AlterNIC

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AlterNIC was an unofficial, controversial Internet domain name registry that relied on an alternative DNS root. The primary purpose of the project was to challenge the monopoly of InterNIC, the official governing body for generic top-level domains (gTLDs) until the creation of the ICANN in 1998. AlterNIC offered second level domain registration in its own TLDs at lower prices than InterNIC. However, these domain names could only be resolved by name servers that were specifically configured to use the AlterNIC root zone. The project is now defunct; the domain name alternic.net is parked and no longer associated with AlterNIC.

Contents

History

Eugene Kashpureff and Diane Boling created AlterNIC in 1995, defining it as a privately developed and operated Internet network information center and domain name registry service, with the purpose of enhancing the Internet with new information services. [1]

In the mid-1990s, the Internet was in a governance transition phase. Until then, the organizational structure of the network was still heavily influenced by its military, academic and governmental origins. At the same time, there was a rapidly increasing interest of private companies, followed by the general public, to gain access to the Internet. Domain names began to play a crucial role in business visibility, and the number of registrations grew exponentially.

Initially, registration of new domain names and their maintenance involved no direct costs for the registrant. In 1995, the National Science Foundation authorized Network Solutions (NSI), the private company that they had mandated to maintain and operate the registries, to begin charging registrants an annual fee. Some perceived this move as unfair, given that the market was closed to competitors.

Eugene Kashpureff and company were among them and they decided to create an alternative registry to challenge the monopoly of NSI.

Alternative TLDs

AlterNIC started operating their registries even though their name servers were not included in the Internet official root zone. As a result, only users of manually reconfigured name servers were able to resolve AlterNIC names.

AlterNIC offered several dozens of alternative TLDs, such as [1]

During the experimental phase, domains could be registered without fees using the .exp and .lnx TLDs. Some TLDs such as .ltd, .med or .xxx were operated directly by AlterNIC. The setup fee for AlterNIC registries was $50. The annual fee was $24, half of the $50 that were charged yearly by NSI for a .com or .net domain ($15 of the $50 were retained for a US Government fund).

A notable feature of AlterNIC was the possibility to request a new custom TLD for the same price as for registrations in existing TLDs. Established publishing groups had requested their own names: Wired magazine had reserved .wired [2] and IDG's affiliate in Europe has reserved .idg [2]

Controversy

A part of the Internet community has praised the initiative, with some recent scholarship proposing that alternative DNS roots may allow for a more democratic network control structure. [3] Yet many others considered it harmful to the Internet. Using an alternative DNS root breaks the principle of universal resolvability, unless it is for a strictly private purpose. From a DNS perspective, it prevents some parts of the Internet from reaching other parts. Jon Postel, a significant contributor to Internet standards, asserted that it would lead to chaos. [2] In May 2000, the Internet Architecture Board spoke out strongly against alternative roots in RFC 2826. [4]

Hijacking of InterNIC's website

On July 11, 1997, against the advice of his AlterNIC colleagues, Kashpureff hijacked the InterNIC website, redirecting affected visitors to the AlterNIC website instead, where they could read about the AlterNIC protest or click a link to the InterNIC page. [5] Kashpureff stopped the hijacking three days later on July 14, but started it again on July 18. [6] This led NSI, the operator of the InterNIC website, to file a lawsuit against Kashpureff.

The civil lawsuit was quickly settled, but NSI had also contacted the FBI to investigate whether Kashpureff had broken federal computer crime laws. On October 31, he was arrested in Toronto on U.S. charges related to wire fraud [6] and faced extradition to the United States. After fighting extradition for two months, he waived his rights, and was extradited to New York City. He was released on December 24, given a $100 fine and sentenced to two years probation.

The hijacking was made possible using a DNS cache poisoning attack, exploiting a security vulnerability in versions of BIND earlier than 4.9.6. [7] [8]

Related Research Articles

ICANN American nonprofit organization that coordinates several Internet address databases

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A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last non empty label of a fully qualified domain name. For example, in the domain name www.example.com, the top-level domain is com. Responsibility for management of most top-level domains is delegated to specific organizations by the ICANN, an Internet multi-stakeholder community, which operates the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and is in charge of maintaining the DNS root zone.

A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are used in various networking contexts and for application-specific naming and addressing purposes. In general, a domain name identifies a network domain or an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a personal computer used to access the Internet, or a server computer. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites and email services. As of 2017, 330.6 million domain names had been registered.

A domain name registry is a database of all domain names and the associated registrant information in the top level domains of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet that enables third party entities to request administrative control of a domain name. Most registries operate on the top-level and second-level of the DNS.

Root name server Name server for the DNS root zone

A root name server is a name server for the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. It directly answers requests for records in the root zone and answers other requests by returning a list of the authoritative name servers for the appropriate top-level domain (TLD). The root name servers are a critical part of the Internet infrastructure because they are the first step in resolving human-readable host names into IP addresses that are used in communication between Internet hosts.

