Mozilla and the Internet
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[Mozilla's Eric Rescorla] What the heck happened with .org?
If you are following the tech news, you might have seen the announcement that ICANN withheld consent for the change of control of the Public Interest Registry and that this had some implications for .org. However, unless you follow a lot of DNS inside baseball, it might not be that clear what all this means. This post is intended to give a high level overview of the background here and what happened with .org. In addition, Mozilla has been actively engaged in the public discussion on this topic; see here for a good starting point.
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During this period the actual name registrations were handled by a series of government contractors (first SRI and then Network Solutions) but the creation and assignment of the top-level domains was under the control of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which in practice, mostly meant the decisions of its Director, Jon Postel. However, as the Internet became bigger, this became increasingly untenable especially as IANA was run under a contract to the US government. Through a long and somewhat complicated series of events, in 1998 this responsibility was handed off to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which administers the overall system, including setting the overall rules and determining which gTLDs will exist (which ccTLDs exist is determined by ISO 3166-1 country codes, as described in RFC 1591). ICANN has created a pile of new gTLDs, such as .dev, .biz, and .wtf (you may be wondering whether the world really needed .wtf, but there it is). As an aside, many of the newer names you see registered are not actually under gTLDs, but rather ccTLDs that happen to correspond to countries lucky enough to have cool sounding country codes. For instance, .io is actually the British Indian Ocean’s TLD and .tv belongs to Tuvalu.
One of the other things that ICANN does is determine who gets to run each TLD. The way this all works is that ICANN determines who gets to be the registry, i.e., who keeps the records of who has which name as well as some of the technical data needed to actually route name lookups. The actual work of registering domain names is done by a registrar, who engages with the customer. Importantly, while registrars compete for business at some level (i.e., multiple people can sell you a domain in .com), there is only one registry for a given TLD and so they don’t have any price competition within that TLD; if you want a .com domain, VeriSign gets to set the price floor. Moreover, ICANN doesn’t really try to keep prices down; in fact, they recently removed the cap on the price of .org domains (bringing it in line with most other TLDs). One interesting fact about these contracts is that they are effectively perpetual: the contracts themselves are for quite long terms and registry agreements typically provide for automatic renewal except under cases of significant misbehavior by the registry. In other words, this is a more or less permanent claim on the revenues for a given TLD.
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Heads-Up to RSS Reader Authors
NetNewsWire 5.0.1 for iOS is delayed due to an apparently new, or newly-enforced, issue: if an RSS reader includes default feeds, Apple will ask for documentation that says you have permission to include those default feeds.
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Why Forking HTML Into A Static Language Doesn't Make Sense
A bigger issue is that defining a static fork of HTML is easy, but persuading Web developers to use it is where the real problem lies, and that is immensely difficult and no-one has any good ideas for how to do it. Of course, if you do find a way to persuade Web developers to avoid features you don't like, there isn't much value in defining a specific "static subset" of HTML.
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