RE: Long term registrations - Was: RE: [ga] Fwd: LACTLD comments on Zone Transfers

[Karl Auerbach <karl@cavebear.com>]

On Fri, 20 Sep 2002, Steven Heath wrote:

> And of course the challenge process needs a billing process :-)

I'm not so sure that I'd agree that that conclusion is a universal truth.

I'm working on an anonymous registration system - it uses 
cryptographically signed digital certificates, a kind of "bearer bond" 
that represents ownership of a domain.

(There would have to be a transfer agent to sign certificates upon 
transfer so as to prevent repudiation of transfers.  However this agent 
need not be aware of what the certificates represent.)

The only reason to have a billing process is if the initial registration
fee is so thin that it doesn't have any room to absorb the costs of
challanges or other such processes.  However, it is possible to make such
procedures very inexpensive - for example a challange can be a sequence of
emails to the e-mail address given in the SOA record.  These e-mails could
use the typical kind of random number challange/response mechanism that is
used in many e-mail subscription systems.  Any valid response would
constitute a sucessful rebuff of the challange.  The cost of this kind of
system could be sufficiently small that some providers could easily decide
to accomodated it in the basic registration fee.

The point is that we have many options - but many of them have been 
arbitrarily ruled out of bounds by ICANN.  Why does ICANN place a 10 year 
limit on registrations?  What is the rationale?  Where was the debate and 
decision?  Who were parties to that debate and decision?

ICANN has become anti-innovation.  For example, suppose a *TLD operates
its DNS servers that provide the proper public query interfaces but use
internal transfer protocols that are quite different than AXFR.  Yet, as
we have seen, ICANN demands the right to do an AXFR.  That is sort of like
the requirement that was imposed by the railroad unions in the 1950's and
1960's that diesel locomotives on railroads retain an expensive and
useless fireman alongside the engineer/driver.

		--karl--








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