[MUD-Dev] OT: NIS/AlterNIC and the DNS system

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

Jeff Kesselman wrote:
> 
> BUT I thin kterhe IS a legitimate concern in the fact the the entire name
> space is controleld by NIS at the moment.  Thatw as fine when it was non
> profit, mroe ro less, but nwo that theya re charging $100 a year for the
> priveledge fo beign listed in their database, the space aught to be opened
> i nan organzied and rationale way to comepting services.

Register a .org domain, which costs nothing. You only need to pay if you
are operating a commercial site... and it's only $50 a year. That's like
$4.17 a month. It's a joke. They're not making any money off that, when
you consider the 24-hour monitoring, backup systems, manpower, fat
pipes, analysis, record keeping, they do a lot of stuff over there. It's
not like setting up a single network. This is a definite SPF for the
entire DNS system, and if they have downtime at *all* it creates a huge
problem. Consider that all the .org and .edu and .gov sites are provided
free to qualifying people, and you're looking at that $4.17 a month per
commercial domain supporting ALL of the NIS domain services. 

<RANT>
If you want to crucify someone for making money off essential services
on the internet, look to the certification authorities and what payments
they require for a digital certificate appropriate for secure
internet-based commerce. They're not even real time service. A digital
certificate fee is like charging someone a fee to sign their e-mail with
your PGP key to prove that it's real e-mail. I'd be a lot more upset
about that than I am about NIS charging me $4.17 a month for a domain
name.
</RANT>
 
> I can't believe it woudl be that hard to modify the rpotocols to allow
> multiple players in that arena.

Here's what I see as the problem. While multiple players are certainly
*possible*, someone somewhere needs to handle a single authority that
determines which ones are official. You have to have a root directory.
Right now, that's NIS. When people want to take advantage of the new top
level domains, they have to point at the AlterNIC servers (which are
incomplete and always somewhat out of date), or at the NIS servers
(which don't support the new top level domains). If AlterNIC and NIS
were talking to each other and trying to work things out, this wouldn't
be too tough... but AlterNIC has been openly and consistently hostile to
NIS, which isn't exactly greasing the wheels. Add to this the idea that
AlterNIC is not exactly as technologically stable or capable as NIS, and
NIS has a perfect reason to say "They are not stable; they are not
effective; they are not ready. We cannot collaborate with them." Now
that AlterNIC has added this childish stunt to their history, the good
ideas behind it are more or less lost in the debate over whether you can
trust AlterNIC with your information. 

<OPINION>
I have a tentative solution: registration of individual top-level
domains. NIS could handle the root server, the top-level domains could
be registered to other companies, and those companies could charge what
the market will bear for names within those domains. NIS could continue
to handle the .com, .org, .edu, and .gov domains as usual, but now other
companies could register appropriate top-level domains in their own
servers. An AUP of sorts could be drafted for the existing domain names,
specifically .com which I think should be further restricted to
companies legally entitled to do business; for example, we have the
well-known www.bluesnews.com for Quake news, which is not really a
commercial site. The other top level domains already have appropriate
AUPs of a sort. This could bring in the single most important Big Win of
the AlterNIC concept: .xxx for pornographic sites. If all the
pornographic sites were registered under .xxx, everyone wins. The
pornhounds can find porn sites more easily. The parents can filter out
all porn sites in a trice. The children can't claim they didn't know
what was on it. And the government can collect accurate data on how much
traffic porn sites get. (I don't think the American public realises just
how many people really DO want porn on the internet.) 
</OPINION>

The internet is due for a reorganisation. But it's not something we can
do overnight, and it's not going to be without hardships and setbacks.
The question is whether we're willing to bite the bullet and just do it.