, it might get worse. But it may as well get better. Implying that changing paradigm can only make things worse is a fallacy.

> Implying that changing paradigm can only make things worse is a fallacy.

So is saying that changing the paradigm will make things better or stay the same. I'm not making a data driven argument for not changing things, I'm simply pointing out that you're not making one either.

Re: Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

#30

Post by tzs » Tue, Apr 13, 2021, 2:01 PM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #6

ICANN has failed us, Nominet has failed us, Public Interest Registry has failed us. We definitely need some better system where a single entity going rogue can't affect millions of domain owners. I can see two approaches. One is where we make it technically impossible for DNS operators higher in the tree to mess with us. That's what the GNU Name System proposes with the "hyper hyper local root", a petname system whic…

If I could I would give you 50 up votes just because you wrote 5 paragraphs about what you see as problems with the current system without suggesting that it be replaced with some kind of blockchain.