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"RIP Jon." In the 90s when learning about the internet I remember reading stuff written by "Jon Postel", a univeristy employee in California Today, a curious

"RIP Jon." In the 90s when learning about the internet I remember reading stuff written by "Jon Postel", a univeristy employee in California Today, a curious student trying to learn about the internet would probably end up reading stuff written by "Big Tech" and/or academics who have financial relationships with these or other so-called "tech" companies I remember Postel and one other person, perhaps at SRI, I forget her name, had a plan for these sort of hierarchical geographical domainnames. I recall it was _not_ commercial in nature. It "seemed like" Postel saw the internet, including DNS, as a public service. Needless to say, any such non-commercial vision was not realised ICANN DNS became a money grab If Postel had survived to today, would he have sold out like so many of his peers I like to pretend he would not but I have no idea

donmcronald 6mo ago
> ICANN DNS became a money grab It’s too bad more people don’t understand how the domain industry is structured under ICANN. IMO, the registries are ICANN’s customers, the registrants are part of the product being sold, and the registrars are a liability shield. One day there will be a grab for .com.
- Barbing 6mo ago
  Fun fact (you probably remember), you used to report phishing sites with one simple email and they would actually be taken down. These days I get the feeling a lot of the registrars are essentially/effectively in on it (at least by inaction). A well-run ICANN feels needed, who can track takedown compliance.
  - donmcronald 6mo ago
    Abuse handling is a mess. AFAIK, the registries, registrars, and ICANN all share responsibility in terms of mitigation. There’s no consistency.
  - ocdtrekkie 6mo ago
    The entire domain squatting/parking industry exists because filing an ICANN dispute costs more than paying the squatter. Absolutely insane.
  - marysol5 6mo ago
    looking at you Cloudflare Funnily enough years ago I did a takedown request for terrorist material, realised that the host was in the same building as me. So when the ticket got closed and they didn't make any changes. I walked into their office and showed them a lovely video they had on their network. Suddenly they took action.
- icedchai 6mo ago
  I still remember when they started charging for domains. Until late 1995, they were free.
- arjie 6mo ago
  In hindsight, quite lucky it’s a California non profit. That allowed us to stop the dot-org sale.
- CalRobert 6mo ago
  It’s a protection racket too. When they first launched generic tld’s, donuts(a shady registry) had a product that didn’t allow domain registration but -did- block registration of a domain across all tlds in case you didn’t want to pay for company-name.[200+ tlds]
car 6mo ago
The hierarchical geographical domains you are remembering must have been the 2000 '.geo' Top Level Domain (TLD) proposal from SRI. It didn't work out, but I remember thinking at the time that it was a cool idea. It would have provided geographical information based on a domain encoded grid, not for human but machine consumption (e.g. acme.2e5n.10e30n.geo). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.geo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.geo In a similar vein there is the 'e164.arpa' domain for mapping telephone numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping
1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
I believe the document I'm thinking of may have been RFC 1480 https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1480.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1480.txt If so, the other person was Ann W Cooper AFAIK Cooper was never at SRI, but Postel was at one time Putting aside the inaccurate memory, the point I wish to make as an ordinary computer user reading about the internet is that Postel wrote about the internet as a _public resource_. Check out the tone of this random Postel RFC, for example https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt Postel received a PhD in Computer Science in 1974 from UCLA and, apparently, he was a _two-finger typist_ who preferred handwritten slides over PowerPoint and used monochrome logos instead of color (I find this interesting; I'm not suggesting anyone else would) Joyce K Reynolds, who co-authored some of the most important RFCs with Postel on protocols, was a social sciences major (another factoid I find interesting)

donmcronald 6mo ago

> ICANN DNS became a money grab It’s too bad more people don’t understand how the domain industry is structured under ICANN. IMO, the registries are ICANN’s customers, the registrants are part of the product being sold, and the registrars are a liability shield. One day there will be a grab for .com.

Barbing 6mo ago
Fun fact (you probably remember), you used to report phishing sites with one simple email and they would actually be taken down. These days I get the feeling a lot of the registrars are essentially/effectively in on it (at least by inaction). A well-run ICANN feels needed, who can track takedown compliance.
- donmcronald 6mo ago
  Abuse handling is a mess. AFAIK, the registries, registrars, and ICANN all share responsibility in terms of mitigation. There’s no consistency.
- ocdtrekkie 6mo ago
  The entire domain squatting/parking industry exists because filing an ICANN dispute costs more than paying the squatter. Absolutely insane.
- marysol5 6mo ago
  looking at you Cloudflare Funnily enough years ago I did a takedown request for terrorist material, realised that the host was in the same building as me. So when the ticket got closed and they didn't make any changes. I walked into their office and showed them a lovely video they had on their network. Suddenly they took action.
icedchai 6mo ago
I still remember when they started charging for domains. Until late 1995, they were free.
arjie 6mo ago
In hindsight, quite lucky it’s a California non profit. That allowed us to stop the dot-org sale.
CalRobert 6mo ago
It’s a protection racket too. When they first launched generic tld’s, donuts(a shady registry) had a product that didn’t allow domain registration but -did- block registration of a domain across all tlds in case you didn’t want to pay for company-name.[200+ tlds]

car 6mo ago

The hierarchical geographical domains you are remembering must have been the 2000 '.geo' Top Level Domain (TLD) proposal from SRI. It didn't work out, but I remember thinking at the time that it was a cool idea. It would have provided geographical information based on a domain encoded grid, not for human but machine consumption (e.g. acme.2e5n.10e30n.geo). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.geo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.geo In a similar vein there is the 'e164.arpa' domain for mapping telephone numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping

1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago

I believe the document I'm thinking of may have been RFC 1480 https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1480.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1480.txt If so, the other person was Ann W Cooper AFAIK Cooper was never at SRI, but Postel was at one time Putting aside the inaccurate memory, the point I wish to make as an ordinary computer user reading about the internet is that Postel wrote about the internet as a _public resource_. Check out the tone of this random Postel RFC, for example https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt Postel received a PhD in Computer Science in 1974 from UCLA and, apparently, he was a _two-finger typist_ who preferred handwritten slides over PowerPoint and used monochrome logos instead of color (I find this interesting; I'm not suggesting anyone else would) Joyce K Reynolds, who co-authored some of the most important RFCs with Postel on protocols, was a social sciences major (another factoid I find interesting)