Discuss mailing list

[Jeff Taylor <shdwdrgn AT sourpuss.net>]

On 12/03/2016 07:16 PM, kevin wrote:
> As for ICANN, they could simply look at all OpenNIC tlds and grab them
> for ICANN use.

Actually that's not true.  We generate our own root zone for opennic, 
and that script forces opennic TLDs to take precedence and override any 
conflicting ICANN domains.  So even in our current situation where 
Amazon's .free has made it into the ICANN root, we opennic users still 
have full access to our existing domains.  The only way for the ICANN 
TLD to get into our root zone is if I remove the references to opennic's 
TLD first.  If we voted to create our own .com zone, we could do it 
because we maintain full control of the zone files used by opennic from 
top to bottom.  If we wanted to maintain ICANN's .com zone, but replace 
google.com with our own domain, we could do that too.

In case you don't realize it, I wrote the scripts and have been 
maintaining opennic's root zone for a number of years.  Most people 
never hear about this because for the most part everything runs smoothly 
and your queries always return the results that you expect (yes there 
have been some hiccups and I do what I can to try to make the scripts 
more bulletproof when something breaks).  If I had ever betrayed that 
trust, you can bet that everyone would have known about it!

However the point is that the root zone is an absolutely critical piece 
of the DNS infrastructure, and changes to the root can have significant 
affects on how you see the whole internet.  We can shape that view 
however we want, and ICANN cannot simply reserve our existing TLDs and 
shut us down.  The initial purpose of opennic was to show that ICANN 
does not HAVE to be the ones in control of the internet, and that anyone 
can set up a DNS service to do the same thing as them, but without the 
huge costs.  We've been here for over 16 years and have a world-wide 
presence.  They may try ignore us, but the proof is here that ICANN is 
not actually as important as they would like to think.