[governance] How do ICANN's actions hurt the average Internet

[Karl Auerbach]

On 07/10/2009 03:10 AM, Roland Perry wrote:

>> If you read more deeply I say that that is a choice for the operator
>> of the root zone that accepts a given TLD. If a sloppy root system
>> wants to accept TLDs with weak procedures, then, assuming users can
>> know about this,
>
> That is of course the main consumer protection issue. How and why are
> they supposed to make these judgements? And remember we are talking here
> about the average Internet user who is a client of those websites, not
> the website operators themselves. Are you really wanting customers to
> boycott suppliers who use websites hosted with "weaker" DNS?

Let's dig into that.

First of all, ICANN is not a consumer protection agency.  It was not 
created to do that at all.  And if it were not only does it not have the 
proper form, charter, and powers but also it would be very odd indeed 
when one notices that it would then be a consumer protection body that 
not only locks-out consumers from the decision making process but also 
encourages those who prey on consumers into the inner sanctums of that 
decision making process.

Secondly, as for the issue of whether people need to look to and chose 
DNS providers.

Some do, some don't.

With regard to the some do:  If person X (you for instance) are buying a 
domain name then why should we have a regulatory body that denies you 
the choice of buying a name from a highly robust TLD/registry (such as 
operated by Verisign) or from a wimpy TLD registry (such as a 
hypothetical .i-may-go-boom-tomorrow)?  As long as the information about 
the quality of the operation is available to you why should we impose a 
regulatory regime that denies you the choice?

One aspect of this that is not discussed much is that one thing that is 
missing from the world-according-to-ICANN is the ability for people to 
lock-in their contractual terms.  ICANN imposes an arbitrary (and very 
capricious) and also inadequate 10 year limit.

In other words, on the internet is ICANN to be our (or our brother's) 
keeper?

With regard to the some don't: If customers or clients can not reach a 
net service or website because the person behind that service/site has a 
name in a weak TLD then that person's suffers when the client takes 
his/her custom elsewhere.  Self interest will drive people who want to 
offer reliable net service/applications to the robust (but usually more 
expensive) TLDs.  But for someone who wants to save some money perhaps 
they are willing to take the risk that .i-may-go-boom-tomorrow will in 
fact crash on the next rising of the sun.

The logic that says that the user/client is harmed by shakey DNS and 
that therefore those providing net services must be forced to buy only 
from highly solid providers is a logic that would also require net 
services to be hosted only on the most rock solid of computers with the 
most rock solid of power systems and connected by links of unimpeachable 
quality.

Wanna make the net as expensive as the telcos of 1970? - that's the path 
to do it.

One of the reasons that VoIP seems so inexpensive compared to telco 
services is that the telcos are burdened with massive costs to keep 
things running with lifeline grade quality.  VoIP providers don't have 
to bear that.

The logic that says that all DNS providers must offer lifeline levels of 
availablity is a logic that would deny existence to VoIP unless that 
VoIP met telco lifeline grade availability.

Let's not go down that path and require that every part of all of the 
net be so hardened that it will almost never fail.  That would be the 
death of many home or office based net services and it would most 
certainly raise the cost of the net to prices that many, particularly in 
"southern" regions could not afford.


>> then that would be OK. But for root zone operator such ICANN which
>> promotes high quality TLD products, their standards ought to be rather
>> higher.
>
> And you propose ICANN be stricter about redundancy of the DNS?

Yes, for those who sign contracts with ICANN.  But I also propose that 
other root zone operators ought to be able to come to exist outside of 
ICANN and those might impose using lesser or greater standards via their 
own contractual relationships.

  That may
> be necessary, I'm not sure. Of course, the biggest hurdle is the
> somewhat arms length relationship between ICANN and the cctlds - the
> ones which are in some cases probably most likely to be run on a
> shoestring.

Many ccTLDs are (or were) run by Randy Bush.

(When I was at ICANN we transferred control of one ccTLD on the basis of 
a blank sheet of paper signed with an unverified signature by an unknown 
person.)

In the scheme that I have proposed for new TLDs and "competing roots" 
ccTLDs would be like any other TLD: they would have to come to an 
agreement with the root zone operator for inclusion in that operator's 
offerings.  (But any root zone operator that didn't gather all the 
ccTLDs, indeed all of ICANN's TLDs, would be foolish and would find 
itself quickly out of business.)

> As an "average Internet user" I have little practical choice between
> using .com DNS or cctld DNS. That choice was made by the registrant
> whose content I want to access.

Yes.  And also that registrant has the choice whether to apply 
electricity to the servers that produce the service you want.  The point 
I'm making is that it is the provider of a net service who has the 
choice whether to provide it or even to allow particular people to use 
it.  It is not a right that is vested in the client, the network user.

