When I stumbled across John Gilmore’s argument against the heavy-handed tactics of the anti-spam cabal a while back, I was surprised to find it pretty compelling. My years as a sysadmin had drilled into my head that Open Relays Are Bad, but this is an awfully good point:
What’s the difference between an “open router” and an “open relay”? An open router takes any packet that you send it, and forwards it toward its destination. An open relay takes any email that you send it, and forwards it toward its destination. They’re the same thing, just operating at different levels of the protocol stack. Should we outlaw open routers? Look at all these evil guys on the Internet backbone, all over companies and campuses, and even in private homes! They’re routing packets without authenticating who sent each one! They’ll accept packets from ANYWHERE ON THE INTERNET, and just send them onward, even if they contain spam or viruses! There oughta be a law!!! If we just shut down all those guys with their big Cisco spam tools, then we wouldn’t get any spam any more. Let’s all black-hole every packet that comes from any ISP that doesn’t authenticate every packet. We have perfectly good standards for authenticating packets (IPSEC — I even funded the free Linux implementation, called FreeS/WAN.) so lack of standards is no excuse. Come on guys, if we apply your rationale about open relays just two levels down in the protocol stack, we ought to shut down the entire Internet. What makes the application-level email service on port 25 so special? (Both sarcasm and logical argument are probably lost on this audience, but I’ll give it a try.)
And…
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In a December 13th speech to The Free State Foundation, Senator Jim DeMint quotes Randy May in asking if the FCC should be renamed the “Federal Unbundling Commission.”
DeMint expands on the unbundling theme covering Open Access, A la Carte and Multicast Must Carry, and Net Neutrality.
My favorite quote:
Market regulation is no less than market manipulation, and we need to take that
power away from the government and put it where it belongs, in the hands of
consumers in the free market.
Check out this excellent presentation on the absurdity of the FCC’s telecom and cable agenda at the The Free State Foundation.
If only more members of Congress took this position on telecom issues!
Domain name tasting was on today’s ICANN agenda at the meeting in LA. The GNSO Council, which represents commercial and noncommercial interests, considered this unsavory issue and voted to take a more thorough look at domain name tasting.
What is domain name tasting? It refers to an abusive practice in which speculators look for the best domain names where they can park ads, and take advantage of a five-day grace period between the time a new domain name is reserved and the time the registration fee must be paid.
Speculators routinely register large numbers of potentially attractive domain names and then carefully track how many accidental hits they generate. If a site fails to generate much traffic, the speculator can let the domain name lapse without paying anything. But if the site generates a lot of traffic, the speculator can use it to park ads, often from one of the large managed Web advertising networks like Google, and generate significant revenue with no effort.
WIkipedia describes the controversy:
The practice is controversial as practitioners typically register many hundreds of thousands of domain names under this practice, with these temporary registrations far exceeding the number of domain names actually licensed. In April 2006, out of 35 million registrations, only a little more than 2 million were permanent or actually purchased. By February 2007, the CEO of GoDaddy reported that of 55.1 million domain names registered, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept.
All this tasting taxes the DNS network, and increases the costs and burdens on legitimate registrants. Moreover, the ICANNWiki describes the consumer harm as follows:
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One of the largest issues to be considered here at the Los Angeles ICANN meeting is about WHOIS. As the AP reports, there are proposals to eliminate the WHOIS database, modify the information process, or call for more studies. Indeed, there’s a lot of people interested in this topic, particularly privacy advocates on the one side and trademark owners on the other.
But there’s more to this issue than privacy and IP rights. The reality is that WHOIS is important for law enforcement to track criminals that steal personal information.
What is WHOIS? It’s the publicly available database that reveals the contact information for who owns a domain name. ICANN has grappled about what to do with WHOIS for a long time, and this week we’ll see action by ICANN’s board of directors as to whether to approve a new proposal to create an operational point of contact (OPoC) or to even eliminate WHOIS, so that registrants don’t have to provide their contact information for the whole world — or the dictator in an authoritarian country — to see.
This is a controversial proposal. Registrars – the websites that you go to to register a name – would love to see OPoC because it gives them another point of revenue. They’d be the ones that could operate the systems to designate an OPoC. But there are a lot of questions raised. How does a point of contact relay information to the registrant? How quickly would it have to respond to law enforcement? Or a trademark owner?
In addition to the OPoC supporters, there are those that would like to abandon WHOIS entirely. This would be a mistake, as Saul Hansell writes in his New York Times blog:
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I’m at the ICANN public meeting in Los Angeles this week. This is my first time at ICANN, so I’m going to be giving you my impressions of the whole thing over the next few days. And there are some interesting cultural, privacy and operational issues that will be considered.
ICANN will vote on how new gTLD (generic top level domain)
names will be added in the future, what to do about the privacy of domain name
registrants regarding the WHOIS process, and how to deal with Internationalized Domain Names, the process of translating names
into such languages as Arabic and Chinese. The later issue is the impetus for
the title of this meeting, “My Name, My Language, My Internet.”
ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, and is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet’s
system of domain names (like .org, .museum and country codes like .UK). There are almost 1500 attendees at this meeting in the LAX Hilton. That’s
right, beautiful LAX airport! After past meetings in San
Juan, Lisbon, Sao Paulo, and Marrakech, I get to go to the one
just minutes from LA’s airport. Great.
Vint Cerf opened up the meeting. This is his last meeting as
Chairman of the Board of ICANN. He’s been on the Board for eight years.
Transparency and accountability are still important buzzwords here. Assistant Secretary for Communications at NITA, John Kneur and ICANN’s CEO, Paul Twomey, both spoke to the need for making sure that ICANN is sufficiently open to the public and all stakeholders.
The major topic for today concerns the introduction of new gTLDs to
supplement (or compete against) existing ones like .com, .biz, .mobi, and
.travel. ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization Council (GNSO) has a
proposal for this process. From ICANN’s website:
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Today, the Well Connected Project of the Center for Public Integrity is excited to launch an issue portal jointly with Congresspedia. This issue portal is a wiki, like Wikipedia, creating a collection of articles on telecom, media and technology policy, in a single location. Anyone can read, write and edit these articles.
This issue portal builds on the great telecom and technology reporting done by the members of the Well Connected Project staff. This venture into collaborative journalism is a first for our project. It adds a new element to our investigative journalism endeavor. First of all, we have the Media Tracker, a free database of more than five million records that tells you who owns the media where you live by typing in you ZIP code. If we win our lawsuit against the FCC, we’ll also include company-specific broadband information in the Media Tracker.
Second, our blog features dozens of quick-turnaround stories on the hottest topics in telecom and media policy. Recent stories have broken news on the battle over 700 Megahertz, on the lobbying over the proposed XM-Sirius satellite radio merger, and also over copyright controls on electronic devices. We also do investigative reports – like this one about Sam Zell, the new owner of Tribune Co. – that build on the data that is freely available in Media Tracker.
Now, with the addition of this Congresspedia wiki, our project aims to incorporate citizen-journalism on key public policy issues near and dear to the blogosphere. These are issues like Broadband availability, Digital copyright, Digital television, Regulating media content, and Spectrum are at the core of what techies care about in Washington. We hope you will add others articles, too. In fact, I’ve already started my own wish list: articles about Patent overhaul legislation, Media ownership, the Universal Service Fund, and Video franchising. Our reporters can summarize these issues and debates, but so can you.
Take a crack at them!
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What is the position of the United States government on a proposed treaty, currently before the World Intellectual Property Organization, that would create a copyright-style protection for television broadcasts?
That is the key question that observers want answers for at the public roundtable discussion that will be held today, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., at the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress. The proposed treaty has been rife with controversy from the beginning. One reason is that it is being promoted as an update to the 1961 Treaty of Rome, which the U.S. never ratified.
During negotiations last year at WIPO in Geneva, the U.S. was the most significant government to promote extending the broadcaster treaty to cover webcasters. But the rest of the world balked at that. Failing that modification, the U.S. expressed dissatisfaction with the end-result.
In a column on the subject last September, I quoted PTO officials as follows:
“The U.S. does not believe that [the current treaty] provides a proper basis for going to a diplomatic conference, and intervened to say as much,” PTO spokeswoman Brigid Quinn said September 15. “The U.S. has always envisioned this treaty as one to provide the necessary protections for broadcast signals in the digital age.” As a result, she said, “there is no consensus and alternatives on at least half of the issues.”
I was on vacation last week when ICANN handed down its latest rejection of the “.xxx” top-level domain (TLD). I just wanted to make two quick points about why I find this decision quite troubling.
First, it’s obvious that some critics of the .xxx TLD oppose the proposal because they think it somehow legitimizes online pornography or will lead to the proliferation of even more cyber-porn. I find this argument bizarre and naive. As John Dvorak makes abundantly clear in his recent PC Magazine column, Internet pornography is not going away and it is almost impossible to imagine how the .xxx TLD could have done anything to make it more accessible. Dvorak rightly asks: “How hard is it to find porn on the Net? Go to any search engine and type porn. Open your e-mail box. Who are these people kidding with this argument?”
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It was a symphony of togetherness at a recent ICANN symposium at the University of the Pacific School of Law. One presenter titled his paper on Internet governance after the Beatles song "We Can Work It Out." And when commenting on a paper about "enhanced cooperation," I paraphrased the Stephen Stills song – if you can’t be with the ICANN you love, then love the ICANN you’re with. And most agreed. The takeaway from the conference was that we should work within ICANN’s current institutional
framework for better management of the domain name system (DNS), but at the same time ensure that the U.S. (or any) government treat ICANN as an
independent, private-sector entity.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.