In an article at CircleID entitled President of Tucows in Response to SiteFinder, the, you guessed it, CEO of Tucows comments on Verisign's recent activity, with an angle that's been the gut feeling behind much of the public's reaction to Verisign's Sitedinder service.
In short: When a company is granted the license to run a TLD, they should consider themselves the steward of that TLD. ICANN makes sure that the licensing of the TLD is not an onerous burden - companies like Verisign can make as much as $6 for every DNS name in the registry, for every year of that name's existence. In the case of .com - and this is simplified, without talking about additional services, or the popularity of Network Solutions, another Verisign company, as the single most popular registrar and beneficiaries of even more money...
Well, it's difficult to estimate. There are a lot of registrations in .com and .net, and it's difficult to really know how many at any one time are registered. However, according to Verisign's 2002 filings to the SEC, there were 26 million names. 26 million names, multiplied by six dollars. To run what is effectively a bunch of DNS servers and some support infrastructure for a handful of registrars - none of which do anywhere near the volume of registrations as they themselves do through thier own company, Network Solutions. 26 million names registered by a bit over 100 'customers' (registrars like Tucows); selling on information to a few more, and running the 'free' registry service for a $6 cut of every name sold.
A global TLD like .com is a veritable money tree; once upon a not so distant time, several new companies were given those licenses to print money in the form of seven new gTLDs - money trees that have not yet taken root, or borne fruit for the companies that have been so carefully watching over those seedlings.
All of them dream of being Verisign, of having that cash cow of revenue. The holy grail of .com businesses, the .com domain itself: a magical place where the Registrars take the brunt of the market pressure, and handle all of the direct contact with the millions of people who own domain names, and run the real risk, and collect between ten and hundreds of dollars per name per year - while the core, safe and secure in the Registry, collects the $6 downstream with the understanding that there's not *meant* to be risk in running that business.
After all, nobody wants to put the core DNS service behind any TLD in a situation where it might go bust. Imagine, for a moment, some crappy company picks up .com on a prayer, and one day, someone slept in and nobody knew that for the weekend, every website you typed that ended in .com just went *nowhere*. Every mail bounced. Even internal mail systems would likely feel the effects, and suddenly you can't even mail your co-worker in the next cubicle (a truly American passtime, these days). Within 48 hours, the majority of .com would vanish, along with your ability to actually get anything done on the Internet.
ICANN would have failed its stewardship of the namespace, and the company responsible would have failed its stewardship of the registry. Nobody wants this ending to the story - not the users, not the companies currently running the registrys, not the registrars whose jobs and businesses are struggling to get by on their current revenues, and not the ICANN Board of Directors, past or present. Not even the much-too-and-oft-unnecessarily-maligned 'boardsquatters' want this outcome.
As a result of the technical structure of DNS, only one company can really run .com; it's run with this understanding that the company is expected to abide by the governance and rules set out in its contract, and act in good faith, in return for that jewel in the crown. That one company, since just after the dawn of DNS and long before the creation of ICANN, has been the company now known as Verisign, or Network Solutions, and others that will undoubtedly be of no consequence to most readers. That's the Nature Of The thing; the history of the Beast.
I once had the pleasure of meeting some of the board members, both privately and publically. Well, on several occasions, actually. I met Vint Cerf, who responded to my proposal by telling a rather giddy man who'd just met God that he had "good bandwidth". I've met Paul Twomey when he was working his butt off in the GAC; and had some fascinating conversations with him, most of which I wholeheartedly agreed with. At other times, I've even had conversations with members of the IAB. I've spoken to registries and registrars, and watched the birth and death of more than one company involved one way or another in the business of assigning a name to four numbers with dots between them.
And in many of those private discussions, there's a theme. An undercurrent. DNS was built to solve a technical problem; it created a political one. A good, hierarchical, centralised naming system, where one name belonged to one person and would be available worldwide - a thing of beauty, a perfectly natural response to the needs of addressing, but utter suicide in the real world - a completely fucked up idea which has created with that aura of perfection a cacophany of shadowy nightmares. Because in the real world, the same word may be owned by twenty companies in twenty categories in a single nation, and that structure may or may not be mirrored into other countries; even more importantly, the companies owning those trademarks elsewhere could be, would be, and often are different companies than the ones we associate with whereever we are now.
