ICANN holds meetings like this three times a year. They are big affairs with lots going on, and often in some exotic location. Today on Radio New Zealand National I talked a bit about what it is like to attend one, and about the domain name system expansion. Read on for my speaking notes or download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Q: Domain names, today?

A: Let’s start with an audio clip

[Sound clip: Romeo and Juliet]

A: yes, that’s Juliet saying that it doesn’t matter what things are called. Of course, she’s completely wrong, and Shakespeare meant us to understand that by putting the line into the mouth of a silly naïve girl who eventually kills herself. What things are called is very, very important to us. And that brings us the domain name system.

Q: These are the names on the Internet.

A: Yes, names like radionz.co.nz or amazon.com. In New Zealand, the domain name system is run by InternetNZ.

Q: Is that where you get domain names?

A: No, get them from a domain name registrar – most ISPs are domain name registrars – InternetNZ sets the policy and runs the core infrastructure. And there are analogous bodies in most countries. But the core of the domain name system – the part which sits above all countries, and above .com, .org and so forth, is run by a body called ICANN. We’ve mentioned that before – it has New Zealander Peter Dengate Thrush as its chair.

And ICANN holds a meetings three times a year, each time in a different part of the world. I’ve just come back from an ICANN meeting in Cairo.

Q: What was discussed there?

A: I’ll just sketch out the meeting first – there are about 700 or 800 people at these meetings, and mostly these people meet in a series of smaller groups. So, there are meetings for people interested in country codes like .nz, for instance, and meetings for people interested in IP addresses, and so forth. There’s a meeting for national governments to come together and talk about the Internet, and there’s the ICANN board overseeing the whole thing. You tend to see the same people again and again at the meetings, and over time if you keep going you can build up a relationship and get business done with them.

And the hot topic in ICANN at the moment is the possibility of allowing far more top level domains. So, a top-level domain is something like .com or .org, and ICANN is proposing a process where people can apply for new top level domain to suit themselves. So, you might get Dot Boeing, or Dot Health or Dot McDonalds

Q: So will we all be getting names like that?

A: Not unless you’ve got several hundred thousand dollars, which looks to be the price of admission.

Q: Is this seriously likely to happen?

A: Not clear yet. ICANN has proposed it, but it looks as though there’s a lot of policy to be worked out. Someone who’s new to ICANN told me that, to him, it looked like the wild west. And the US Government isn’t terribly impressed, either. The person from the Department of Commerce – an Assistant Secretary, I think that’s someone rather important – gave a whole list of things that they would expect to be dealt with before a proposal like this could go live.

Q: Like what?

A: The possibility of vertical integration of registries and registrars is one problem. Another is the fact that ICANN is a non-profit, but that this proposal could see it with a great deal of income. And another point that the speaker referred to is “delicate issue of morality and public order”.

Q: What does that mean?

A: That people might want to create domain with names that others would find offensive, perhaps? And the public order remark is presumably a reference to China and similar regimes which can’t cope with references to political concepts like democracy. There are real problems here. We wouldn’t like it if some went out tried to register Dot New Zealand or Dot Kiwi, for example. But the shoe polish company might think that was a fine thing to do.

Q: And what’s going to happen?

A: A bit early to tell yet. But all the component parts of ICANN are very engaged on this issue, and the discussions are continuing. I’d be surprised if it didn’t happen sooner or later.

Links

ICANN and its page about new top level domains – and the US Government speech about it.

I talked about this on the radio a few weeks ago. And here’s my submission to the Government – which still hasn’t even been so much as acknowledged, over three weeks after I sent it.

Frankly, the potentialities here are scary – ACTA could do everything from killing off free software to stopping innovation on the Internet, but virtually all the information we have about it comes from leaked documents. Our government is negotiating in secret, and will probably end up giving away more of our rights like it did during the last Copyright Amendment Act.

This really is not good enough. Our government should have nothing to do with this, and we should all be telling them that. Now.