>>> If all of an ISP's customers could no longer see .com (because of bad
>>> data in their DNS resolver), they'd probably hear about it fairly
>>> quickly.
>>
>> Perhaps. Suppose the net becomes further cross-coupled with other
>> infrastructures. How might a VoIP phone establish a call to an ISP to
>> report the problem when the SIP phone number is under .com? Or what if
>> the directory that lists the ISP's phone number is under .com?
>
> You have to expect that a failure in .com will be noticed by people
> other than those VoIP customers.

It is quite within the realm of possibility that the failure of .com 
could lead to all kinds of dependent failures.  For example, I would not 
be surprised to see some areas lose electrical service as a result. 
Here in Santa Cruz we lost the net a few months ago when someone cut 
fiber optic lines.  All kinds of unexpected side effects happened - 
gasoline stations had to shut down, 911 service on some hardwire phones 
stopped working, etc.

  When it's fixed it will hopefully be
> fixed for all of them.

That seems not to be the case.  Once an infrastructure goes down the 
reviving seems to be a process of triage and piecemeal recovery.  I know 
about this because here in Santa Cruz we go through this cycle several 
times a year.


>> Most of us feel that reliable DNS is worth buying. That's because we
>> view domain names as some sort of rock of eternal use. But for some
>> short lived purposes reliability might not be worth paying for. If one
>> only needs a domain name to be stable for a few minutes or days then
>> there might be large cost savings possible if a provider can avoid
>> building things like data escrow and backups.
>
> That seems to be more about registrants, than the people George was
> wanting to talk about: "the average Internet user".

Yes, let's allow internet users - who are frequently also providers of 
internet services - the ability to pick and chose the net facilities 
that best fit with their needs and finances.

Why should we have an ICANN that imposes the most expensive (and the 
most trademark protective) system onto everyone.  The ICANN world is a 
one-size-fits-all-as-long-as-it-is-from-Tiffany world.  That kind of 
mother-knows-best-for-you paternalism should not be a part of the 
internet of today.

Sure consumers need protection.  But that is usually done with 
publication of information coupled by standards to assure safety.


>> The point is that ICANN is imposed a very top-down view of what the
>> internet should be onto the DNS. It is a very unimaginative view and
>> ICANN is very xenophobic about new ideas.
>>
>> Had ICANN's mentality held sway in 1972 it is likely that the internet
>> would never have been born.
>
> I'm struggling with that, because the original framework of
> .com/.org/.gov etc, plus cctlds dates from way before ICANN.

That's not my point.  The point is that the "no innovation because it 
might confuse or surprise users" flag that ICANN waves is one that, had 
it been in place in the early 1970's would have said "that new fangled 
packet switching stuff confuses users of switched circuits, and besides, 
packet switching throws away packets upon congestion and thus it is bad 
and must be kept away from users."


> Whether they are using the most elegant method or not, ICANN does seem
> to be trying to increase the competition in gtlds,

If I believed that I would also be the proud owner of the Brooklyn Bridge.

ICANN has granted so few new TLDs that it has made a mockery of the 
process.  And ICANN's regulatory scheme makes those few largely clones 
of one another.

If ICANN really were promoting competition the first thing it would need 
to do would be to let new vendors into the marketplace.  ICANN has not 
done that.  Then ICANN would have to let those vendors innovate.  ICANN 
is very much against that.


  and let's not forget
> IDNs, which may be George's elephant in the room: perhaps delay in
> introducing them *is* hurting one section of the Internet-using public.

Sheesh.  When the button/touch tone phones were introduced the public 
was harmed - huge parts of the public with old rotary dial phones could 
not reach new services.

New things do hurt the installed base.

It is a price we pay.  In some rare instances we chose not to move 
forward and deny a new technology.  My country did that for the better 
part of a decade by denying promising stem cell research because to do 
that research offended certain religious communities.

The internet is still far too new to ossify by restricting innovation or 
larding it with huge taxes or private tax equivalents (ICANN's tax and 
fiat registry fee amounts to the better part of $1,000,000 (USD) a year).

> And wherever that data came from, all you need is a list of the "top X
> popular websites" for your DNS DVD,

The world wide web is but one service on the internet.  An emergency 
boot-up-and-go DVD that encompassed only the web would be deficient.

During an emergency, voice, email, and text message loads tend to go 
way, way up.  Web stuff tends to diminish in relation.

(By-the-way, one of the best ways to help release web-dependencies 
during troubled times is to map the names www.google-analytics.com and 
ssl.google-analytics.com to IP address 127.0.0.1.  It is amazing how 
many web pages cause side queries to google's analysis gathering sites.)

		--karl--

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