There are some, like me, who would see DNS replaced by a distributed, "DNS 2.0" style system of interlinked directories and peer-to-peer networks of name resolvers. Not many, I fear. Certainly not those making money from the "one buyer, one name" solution that we have today; which company would trade its sole ownership of a domain for one which any number of people could own the name, where no individual had absolute control? Where DNS 1.0 was nothing more than cheap infrastructure and the names in it meant essentially absolutely nothing, where the whole market would essentially vanish in as long a time as it took to create in the first place? Radical, foolish, naive - technically fraught with problems and innately flawed in specific ways. A design to matches the political requirements of the world we live in, not the technical ones for a world we don't. In other words, a no-go; something that I'll probably pound on about in my old age as I send my 50 squid to RandomMegaCorp and its ICANN love-slaves just to keep this blog alive.
On the other hand, there are those who believe that a 'generic' TLD should never have existed; tell that to the 30 million registrations sitting in .com and .net - names which you can't really "take away" now. UDRP is a poor solution to a problem which techies created - we mapped a perfectly logical addressing system onto a perfectly illogical world, and the domains don't share much in common.
At the time, dividing everything up into country-level TLDs (where each nation's name is taken from a 'country code'), or ccTLDs, would be a great solution to the problem, you'd think, so that's what happened. And thus the ccTLDs were born; and companies fought to get stewardship over those domain names, and some of them took that stewardship fraught with difficulties. Only a handful of countries run those TLDs as non-profits, and not all of those have evaded capture by special interests.
The issue of stewardship raised is an important one, however. Most of the people putting up the biggest fight against these controls are those companies wishing to either exploit or treat as property that namespace. The ultimate owners of that namespace is what is truly being disputed by all of the infighting - in the case of the ccTLDs, it's a fight between the managers, the governments and their designated negotiators in the GAC and other international bodies, the all-powerful ITU with the power and responsibility of managing country codes, WIPO and it's stranglehold over all things trademark-related, and a flurry of individuals, both past and present, screaming "If Jon Postel was here, he'd have done <X>" (where X translates roughly into "exactly what I'm telling you to do").
And the war is by no means over; it's just begun. My previous company is back on the prowl; TelNIC is hunting for a .tel again, wishing to plant a money tree that lives in a variety of soil types, but is happiest in mobile telephone numbers. The unstoppable, indefatigable ICM Registry remains in the wings, pushing .xxx as that joyous, world-wide home of porn-related content will undoubtedly rise from the ashes. Many of these ideas are carefully engineered to succeed where the first seven have failed: to provide a cash cow. A get-rich-quick scheme of magnanimous proportions. Sure, most of the ones with the really cracking ideas intend to do an awful lot to provide a real and useful service, but there's no pretending that these companies aren't thinking of these things as the .com of <insert market>.
And ICANN stands in the middle of all of these diverging interests: people who want that the name is theirs to do with as they please fight ICANN for control over the name, while people out to make a fast buck think up new and interesting ways of exploiting the things they already have gained control over. Meanwhile, the rest of us live with the knowledge and memory of just how many of the former became the latter once they achieved their goals, and the importance of vigilance as well as stewardship. And if that weren't enough, there's the fights from those utterly incorruptible governments over who actually has control over the names, both in terms of revenue sharing and content controls, who then began playing the former's game, and who'd never dream of becoming the latter. (Keep in mind that not all governments in the ISO list of country codes can be necessarily considered 'scrupulous'. As an aside, the beauty of this argument is that I can say "just look at the UN", and everyone reading this will think I'm talking about everyone other than their own government. Van Halen's "right now our government is doing things we think only other governments do" happens to be universally true - ask Amnesty International. I can in full faith guarantee your country is listed at least once.)