The importance of names is far wider than that. Look at our personal names. People’s names work differently according to culture – but there is no human culture in which people do not have personal names. The requirement for personal names seems to be built in to us. Now, Richard Westlake has done some research to show that our names are more than just sounds. He has shown that someone whose name is in the first half of the alphabet is twice as likely to be elected to high office than someone whose name is in the second half.

Domain name tasting is the practice of buying a domain name, putting up a web site with advertising on it, and not paying for the name when the bill comes in a week later if the advertising doesn’t show a profit.

It works likes this: You think up a name that people might type – it might be close to the name of a popular site – let’s say it’s goggle.com – then you point it at a website full of ads. You get paid when people click on the ads on the site. Under the rules for domain name purchase there is a so-called “grace period” during which you can cancel your registration for a full refund. So, at the end of the grace period you figure out whether the costs of holding the domain outweigh the ad revenue.

Some registrars in the US are doing something like a million names at a time and canceling 99% or more at the end of the grace period. They can automate the whole thing so it’s pretty much untouched by human hand. Then they just wait for the money to roll in. And it’s a really bad practice because it takes the opportunity of names away form people who might have a valid use for them – John Goggle, for instance – and it places huge loads on the registration systems which pushes up everyone’s costs.

One way to kill this off would be to get rid of the grace period on domain name registration, so all registrations would be immediate and final and paid in full. But the grace period is kind of useful to ordinary users and it’s a shame to see it so abused.

Instead, ICANN looks likely to limit tightly the size of a refund that a registrar can claim in a month, which is quite clever, because this is a game of large numbers and this should stop it. It should also stop the practice of ‘front-running’, where you ask about a particular domain name – only to discover that the registrar you have just asked has automatically registered it on your behalf as soon as you asked, and you can’t register the name using a competing registrar until after the grace period.

None of this has been a major problem for dot nz names, possibly because we have a smaller market than dot com, but mainly I think because we have a strong regulator.

There are people out there registering 100,000 names a day and cancelling 99% of the names before they have to pay. Typically these people put a webpage full of advertising on the name as they register it, and they only keep it if people click on the adverts.

This is a bad practice because it prevents people from getting access to names because some taster has grabbed them. It also stresses the registration systems. And its very much against the spirit of the system.

There’s a lot of discussion going on at ICANN on how to shut down the tasters. Perhaps the free grace period will be removed, or perhaps people will only be allowed to cancel a small proportion of the names they register.

It’s interesting to watch the people who care about this practice coming up with a solution to the problem.

That’s right. She’s a person – and people have names. That’s how we know each other. Hers is Qian Xun Xue. If you can’t manage that, saying Chee-ahn is pretty close. Recognisable, at least, and it shows you think she’s a person with a name. Not a vegetable, as many of our media have been calling her ever since her plight hit the headlines.

I’ve heard TV1 and TV3 (which is still doing it tonight) call her “Pumpkin”. The Dominion Post called her that in screaming headlines today. The Press was doing so as well. Not only is this not OK, it’s insulting and casts her as, at best, some kind of doll, a prop for a news story. She’s not a toy – Qian is a person like you and me and just as deserving of a name.

I know when she first was reported as abandoned to the Australian Police they didn’t know her name. If they needed to give her a name, why couldn’t they have given a human one like Jane Doe as the Americans do for unidentified girls and women? Is it somehow OK to call her a vegetable because (let’s whisper it) she’s Chinese?

1. Telecom’s implementation hasn’t gone well. People are reporting lots of new spam, lost email, lost connectivity. This sort of thing is always a risk with IT implementations, but this one does seem to have been fairly bad.

2. Communications have not been good. Lots of people are complaining that they had no warning. Given that this affects a lot of people, it’s really not good enough. And coupled with the poor implementation, it has annoyed lots of people.

3. This is a change to the way Internet email works – unilateral and commercially-driven. Webmail has been withdrawn and people have been told they have to download software to use it in future. No idea if the software works on Macs or Linuxes. And people are saying that it puts advertising onto their computers. Yuk.

