Re: domain name zapping threat by Internic

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 02:05 PM 6/24/96 -0700, Vlad wrote:
>surprising not to see any discussion on this here..
It's not particularly relevant (:-), but SAIC's position
has been discussed here....

>this is a very intersting development. all kinds of news reports
>are talking about the internic zapping 25,000 DNS addresses.
>I wonder how this will turn out.
>I saw in an article a claim, I think, that the internic now charges
>$100 "rent" per year for a domain. this is really amazing to me,
>because this has totally changed from a one-time only fee, if correct.
>is that correct?

It's not correct.  They charge $50/year (the $100 setup fee for new 
domain names gets you the first two years.)  This gets you the use of the
name plus support from the root-level domain name servers; 
it's how they're trying to fund the NIC instead of getting tax subsidies.  
Before the rent policy started, domain names weren't charged for 
(there's no such thing as a free name server...)  They did a 90-day
grandfathering, but now they're trying to de-grandfather the older names,
and you can tell when you've got to pay from whois.

The legal issues are really unclear, especially since they don't run
all the US-based root name servers, but they'll probably get away with it.
It seems appropriate that organizations calling themselves COMmercial
should pay money for the privilege :-)  They also control the
.org and .net hierarchies.  If you don't like it, you can always
get a statist address in the .us domain or some other .xx government domain,
or find someone who's got a second-level domain that will register you
(e.g. someone may decide to rent out space in .a.com ... .z.com 
cheaper than NSI, or .hardware.com, .software.com, .services.com....)
The NSF is still subsidizing .edu and .gov, and .mil runs its own nameservers.
NSI's contract runs til 1998, which is about enough time to evaluate
alternatives.  .in-addr.arpa is also still "free".

>I wonder if people are going to try to find a way to "route around"
>this action by the internic... 

There are very interesting discussions of the issues in RFC1591 and 
RFC1480.  You _could_ hang off odd places in the .US domain, like
calling yourself a technical school, distributed nationwide institute,
or a generic .GEN.st.US which is used for things like domain name parks
or statewide garden clubs.  But use of top-level domain names and creation
of new ones isn't precluded; it might be interesting if someone wanted
to form a .ALT domain with some automated first-come-first-served registration.

Or you _could_ just live in .in-addr.arpa space if you wanted....

About N years ago, Peter Honeyman started the .fun domain; don't know
if he's still got a nameserver supporting it.

>one wonders if this is just the first in a series of actions by the 
>new spook owners. (SAIC)  essentially,
>if someone wanted to implement a tax or a way to control the internet,
>the NIC would be an excellent place to start.

They may have contracts with spooky people, but it doesn't really
give them a lot of control, especially since you can always get yourself
a domain name from some friendly country like Anguilla or Lichtenstein
(a high-tech equivalent of fancy postage stamps? :-)
It's more interesting to speculate on what they can do with .in-addr.arpa.

However, because the DNS root-level servers only hand out addresses,
rather than carrying your mail, it doesn't provide much opportunity
for wiretaps or other Un-American Activity.  They could do a bit of
traffic analysis (seeing which IP addresses request info for which
domain names), but it's really sparse traffic information - they're
mainly getting requests that have filtered through other nameservers
(especially if you point your systems at some caching nameserver like 
netcom's or aol's which tells them that one of 5 million users wanted
to know the address for .suspicious.com), and caching nameservers
mean that multiple requests for the same information generally won't
hit the root servers.  The take is further reduced if suspicious
machines are third-level addresses under either privacy-protecting
second-levels (suspicious.alias.net) or large ones (suspicious.big-isp.net)
which will get the queries instead of the root servers.





#				Thanks;  Bill
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