And behind all of this is the background noise of the technical people who inadvertently created (and are ultimately accountable/responsible for) this nightmare of policy and politics in the first place, the IETF and the IAB, who can do nothing to stop this. As a matter of fact, even their attempts to internationalize domain names have fallen to corporate manoeuvering and manipulation. And attempts by many people, some of which I witnessed, some of which even came from IAB members, to think up a DNS 2.0 were ignored. Rooms full of techies, pondering about pondering about a solution to internationalized DNS, completely incapable of doing anything other than gazing at their navel, ready to bring the current conflict over ownership of <insert word> to your favorite non-English language, and companies chomping at the bit to make money from the fallout of their shortsightedness. Even ICANN doesn't seem to have the teeth to ask for anything different, even though it has shown me time and time again that those dentures, in private, are perfectly able to chew up a solution.
All because a bunch of techies decided that a hierarchy was the best way of achieving the goal. That one word should belong to one person, everywhere. That naming is the same as addressing. That the sociopolitical requirements of the world itself don't have any input, and shouldn't have any affect on the technical requirements. That someone gets to have a licensed monopoly to something we all take for granted. And now that it's entrenched - in business, in marketplace, in ideas, and in the mindsets of the people at every level of the process, nobody's going to give up their slice of the pie - these companies would sooner litigate each other to oblivion than lose that revenue stream. In retrospect, it's such an obvious outcome - and yet we seem unable to avoid it, the glare of the headlights of the approaching future freezing our feet like a deer about to become roadkill.
Ultimately, that's why we're all losers in this war. DNS namespace was created for our use - not for the profit of others. The Clinton Administration believed it was doing the right thing; so did Postel and Mockapetris. The issue of stewardship has been lost not on just one or two of the people in this war, but on great swaths of the marketplace of ideas. And let's not leave out the U.S. Government in this one - the Department of Commerce, the real owners of the global DNS infrastructure, have just granted another three years to ICANN - to magically solve these inherently unsolvable (or at the very least intractable) problems that it and the National Science Foundation helped to create in the first place, along with the rest of us stupid techies. Who could have forseen? We could have. Hell, some of us knew it was fucked up then. There was a time, post-bangpaths, when we all knew just how bad Network Solutions was abusing us. We seem to have forgotten that we knew then that it was broke - we knew it before the Internet became commercialized, and we did nothing, because "it worked". Rarely, if indeed ever, to our advantage since the NSF - but it did the job. Better to ask why we refused to see.
ICANN has come closer than anyone else to getting most of these companies under a control of any kind. And without question, there are indeed technical problems which arise from the original technical solution; but they pale in insignificance compared to the political problems that the technical solution created in the first place. And still, we all go about our daily lives with the expectation that it should all just work. That expectation - the expectation that the magic is just there - is exactly why these companies and governments want these TLDs, and exactly why they expect that in the long term, they're going to get rich running them. For every man - whether you're Vint Cerf, Our Father Who Art On The Board, or Esther Dyson, mother of At-Large...
For every good man out there looking out for the best interests of the namespace and the stewardship of what is ultimately the most fundamentally visible naming system on the internet, there's ten people (whom I can't name here or they'd sue me) looking to turn those best interests into lucrative money trees. Domain names was, is, and forever shall be political, and for the forseeable future, will always have a dark side.
Never before has that underbelly been so visible as the recent behavior has been.
I am and remain honored to have met and hopefully influenced some of the most important defenders of this service; I remain in their debt for the opportunity to do so, just as I remain in the debt of the companies, and their more fiduciary interest, who brought me to those meetings and remained concerned with doing the right thing while making a profit. I appreciated then, as I appreciate now, how beautiful and fragile such a motive and interest truly was in this particular space.
Only time will tell how many of the former continue to become the latter, or how successful ICANN can be at preventing this rampant transmogrification from provider into profiteer. The members of ICANN's board, past and present, as well as the members of the At-Large, have long known that capture of the board by individuals who sought the latter would be the world's biggest Sky Writer, spelling out "Internet Users Fucked, Film At 11." The success or failure of ICANN to continue to exist as an uncaptured (and they are uncaptured) entity will spell out the eventual success or failure to keep the domain name service exactly as envisioned by the aforementioned CEO - as a series of companies stewarding some of the most important property of the internet community ever to be decentralised and put into the commercial marketplace.
Not a bad speech from a man making a living as a customer of Verisign. And as a large customer, it's unlikely that Verisign will be able to do anything to affect Tucows unfairly - regardless of whether other people are afraid to do so or not.
