Category Archives: DNS

Are domain name registrars ready for IPv6 ?

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 4 April 2008 None comments
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Now that ICANN has added IPv6 name servers for the root zone, and that many registries have enabled IPv6 on their DNS servers, I thought it would have been easy to update the DNS records pointing to my domain to mention a IPv6-only DNS server. This way, we could have native name resolution end-to-end in IPv6. We are not there yet, it seems.

The web interface my registrar (Gandi) uses does not allow IPv6 addresses. Their support desk informed me that they do not yet handle IPv6 addresses in their web forms.

There is obvious workarounds, of course. One is to assign both a IPv4 and a IPv6 address to the DNS server, as long as it is in under another domain. However, if the DNS server is under the same domain, a glue record would need to be inserted in the TLD zone file. This is currently not possible, at least with the tools provided to the average domain name user.

I am really looking forward to the IPv6 workshop that ALAC is planning at the Paris meeting of ICANN next June and see with other constituencies how these showstoppers can be addressed.

Luxembourg to offer an investor-friendly legal environment for Domain Names

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 11 January 2008 2 comments
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EuroDNS, the Luxembourg registrar, used its well attended New Year party last Wednesday to invite the Minister of Telecoms, Jean-Louis Schiltz to talk about a law voted at the end of December 2007. According to the Finance and Budget Commission Report on Draft Law 5801, «Revenues generated from use of, or license to use, a Domain Name are exempted from Luxembourg corporate taxes up to 80% ».

This is of course excellent news for EuroDNS, but also for domain name investors, both in Luxembourg and worldwide. ICANN will probably launch a RFP for new TLDs next June in Paris. As such, someone took the opportunity to mention that Luxembourg would be an ideal place to launch a new gTLD. The proposed gTLD floating around seems so obvious it is surprising no-one though about it before. At this stage, I cannot expand any further until this proposal is formalized, but stay tuned for more news.

Whois: if you want privacy, pay for it

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 9 November 2007 2 comments
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Netchoice, a lobbying group for the e-commerce industry had a strange reaction on the failure of the GNSO working group on whois to reach a consensus.

After all, they say, “Privacy concerns with Whois that were identified years ago have already been addressed by in the marketplace“. In other words, if you want privacy for your domain name registration, you need to pay extra for proxy services.

I understand that the industry wants to always sell more services. That means money for them. However, those proxy services were developed as a workaround to the current whois system, which does not protect privacy, and in wait for a more global solution.

But of course, the main question is that privacy is a fundamental human right under article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human rights. As far as I know, human rights are for everyone, not just for those who can pay for it. What is next ? Will we need to buy the right for freedom of expression or to organize in trade unions ?

Comments on the GNSO report on new GTLDs

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 28 October 2007 None comments
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As I am not able to attend the Los Angeles meeting of ICANN, I sent the following comment to the GtLD workshop:

There have been numerous comments periods over this report in the past and what I want to state is not new, but it seems it has not been addressed in the report.

Basically, the report is based on the assumption that the current model for gTLDs is the only possible one. It assumes that domain names will be sold on a mass market, mostly through intermediaries, and that this will generate a profit.

Was it ever envisaged that there could be other business models that do not fit into that mould ? There are several but, unfortunately, it will be next to impossible to try them out. There may be TLDs for very small communities, or an advertisement driven model in which domains are given out for free. A dynamic DNS service, like DynDNS.org, but performed a the TLD level could not accommodate the registrar model.

Regarding the Application Fee for proposed new gTLDs: while the report states that “Implementation Guideline B suggests that application fees be designed to ensure that adequate resources exist to cover the total cost of administering the new gTLD process, and that application fees may vary for different applicants”, the criteria that will be applied to various applicants are not yet clear, and this is a sensitive area. Will that be a one-time upfront cost ? How do we set it to avoid eliminating good ideas from the start of the process and privilege those incumbent players with deep pockets ? Could that be a per domain name fee to be paid over several years once the TLD is up and running ?

In short, the way the application fee is implemented will be a key factor for the success of new business models.

How can the engineering community and the users meet ?

Posted by Patrick Vande Walle on 19 September 2007 4 comments
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There is currently a discussion going on between Milton Mueller and Patrik Fältström over the deployment of DNSSEC on the root servers. I think the discussion exemplifies the difficult relation between those who develop standards and those who use them.

On the one hand, Milton points out that the way the signing of the root zone will be done will have a great influence on the subjective trust people and nation states will have towards the system. On the other hand, Patrik states that “DNSSEC is just digital signatures on records in this database”. Both are right, of course, but they do not speak the same language. It is just like saying that a spam e-mail which is RFC (2)822 compliant is a legitimate one. From a technical point of view, it certainly is. From a social point of view, it is still an annoyance.

There is this often expressed feeling in the engineering community that technological choices are politically neutral by design. Nothing is further away from truth, as has been demonstrated by people like Lawrence Lessig. The development of standards is done exclusively by companies. Notice, for example, that those attending IETF meetings do it on company time and budget. The actual users are absent. The logic that says that IETF meetings are open to all is flawed by the fact that an average IETF meeting will cost you around $1500 to attend. Hence, there is an economic barrier to the participation of individuals. Additionally, the influence you might have on a process is proportional to the consideration you get from your peers. Newcomers need quite some time to get accepted by the community, especially if they are not engineers.
Companies are driven by the market. If there is no potential market, there is no need to develop a new standard. A good example of this is the fact that you cannot yet send an e-mail to, say, brønshøj@københavn.dk or addresses in native Cyrillic, Arabic or Asian scripts. Pretty soon, the right hand side will be dealt with, thanks to IDNs. But the use of non-ASCII character sets on the left hand side is still a not standardized. The EAI working group in the IETF has only been launched a few months ago. Why did it take so long ? I guess that the need for this has only appeared in recent years. As long as the Internet was mainly used by the American / Western European world, being restricted to 7 bit ASCII was not much of an annoyance, if at all. Now that the user base has enlarged to include countries that do not use the latin alphabet, it becomes a hot topic. However, it will take years before this can be implemented in the software we use every day. Notice, for example, that most operating systems today still require the user name to be in 7 bit ASCII.

Similar issues exist with RIRs, where again the actual IP address users are absent for the same set of reasons detailed above. However, which IPv6 prefix is going to be allocated by your ISP to your home network in a few years from now is an important one. Yet, those who are active in policy development at the RIR level are those very ISPs. The policy will be related to their commercial interest, which may – or may not – match the user’s interests.

End users are represented in ICANN. I am the first to admit that ALAC may be far from perfect, but it has the merit to exist and we can improve it. Isn’t time for a similar concept for the IETF, the RIRs and all those bodies that have a crucial effect on our user experience while using the Internet ? Being closer to user needs, without the filtering of the marketing department, may help prioritize the future developments.