🚀 go-pugleaf

Mark Anderson <mea@nospambradnylion.com> wrote:

> I never quite understood this entire DNS racket.  What does one have to 
> do to become a registrar where you can hand out domain names and charge 
> yearly rent?  The forces of monopoly may not completely succeed with 
> SOPA but they'll keep trying until they do.  If that happens isn't it 
> possible that a bunch of parallel sets of root DNS servers surface where 
> someone typing google.com could get some phony google.com hosted in some 
> off shore tax haven.  But the pirate Internet would still resolve 
> piratebay.org, free of censorship, and making us all criminals for 
> pointing our DNS servers to the wrong root servers.

It is a racket.

If someone died and left me god of the internet, first thing I would do is
get rid of the current dns system and make everyone go back to use ip
addresses. Technical problem abound with that, but nothing that can't be
worked out.

If someone wanted a domain name, it would be $1000 a year or worse. If you
couldn't afford it or thought it unreasonable, you could just use a
sub-domain belonging to someone else.

It wasn't like this in the beginning, early on there was no charge for
domain names but the process was long and complicated. They actually
verified information. You needed to justify it. The zone records needed to
be set up before the approval. If you fucked something up, back to square
one.

As far as becoming a registar, couple forms and money to buy into the TLD,
probably around $10k or better for most of them (each). Not much to it. Have
to prove you are a legit biz, someone in charge, bank account, normal proof.

Alternate DNS has been around since the beginning, I think, if I remember
correctly, even Karl from MCS was involved with one. First one I remember
was Carl Palmer, was called the rabbit network. Alternate root servers,
alternate DNS servers. Actually it's possible Carl and Karl were in bed
together, or mortal enimies, forgot about all that until now.

They exist now to an extent, I beleive if you use TOR (the onion router),
there is another TLD called .onion you can access. In theory, stuff not in
the .onion TLD gets dropped through from the normal root servers, ones with
the .onion extention get added in.

They always have had the same problem, getting people to use them. Then you
have the trust issue. All you need is some admin with a god complex deciding
that aol.com should be blown off the internet, makes a quick edit "because I
can justify it" and there goes that idea out the window.

About 10-12 years ago networksolutions.com tried something like that. If you
mistyped a url (ripqo.com instead of ripco.com), they rigged it so it went
to a landing page rather than letting the browser tell you the domain didn't
exist or the more cryptic "host not found" error. Basically they tried using
mis-spelled domain names as an advertising method for their services.

Anyway, the group in charge of domain names is called ICANN. They delegate
power to the registars like godaddy and namecheap. They are the ones that
steered everything to the mess we have now.

Like you pointed out, no one anywhere can "own" a domain name. No matter who
you are, how many you claim ownership to, you are mearly renting them on a
year-to-year basis. And don't me where all the money is going to, because I
don't know. Godaddy alone is supposed to have 32 million registrations,
ignoring all their other services and averaging a renewal at $10, thats $320
million a year just for them.

They claim $6 ot $7 of that goes to ICANN, and again, for what? What the
fuck do they need all that money for? Figure if there are 100 million domain
names total, thats like $600 million a year, just their take.

It costs that much a year to keep this mess in order?

-bruce
bje@ripco.com