I’m left guessing what the point of this so-called upgrade is. A piece of ‘for download’ software is not what people want from Webmail. They want vanilla Internet email delivered through a web interface that works anywhere.

I know Telecom has to position itself to deal with the competition now Vodafone and others are starting to seriously compete, folloing the local loop unbundling. That’s good. But this is the wrong way, surely? Irritating your vast customer base doesn’t seem the best way of keeping them. And lots of the are irritated alright judging by the comments on the Herald article linked above.

So, if you are an Xtra customer, and you don’t like this, what to do? Basically, go somewhere else which offers plain and simple email and webmail. There are plenty of offers around at the moment. And if you want to future proof yourself so next time you change you won’t have to change your email address (you will this time unless you keep paying Xtra a few bucks a month to forward it), you should either use Gmail or get a domain of your own. Then you can take it with you next time you change. And one last tip – getting a name costs anything from $30 a year to $200 – check what your new ISP is going to charge.

Q: Domain names are the names we use for things on the Internet, right? How does all that work?

A: Yes, radionz.co.nz is an example of a domain name. We’ve talked in the past about how computers know each other by long numbers like international phone numbers. That’s how the core of the Internet was designed to work – with every machine knowing every other machine’s number. When the Internet was much smaller than it is now, there was a complete of list of machines on it that everybody shared. Obviously that’s not possible now – the Internet is a far too big, and the machines on it change every day, or more likely every second.

The naming system was added to provide a way to devolve the responsibility for naming computers out to people who might actually know what was going on their corner of the Internet.
That’s why names look the way they do – the right hand bit, like dot com or dot nz, is the least specific part, and they get more specific as you move from right to left. So, in www.radionz.co.nz, dot nz means that it’s a New Zealand name, co means that it’s a commercial body in New Zealand, RadioNZ is obviously the name of the company, and the dub dub dub is the name of the specific machine which serves web pages.

Q: The dub dub dub is optional, isn’t it? Why is that?

A: Yes. It’s a bit of an anachronism. The history there is that the Internet and the domain name system predates the World Wide Web – the famous three Ws – by quite a while, and that in the early days of the web, the web was just another service that people on the Internet offered, among others like FTP and Gopher, and the machine was named accordingly. These days the Web is overwhelmingly the most common information service that people offer on the Internet and so most companies have dropped the need for the dub dub dub on the front – their servers are just told to send any web traffic straight to the web server regardless. So, most web addresses will work without the www on the front, but not all of them – it depends on whether the particular server is set up that way. Any web masters or web mistresses listening out there, by the way, please do check your servers and make them accessible without the dub dub dub – why make your visitors type more than they need to?

Q: And what about the HTTP that you sometimes see on the front of web addresses?

A: That’s what’s called the protocol. It stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, which is the name for the way in which web pages are packaged up and transported across the Internet. Quoting the HTTP – it needs to be followed by a colon and two forward slashes – tells your computer that it’s a web page you want, not some other kind of service. You don’t generally need to say the http bit though – your web browser just assumes that you want a web page and supplies the http automatically. But here are alternative services to http, like the ones I just mentioned – gopher and FTP. Gopher was a kind of primeval world wide web driven by menus. Every gopher page was either a list of pointers to other pages or a document. There was a network of gopher servers across the Internet. There’s only a handful left now.

Q: What happened to gopher?

A: The World Wide Web, in short. It does everything gopher did and a lot more besides, so all the gopher servers turned into web servers. Another protocol was FTP or file transfer protocol – you still see this around quite a bit. FTP is just a way of shipping files around the Internet. Of course, the Web can do this for you as well, but there are some advantages to FTP such as speed, and its easier to move files in both directions – from the server to your PC and vice versa.

Q: Why are some sites dot nz and other dot com?

A: Dot com is what’s called a generic – it’s not tied to a country. Dot NZ is very much the New Zealand space on the Internet. Other countries have their own, like dot AU for Australia or dot UK for the United Kingdom.

