RE: [Membership] ICANN: The Issue of Membership

[George Conrades <gconrades@polarisventures.com>]

Thanks, Russ.

-----Original Message-----
From: a@help.org [mailto:a@help.org]
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 1999 5:23 PM
To: membership@icann.org
Subject: RE: [Membership] ICANN: The Issue of Membership


Even if an administrator did 'control' which e--mail addresses belong to
what person (which, of course, does not happen in the real world) you would
need to cross-check all the administrators on earth to ensure no duplicates.
You would also be trying to verify millions of e-mail addresses around the
world, in different countries, etc.  Even if an administrator did 'verify'
the addresses how can you be sure they are telling you the correct
information?  Even if this all could be done it would cost millions to
verify and keep track of this stuff.  At this point, Internic cannot even
verify domain holders, not to mention e-mail holders.  Plus, administrators
cannot start verifying users to a third parties due to privacy policies,
data protection laws, etc.  Can you imagine trying to call AOL to verify
e-mail addresses?  Also, what is going to stop me from registering a domain,
setting up an e-mail server, and using a million different names to use as
separate votes?  If you ask me I'll verify them all and set up an foreign
address so I cannot be pegged with fraud if I am caught.  The Internet is no
longer a small group of friendly administrators.

Internic is going through this problem right now with the domain
registration games.  (However, I believe the problems have been caused by
Internic's own policies.  I believe they have created a false sense of a
'shortage' of domain names as a marketing ploy similar to the Beanie Babies
marketing strategy).  They had to change the format of the WHOIS results to
try to cope until the system is turned over to the distributed registrar
system (you will see they removed notations of domains 'on hold' and removed
the 'records creation date.').  What people do is register huge numbers of
domains and try to sell them before they are released again.  They change
their addresses to try to fool Internic.  They then use the same trick to
register the domain again the day before it is publicly available and the
cycle starts all over again.  Imagine this same situation increased by
several order of magnitude.

I do think that IP address allocation voting needs to separated out somehow.
Assuming all domain registrants have a vote, the number of users that are
directly involved with the allocation of IP's is much smaller.  However, the
allocation of IP's is extremely important to these types users and the
issues are often somewhat different.

Below is a very rough cost estimate I tried to post to this list a about 2
weeks ago but it was lost that roughly estimates the cost of per domain
voting.  I wouldn't even try guess how much it would cost to verify e-mail
addresses around the world:

Assuming one vote per domain, there are currently just over 3 million
registered under .com, .net, and .org.  assuming 2 votes per year that would
mean 6 million outgoing messages.  At a 10 to 30% response rate that would
be at least 1 million incoming votes.  You would need at least 2 to 3
administrative people to get the information on the voting out to the
members, answer questions, look into problems, etc. A database person to
keep track of the voting and the verifications.  the votes would also have
to verified against the Internic database.  Other technical people will be
needed to write the scripts for vote tabulation, update the web site, ensure
the e-mail servers are working, etc.  A fairly robust and redundant network
is also needed.  I very roughly estimate somewhere in the neighborhood of
$.50 per domain to do all this.

Russ smith
http://consumer.net







Russ and all,

  Why would it be impossible to verify any number of addresses?  Some
person owns each E-Mail address at some level.  Hence it is
possible to identify those E-Mail addresses.  The DN owner should
be able to control what E-Mail addresses belong to which person.

a@help.org wrote: