Random Bytes...by Ross Rader

This Category has been moved.

Ross — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 10:46:00 -0500

If you are reading this, you’ll probably want to know that I’ve moved this subcategory to its own blog.

The web site is available at http://code.byte.org and the RSS 2.0 feed is available at http://code.byte.org/blog/index.xml

Verisign/ICANN Settlement: Registrars to Twomey - we're not on board

Ross — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 15:12:00 -0500

Registrar Constituency: “…your statements have created some confusion within the community. We are now hearing further reports from third parties that the registrar community is generally on board with moving forward with this proposed settlement arrangement…To help us resolve this confusion, we would like to request that these statements be substantiated…”

Verisign/ICANN Settlement: Complicated Name Game

Ross — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 13:21:00 -0500

TheStreet.com: “"$12 to me is absolutely insane," says Tom McDonald, founder of domainwatch.com, a service that tracks the domain name registrations of all registrars. "Who knows? They'll probably get it. They've got quite a bit of pull and they've been around a while." McDonald says a fair price would be less than $1 a year.”

Truer words have never been spoken. I’m surprised that we are still having this same conversation 7 years later. This article was written in 1999.

More on the Verisign/Snapnames connection

Ross — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 23:59:00 -0500

VeriSign PR: “VeriSign, Inc., the world's leading provider of domain name registration services, announced today that it has begun offering SnapNames.com, Inc.'s SnapBack service”

~~Is a bigger deal right around the corner?~~

Stupid news alerts. Apparently Google can't tell the difference between news from 2001 and news from today. Relevancy *AND* timeliness would be nice :)

Verisign/ICANN Agreement: Something for Everyone

Ross — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 23:33:00 -0500

The Wikipedia defines an Easter Egg as being “…a hidden message or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, or computer program.”

I think they should add “settlement agreements” to the list of places where Easter Eggs are hidden.

In preparing my overview of the puts and takes of the proposed Verisign/ICANN settlement agreements, I eventually made my way to Appendix 5 of the new Registry Operator Agreement that Verisign and the ICANN Staff want to implement as part of the settlement. This far into the agreement, I was expecting a fairly routine run down of Verisign’s obligations to provide Whois service and the standards it would employ in executing these functions.

What I got was distinctly different – there is an entire new set of obligations tacked onto the old 2001 language! These new clauses specify that Verisign will turn over the COM Whois file, in bulk, to a third party for the purpose of creating a centralized Whois that includes all TLD data.

excerpted from the Verisign/ICANN Settlement Agreement, Appendix 5; “Registry Operator shall provide bulk access to up-to-date data concerning domain name and nameserver registrations maintained by Registry Operator in connection with the Registry TLD on a daily schedule, only for purposes of providing free public query-based access to up-to-date data concerning domain name and nameserver registrations in multiple TLDs, to a party designated from time to time in writing by ICANN.”

The thing is, this is being implemented despite a clear and contrary mandate from the community that is backed up by the original ICANN/NSI Registry contract which explicitly states that such a centralized system would only be implemented “…if [the distributed Whois system] implemented by registrars on a distributed basis does not within a reasonable time provide reasonably robust, reliable and convenient access to accurate and up-to-date registration data”. It also goes on to say that the deployment of the centralized system would be undertaken pursuant to the establishment of Consensus Policy.

Will the ICANN GNSO Policy Development Process be replaced by a contractual negotiation process, or more simply become a process of appealing to the U.S. legal system? Or are we there already?

Now playing: Blues Traveler - Psycho Joe