Q: So does that mean that a dot NZ site is in New Zealand?

A: No. It means that site has chosen a name in New Zealand, but the site itself could be anywhere.

Q: So how do you get a name in dot NZ?

A: Quite easily – in fact, it’s InternetNZ, the group I’m president of, which manages the dot NZ names. It’s a good idea to have your own name – you can make your email and your website look like they belong to you that way. My name is it.gen.nz – that goes to my web site, and any email sent to that name ends up in with me. You get a name by asking an accredited dot NZ registrar. There’s a list on the Domain Name Commission’s web site at dnc.org.nz. Most New Zealand ISPs are on the list.

Q: What’s the difference between a .co.nz and a .org.nz? Are there others?

A: These are what are called second-level domains. We have them in dot NZ, as do lots of other countries like Australia and the UK. Some others like Canada and France don’t have a second level – everybody just registers their names directly under the country code, like say Jackson.ca. In New Zealand there are thirteen second level domains – .co.nz is the most popular but there are others like .org.nz, .net.nz and .govt.nz. Most are open second level names, like .co.nz, meaning anyone can register a name in them, but some like .govt.nz are controlled, or moderated in the jargon, meaning that only, a specific community, such as parts of government can get access to the names.

Q: What does it cost to have your own domain name?

A: New Zealand names are all the same wholesale price – $1.50 per month plus GST, which is $18 a year. That’s a wholesale price – you have to deal with an accredited registrar to buy one, and they put a margin on to cover their costs. The actual cost you will pay ranges from $25 a year upwards. Ask your ISP what a name will cost you – if it’s more than, say, $40 a year, I’d ask what services it’s supplying for the extra and I’d be tempted to look at a different ISP or another registrar if they couldn’t give me a good answer.

Q: How many names are there on the Internet?

A: Millions! Somewhere over 70 million in dot com alone. In New Zealand we are nudging up towards 300,000 names – in May the number grew by over 5,000.

Q: So, about the names – how do you choose a name?

A: Creatively! I think it’s no accident that the seriously big web companies – Google and Yahoo – have, well, creative names. They don’t sound anything like the traditional bricks and mortar companies. But the really big web companies are less than 10 years old, they have ridiculous names which have become household names, and they are bigger than most traditional companies you have heard of.

One thing to watch out for, though – don’t just go out and register a name which is a household name already, like Coke or Adidas, unless you are sure you know what you are doing – big companies can be very protective about their trademarks and you might hear from their lawyers in short order.

Q: So how does the system work? What happens when you type a name into your computer?

A: Several things – the computer has to convert the name into one of the IP numbers that computers use to address each other across the Internet. It does that by using the domain name system. When you ask it to look up a name, the first thing your computer does is ask one of the thirteen root servers that anchor the whole global domain name system. Every computer just knows the IP addresses of the thirteen servers. In fact there are eighty or so root servers now, using a kind of deep magic called Anycast to split up some of the thirteen, so they are spread over the world. There are two in New Zealand, one each in Wellington and Auckland. Anyway, if you’ve asked for, say, www.radionz.co.nz, the root server will reply with the address of the name servers which handle dot NZ. And your computer will then go to one of those servers and ask it about radionz.co.nz, and when it gets an answer it will ask the next in the chain where www.radionz.co.nz is. And ultimately it gets back an IP address, which is just dandy because it can have a conversation with another computer once it knows the IP address.

Q: How does one computer talk to another once it knows the IP address?

A: The details of that are a topic for another conversation. But the important thing here is that communicating between numbered machines is something that is just built into the core of the Internet protocols – any machine on the Internet knows how to do it. But the domain name system gives us a way to have memorable names attached to those machine numbers.

Links

The New Zealand Domain Name Commissioner, a list of New Zealand registrars, and a booklet on how to get a New Zealand domain name.

A Wikipedia article about gopher, and a link to a gopher site (works in Firefox, not Internet Explorer).

The locations of the root servers.

Domain name numbers for generic addresses and for dot nz.