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[Jonah Aragon <jonaharagon AT gmail.com>]

Thanks for providing some insight into your plans Simon, I agree with essentially everything you said.

If you do go with the auction plan, the only thing I'd have to say would be to implement protections for current domain holders. I think either renewals will have to *always* be free, OR *always* be the price you bought it for (so if you got it free, renewals are free, if you got it in an auction for say, $10, renewals are $10); and make that policy clear. There should also be a grace period of 20-60 days after expiration where only the domain holder can re-register; similar to how ICANN gTLDs are operated.

I'm left wondering how exactly the registration process will work if there's an auction component though. If an auction period was like 20 days, your domains wouldn't be immediately registered which might lower interest in your domain, but if you granted domains immediately with a 20 day auction period where someone could snatch it from you, there's some clear issues with that direction too.

Obviously some thought would have to be put into the process, I trust you'll be able to figure out some solution by the time your draft is final.

Jonah 

On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 10:26 AM Simon Castano <discuss AT lists.opennicproject.org> wrote:

Thanks again for you kind feedback and please see hereafter some
insight.

On 2016-12-08 00:51, Maiyannah Bishop wrote:
> For my personal view: I'm not against levying fees or fines if the way
> in which they are levied is fair and predictable.  My concern is the
> potential for abuse with your idea for dispute resolution.  An auction
> is not an appropriate dispute resolution method, in my opinion.

I can clearly see how auction on renewal could be used as a form of
censorship where whomever has money could close down any domain he
doesn't like. This is clearly not intended and we will define another
mechanism to avoid such abuse.


On 2016-12-07 20:55, spaesani AT mail.com wrote:
> Considering liberland may never be recognized as a country I would
> suggest going with the fair policy of allowing potential country
> code or name TLDs with the understanding and obligation to cede the
> tld to new nations upon request.

On 2016-12-08 03:24, Jonah Aragon wrote:
> I completely agree with spaesani's approval. I think it would be best
> to allow country-hopefuls to apply directly with us with the
> understanding that IF a country that isn't theirs is created with the
> same two letter code, they'll have to give up their rights to the
> zone, and IF they are accepted as a country they have to give all
> OpenNIC domain holders the domains they had on the new ICANN delegated
> zone. I think those policies would be fair for any countries hoping to
> get a TLD on OpenNIC.

Fair enough. We will make this clear in our charter by mentionning that
if "LL" is added to ISO3166 and not deleguated to Liberland, Liberland
will cede the TLD to whomever has received official delegation.
We also agree that IF we are accepted as a country we will give all
OpenNIC domain holders the domains they had on the new ICANN delegated
zone.


On 2016-12-08 03:04, Maiyannah Bishop wrote:
> As regards a TLD for a new ccTLD, I really think its best they go
> through New Nations for this, which we peer with, rather than us
> directly.

Mainly answered by Jonah hereafter, nothing to add.

On 2016-12-08 03:24, Jonah Aragon wrote:
> Being honest, I can clearly see why Liberland decided to go with us
> instead of New Nations. New Nations doesn't seem to have the
> decentralized control of T1 servers we have, so they wouldn't be able
> to host their own zone. And looking through New Nation's forums, there
> seem to be a lot of requests that have been open for years, dating
> back to and before 2011. The legitimacy of those requests are indeed
> questionable, but I can see why someone on a slightly faster agenda
> than "whenever," would be interested in just going with us directly as
> we have a larger user base.


On 2016-12-08 03:25, Jonah Aragon wrote:
> Well we can't take their TLDs for our own purposes. I'm sure it
> wouldn't fit Liberland's needs as a country.

Correct: .lib or .bit have no added value for us. We are aiming for a
ccTLD.


On 2016-12-08 04:28, Jonah Aragon wrote:
> From a common sense perspective at the moment, it makes no sense to
> charge
> for domains because OpenNIC--while being the largest alt-root--still
> has no
> significant usage in the real world. But OpenNIC as a project should
> not be
> about limiting the rights of TLD operators; and it shouldn't force the
> distribution of said earnings among all contributors to the project
> either.

