Re: Petition against VeriSlime's DNS abuse

["Jonathan A. Zdziarski" <jonathan () nuclearelephant com>]

Not trying to shoot this down, well yes I am... if Verisign didn't
bother talking to NANOG or ICANN first, they certainly don't care about
a petition from a bunch of people who may or may not be related to
operations on the Internet.  IMHO, petitions are just another
meaningless straw poll designed to waste your idle cycles (if you have
any) on the Internet.

If you really want to fix this, we need to bring control of our root
registry (yes it belongs to all of us) back into a non-commercial
organization's control.  From a recent article
(http://www.nuclearelephant.com/papers/verisign.html).  This is my
personal feeling at least:

<SNIP>

The primary goal is to restore the root registry and servers to the
Internet community so that it is not run by any one commercial
organization. A non-commercial registry created from a consortium of
network operations veterans in the form of a non-profit organization
will have the power to accomplish the following: 

      * Establish a new set of root servers and top level registry
      * Publish a new root server list over 80% of ISPs will likely use,
        resulting in Verisign's root servers to become obsolete
      * Provide the legal and financial backing it will take to
        accomplish this


This certainly isn't an easy feat, but very do-able. The two main
obstacles will be first moving all domain records for top level domains
over to the new root servers. Acquiring this information from an
uncooperative commercial entity (whether it be Verisign or some other
registry) may be difficult and possibly require legal action. The second
obstacle will be fighting companies who oppose the non-commercialization
of a top-level registry in a court of law, providing enough legal muscle
to convince a judge not to impose an injunction or heavy financial
damages.

</SNIP>