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[Amunak <amunak AT amunak.net>]

On 8.12.2016 05:04, Maiyannah Bishop wrote:

On 2016-12-07 22:56, Jonah Aragon wrote:

If OpenNIC ever wants to be a serious alternative for the DNS system everyone will kind of need to accept some basic facts here, we can't exactly go about doing everything for free for everyone forever if our userbase grew. We have an opportunity to not make mistakes ICANN made, but charging for domains was not one of those.

Why not?

And why shouldn't I be compensated for the bandwidth a TLD operators costs me as a T2 operator?  It isn't cheap to get the amount of transfer a single reflection-style or DDOS attack going across a nameserver can cost at any sort of "big player" level.  Just one across the local DNS at the datacenter I used to moonlight at would have been expensive if it was being charged at the level end-users are charged by the DCs, let alone home ISPs.  It is after all for this reason that it is discouraged to run a T2 let alone T1 nameserver if you have a cap, but believe you me, if you don't have one before a major attack, you will afterwards.

Noone is forcing you to provide a T2 server. And I think noone even says it has to be free (correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a while since I read the OpenNIC guideliness). I believe that if you want to provide a paid T2 server (with some kind of whitelisting for paying users) nothing is stopping you. And by the nature of DNS noone even really can stop you. At worst you would not be allowed to be listed among the "official" OpenNIC T2 servers. But that doesn't prevent you from providing such a service. And to be fair I think that it's totally fair to charge for such service - you may have a hard time getting customers (users), especially if you didn't offer anything extra, but if you were reliable and had perhaps some extra services it may be interesting.

So in short: you can be compensated for your work and bandwidth if you want and can make it work. But at the same time OpenNIC was not set up to compensate T2 server operators (or any ops for that matter). If you don't like that you may propose a change or simply withdraw your server from the pool and stop providing the service. Plenty of people have done that for one reason or another.

I think that as long as there are enough volunteer server operators there is no need to incentivize people with any payment scheme.

And why must a "serious" project be a business venture?  Linux isn't a business venture.  The Free Sofware Foundation and GNU that it supports isn't a business venture.  Both of them are much larger infrastructures and ecosystems than OpenNIC is likely to ever be.

While the subjects you listed are not for-profit organizations they are certainly run like businesses. They still have structure, financial plans, the take donations, pay employees, etc. They couldn't work without that. And while OpenNIC has a very different structure, if we want to grow there will eventually have to be some kind of business-like structure and legal status (I expect us to become a non-profit).

There's a lot of false dichotomy going on here: it is entirely possible for a large network infrastructure to be done for free or at the very least non-profit.
-mb