[At-Large] 9th Circuit Court ruling on ICANN Contract.

[Karl Auerbach]

On 12/24/2010 08:26 PM, John R. Levine wrote:

> If you want to register in ICANN's TLDs, you have to play by ICANN's
> rules.  If you prefer some other TLDs, or some other DNS root, you know
> where to find them.

Over the holiday break I'm working on code to revive the old 
"GrassRoots" tool.  (I'm calling my implementation "GrassRoots2".)

What GrassRoots does is to gather information about top level domain 
offerings - whether ICANN approved or not - into a catalog.

The user then gets to pick and chose which TLDs he/she wants - and in 
the case of multiple TLDs with the same name the user gets to pick which 
one of the contesting providers.

Then the user pushes a button and voila, a root zone file (and other 
related configuration files) are generated that can be plopped into an 
instance of Bind so that it acts as the user's own root server (which 
can be then offered to friends and family as well.)

That way the top level domains that a user wants in his view of the 
internet landscape is a decision made by the user without a lord o' 
names organization.

It makes top level domains into products that obtain market share and 
"shelf space" in root zones on the basis of user choice rather than 
top-down mandates from bodies such as ICANN.

My code (in Python) will be published under a Python-like (i.e. non 
viral) open source license.  (I'm not sure when I'm going to be done - 
It's kinda slow slogging - I'm rather far offshore right now, with 
rather thin [and long latency] links, and my ability to do testing is 
kinda limited.)

		--karl--