| | At Large Membership and Civil Society Participation in ICANN |
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 Anonymous ICANNwatch Messages Considered Harmful?
posted by michael on Friday June 04 2004, @03:55AM
dtobias writes "I wonder if it might be time for ICANNwatch to consider banning anonymous messages. Yeah, free speech is great, but people hiding behind anonymity on this site haven't lately been engaging in insightful discussion on the issues; rather, the "anonymous cowards" (as Slashdot terms them) have unleashed an astounding quantity of utterly delusional "commentary", and seem to have chased off practically all the rational commentators who once made the discussions here interesting and informative."
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"Among other things, anonymous comments have made the astounding assertion that the .org TLD is "being phased out" and is already unsupported by some "cable TV-style Internet connections" because few people are interested in going to .org sites and they just waste bandwidth. Those services do, however, support the more desirable and popular .travel and .xxx domains. (And you thought those two were merely applications for TLDs that didn't exist yet?) Furthermore, the entire community of organizations with .org addresses, from the ACLU and the EFF to the Christian Coalition and David Duke, is uniformly in solidarity with one another in a vast conspiracy to reduce the diversity of society and the Internet, and hence diversity would be enhanced by kicking them off the 'Net.
As long as such things can be posted anonymously, we have no way of knowing whether they're all being written by a single mental-institution escapee, or if there's a groundswell of militant ignorance out there. If people were required to register before posting, then at least individuals would be able to gain and lose reputations and karma for the quality of their participation."
[Editor's note: I personally would be very reluctant to take this step. People who do not want to read anonymous comments need only set their comment reading preferences to +1, and they will never see an anonymous message unless it's moderated up by someone. All signed comments start with a score of at least 1, all anonymous comments start with a score of zero.]
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Anonymous ICANNwatch Messages Considered Harmful?
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The Fine Print:
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them.
We are not responsible for them in any way.
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"... and seem to have chased off practically all the rational commentators who once made the discussions here interesting and informative."
I don't think so. "Interesting and informative" discussions come from interesting, exciting topics. Lately (at least several months), topics here (and other venues like icbtollfree.com) have little stimulating news to report and discuss.
New TLDs were the hot topic back in 2000, but now it's ho-hum, ho-hum.
If not for John Berryhill's stellar contributions, this place would be about as stimulating as the old indian-head TV test pattern ... when there wasn't enough content to fill TV airtime.
The Internet has a built-in 24 hour news cycle. One must be creative to keep everything interesting, all the time.
Ban anonymous posters and you'll have a real sleeper here.
Some anonymous posters here have deeper insight than the narrowly-focused Mr. Tobias. Grow up Dan.
It would be nice to follow up on ICANN spreading viruses through comment forum(s). If true, it's really very troubling. If not true, ICANN should vociferously reassure the rest of us.
No, I'm not John Berryhill.
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[ Reply to This | Parent
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OK, anonymous coward... if you want to be taken with even the most microscopic fragment of seriousness, it's time to put up or shut up... provide some documentation for the more bizarre claims you've made, most notably:
1) Please give a specific company, product, or service name, and contact info such as a Web site, e-mail address, phone number, or snail-mail address, for the supposed "cable-TV-like" Internet service that makes .ORG addresses accessible only upon payment of an extra fee.
2) Please give a specific citation (URL) for any official statement by an official of ICANN or other organizations involved in Internet governance to the effect that there is any plan in progress, or even being considered, to discontinue any currently-existing TLDs, including .ORG and the four-letter TLDs like .INFO and .NAME.
If you can't do any of this, please crawl back into your hole and stop bothering people with your psychotic ravings.
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[ Reply to This | Parent
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"As long as such things can be posted anonymously, we have no way of knowing whether they're all being written by a single mental-institution escapee, or if there's a groundswell of militant ignorance out there."
How about logging the source IP address (or network) for each anonymous posting? That way, some idea can be gathered if there is one mental patient out there!
Or alternatively, limit the number of anonymous postings by IP address per day to (hopefully) improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
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[ Reply to This | Parent
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.TV is indeed a country code domain -- for the island nation of Tuvalu, which has chosen to make a bit of money by letting somebody market it as if it really stood for "television".
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[ Reply to This | Parent
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I'm perfectly aware of what a WIKI is, and have read and edited them myself.
I'm also aware that no such TLD as .WIKI exists in the standard Internet namespace at this time, not because there's anything invalid about four-letter TLDs (.INFO, .NAME, .COOP, and .ARPA all exist), but because that particular one is not in the root.
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[ Reply to This | Parent
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That seems odd. I will look into it.
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[ Reply to This | Parent
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You seem to have a negative karma score of -2, which is why you don't get the signed comment bonus. Karma represents the judgment of moderators, users who help police the site.
SO I should have said that the 'starting at 1' rule didn't apply to people who rack up negative karma.
The whole thing is explained in our FAQ. You can get some idea of your karma score by visting your user info pages.
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[ Reply to This | Parent
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It's pretty much standard language out of ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC and ICANN that IP addresses (and the blocks that hold them) are not owned. Of course that's merely an assertion.
But I have rarely heard anyone claim that an IP address is required to be unique and that folks are legally prevented from creating local instances of an address. It is an axiom of faith that the acceptance of routing information is purely voluntary, the fact that packets reach your block is merely an aspect of that voluntary acceptance of routing information by most, if not all, ISPs and not a necessary result of the allocation of a netblock to you.
What I hear you claiming is that anyone who sets up a DNS server at the f-root address is somehow engaged in a legally actionable misrepresentation. If so, who is being harmed, the user or the f-root "owner"? And what is that nature of that harm?
You claim it is an "unlawful communications intercept" to have a local instance of the f-root server address? That is a rather bold assertion that makes many assumptions. The first is that somehow the packet was intended for the f-root server as opposed to simply one of a class of fungible servers that offer authoritative answers to root zone queries. The second is that it is an "intercept", much less that it is "unlawful" (which of course raises the question of "under the laws of what jurisdiction?")
The root servers are a wonderful service - and I thank you for your contribution. But your claim of ownership is quite a reach. And as a member of the internet community, the apparent lack of information regarding the financial condition underlying the continued operation of the f-root group is troublesome (it would be useful for you to post the IRS 990s, which are, public documents.)
Your claim that there shall be no DNS service on 192.5.5.241 except yours strikes me as a landgrab not much different than Versign's Sitefinder - it is an assertion of private power over a privileged spot in the internet infrastructure.
What you are claiming is that internet users are not to be allowed to route around your service. You are the beneficiary of a conjunction of voluntary routing decisions. You seem to now be demanding that such decisions are no longer voluntary but must be coerced in your favor. That is something that I do not accept as a good thing for the internet nor do I see any legal throries that would support such a claim.
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ICANN's board never considered, much less decided any question with regard to anycasting of DNS roots.
Rather the question was silently abandoned to the judgement and action of the root server operators themselves. Fortunately for the net these are thoughtful and capable folks. Unfortunately for the net these folks are mortal, run out of money, and are not in any way constrained from taking other actions (such as selling their roles or offering differential services or data mining).
ICANN should have been overseeing these matters. But ICANN has abandoned its post.
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