The domain name .com is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Added in 1985, its name is derived from the word commercial, indicating its original intended purpose for domains registered by commercial organizations. Later, the domain opened for general purposes.

.org Generic top-level domain

The domain name .org is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) of the Domain Name System (DNS) used on the Internet. The name is truncated from organization. It was one of the original domains established in 1985, and has been operated by the Public Interest Registry since 2003. The domain was originally "intended as the miscellaneous TLD for organizations that didn't fit anywhere else." It is commonly used by non-profit organizations, open-source projects, and communities, but is an open domain that can be used by anyone. The number of registered domains in org has increased from fewer than one million in the 1990s, to ten million in 2012, and held steady between ten and eleven million since then.

Verisign American Internet company

Verisign Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, United States that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the .com, .net, and .name generic top-level domains and the .cc and .tv country-code top-level domains, and the back-end systems for the .jobs, .gov, and .edu sponsored top-level domains. Verisign also offers a range of security services, including managed DNS, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack mitigation and cyber-threat reporting.

The Internet uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to associate numeric computer IP addresses with human-readable names. The top level of the domain name hierarchy, the DNS root, contains the top-level domains that appear as the suffixes of all Internet domain names. The most widely used DNS root is administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In addition, several organizations operate alternative DNS roots, often referred to as alt roots. These alternative domain name systems operate their own root name servers and commonly administer their own specific name spaces consisting of custom top-level domains.

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Network Solutions

Network Solutions, LLC is an American-based technology company and a subsidiary of Web.com, the 4th largest .com domain name registrar with over 6.7 million registrations as of August 2018. In addition to being a domain name registrar, Network Solutions provides web services such as web hosting, website design and online marketing, including search engine optimization and pay per click management.

.xxx Sponsored top-level Internet domain

.xxx is a sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) intended as a voluntary option for pornographic sites on the Internet. The sponsoring organization is the International Foundation for Online Responsibility (IFFOR). The registry is operated by ICM Registry LLC. The ICANN Board voted to approve the sTLD on 18 March 2011. It went into operation on 15 April 2011.

.ae Country code top-level domain for the United Arab Emirates

.ae is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet for the United Arab Emirates. It is administered by .aeDA which is part of the Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority of UAE (TDRA).

Generic top-level domain Top level domain without country association.

Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use in the Domain Name System of the Internet. A top-level domain is the last level of every fully qualified domain name. They are called generic for historical reasons; initially, they were contrasted with country-specific TLDs in RFC 920.

.um was the Internet country code top-level domain for the United States Minor Outlying Islands. It was administered by the United States Minor Outlying Islands Registry. Until late 2006 USMIR was housed at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI), which was the original administrator of .us prior to NeuStar absorbing that role.

WHOIS is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block or an autonomous system, but is also used for a wider range of other information. The protocol stores and delivers database content in a human-readable format. The current iteration of the WHOIS protocol was drafted by the Internet Society, and is documented in RFC 3912.

.biz is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet. It is intended for registration of domains to be used by businesses. The name is a phonetic spelling of the first syllable of business.

Domain registration is the process of acquiring a domain name from a domain name registrar.

OpenNIC

OpenNIC is a user-owned and -controlled top-level Network Information Center that offers a non-national alternative to traditional top-level domain (TLD) registries such as ICANN. As of January 2017, OpenNIC recognizes and peers all existing ICANN TLDs, for compatibility reasons. However, OpenNIC has not yet evaluated and does not hold a formal position on future ICANN TLDs.

References

  1. 1 2 "AlterNIC website". Archived from the original on January 25, 1997. Retrieved 2017-04-11.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  2. 1 2 3 George Lawton, "New top-level domains promise descriptive names". Archived from the original on 1996-12-21. Retrieved 2016-10-10., SunWorld, 1996-09-16, retrieved through Archive.org
  3. ↑ Bastick, Zach (2012). "Our Internet and Freedom of Speech 'Hobbled by History': Introducing Plural Control Structures Needed to Redress a Decade of Linear Policy" (PDF). European Commission: European Journal of EPractice. Policy Lessons Learned: Policy lessons from a decade of eGovernment, eHealth & eInclusion (15): 97–111.
  4. ↑ RFC 2826 (informational), IAB Technical Comment on the Unique DNS Root, Internet Architecture Board, The Internet Society (May 2000)
  5. ↑ Janet Kornblum, AlterNIC founder faces extradition , CNET News, 1997-11-13. Retrieved 2010-03-22
  6. 1 2 Janet Kornblum, AlterNIC founder arrested , CNET News, 1997-11-03. Retrieved 2010-03-22
  7. ↑ NANOG Mailing List, Re: what's up, AlterNIC? , 1997-07-11. Retrieved 2010-03-22
  8. ↑ "Cybercrime: Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations United States Senate One Hundred Sixth Congress Second Session" . Retrieved 5 March 2017.PD-icon.svgThis article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain .
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