I could not have said it better. Gratis works nice at the moment but if
OpenNIC were to scale I trust that most operator could not affoard
high-end / high-capacity and we need to make sure we can scale as
appropriate.
Distribution of earning is also arguable. In fact, if Liberland were to
bring significant load on OpenNIC infrastructure it would de facto raise
the value of all TLD hosted by OpenNIC - we could see OpenNIC as some
sort of shopping mall which had only give-away shops, a new shop join
the mall but start charging for items, while this new shop is benefiting
from the mall infrastructure, give-away shops will see more customer
passing in the mall and may in turn charge fees for item there were
previously giving away.
It is basic supply and demand economics : supply is actually higher than
demand for OpenNIC domain since it doesn't reach a lot of users. We do
not say we will bring a lot of traffic but if we manage to charge for
domains - which is not even guaranteed - it will mean that demand be
high enough for people to pay which in turns implies that supply (server
capacity) needs to be increased, as such operators costs increases, up
to a point where you cannot do that for free...
On the other hand we are not opposed to a fair compensation system if it
makes more sense to OpenNIC community


On 2016-12-08 04:51, vv AT cgs.pw wrote:
> I do however, have an issue with people who are always
> trying to make something into being about making money.
> Working for a living is fine, I have almost 6 decades
> of understanding in that regard, so am no newcomer to
> the ideas of how one might contribute to society and
> get something for oneself in return. In fact this is
> why I am questioning the concept of mixing money with
> what I see as an altruistic project.
>
> I keep seeing unrealistic dreaming about how someone
> plans to compete with ICANN and a significant number of
> people will magically decide that they're going to
> take a break from Facebook and learn how to change their
> DNS entries in their /etc/resolv.conf or however it's
> done in their OS. I'll tell you right now. It's not
> going to happen. There will be no significant
> opportunity for commercialisation or monetisation
> magically presenting itself in the OpenNIC ecosystem.

It is not about making money but covering operation expenditure:
hardware isn't free, electricity and bandwidth either. We are planning
to operate our TLD under a not-for-profit organization where revenue
would be reinvested into maintainance, infrastructure and R&D.
Furthermore, we do not plan to compete with ICANN - we actually lobby
for delegation - but rather aim for collaboration, interoperability and
most of all avoid any single point of failure.


On 2016-12-08 09:16, spaesani AT mail.com wrote:
> Affording a tld at the cost of a T1 (my mistake earlier with T2) is
> attractive considering icann's  180.000 usd for the application alone 
> . Not to mention years waiting for application windows.

ICANN indeed charges 180 k$ for gTLD. ccTLD are simply delegated at no
cost as soon as a country is added to ISO3166.
In other words, we are not contacting OpenNIC to save or money or time.


I hope this clarifies our point of view, or rather mince since the above
answers were not prepared with prior internal consulting.


Greetings,

---
Simon J. Castaño Segondy
Member of the representation of the Free Republic of Liberland in the
Netherlands


On 2016-12-08 00:51, Maiyannah Bishop wrote:
> Well, you asked for opinions, and a lot of us have been conditioned
> to express them in the form of votes ;)
>
> For my personal view: I'm not against levying fees or fines if the way
> in which they are levied is fair and predictable.  My concern is the
> potential for abuse with your idea for dispute resolution.  An auction
> is not an appropriate dispute resolution method, in my opinion.
>
> I have no problem with any of your other suggestions.
> -mb
>
> On 2016-12-07 17:16, Simon Castano wrote:
>
>> We are indeed not calling for any vote at the moment but rather
>> gathering feedback to prepare our TLD charter, and finally call for
>> vote to peer .ll domains to OpenNIC. We expect the request to be
>> sent within six month.
>>
>> We will prepare our draft policies considering what has been said
>> and surely ask for opinion sooner or later.
>> Pricing and renewal mechanism are definitely not final.
>>
>> Thanks so far,
>>
>> ---
>> Simon
>>
>> On 2016-12-07 22:55, Jonah Aragon wrote:
>>
>>> I'm fine with the pricing aspects of the domains during the
>>> registration process. I don't think OpenNIC has to be free and
>>> shouldn't mandate that on their domains, that's unfeasible at a
>>> certain point.
>>>
>>> The pricing system is flawed though in ways that could and will
>>> make
>>> it susceptible to abuse when it came time to renew, which I
>>> pointed
>>> out a few days ago. For that reason if this was brought to a vote
>>> I
>>> would also vote no. If Liberland included policies that protected
>>> current domain owners when renewal time came around I would
>>> probably
>>> vote yes.
>>>
>>> That's just my opinion. This isn't even being called to a vote
>>> right
>>> now anyways so there's no reason to pick a side.
>>>
>>> Jonah


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