CaveBear Blog

The ICANN of VOIP? Nah.

Steve Forrest over at Free 2 Innovate has picked up an article about Spider, a company that seems to want to be the registry of registries for ENUM.

I guess folks who are wrapped up in ENUM have not noticed that the VOIP community, particularly the SIP community, are ignoring ENUM in droves.  I mean, why should I use legacy phone numbers when I could be calling something rather more descriptive, and more memorable, like a text string or what looks like an email address?

In the VOIP world calls are placed using URI's - these look a lot like URLs.  (But trust me, they are really different, and more flexible than URL's.)

ENUM was a designed as a way to let people call legacy PSTN phone numbers.

But with personal directories (e.g. speed dial) and group directories, and search services, and all the other web-based technologies that everyone has come to use over the last few years, do you think there is much beyond the 12-key pad that is locking is into archaic phone numbers?

In the SIP world there is arising a kind of dynamic registry of registries called DUNDI - Distributed Universal Number Discovery.  DUNDI is open source and is found, among other places, in Asterisk the extremely popular open source PBX.

I often scoff at the phrase "the internet routes around problems".  However, I do suspect that VOIP "number" registration is going to grow in ways completely outside the telco and ICANN mentality.

Network Neutrality - There Are Other Shoes To Drop

It seems likely that through action or inaction our legal framework is going to permit telcos who provide IP packet carriage to impose differential prices.  That's sad, because it is likely that these price differences will be imposed not to cover actual cost differences in providing different classes of service but, rather, to hobble products that compete with those offered by the carrier.

Right now we seem focused on non-equal package carriage on the part of carriers, ISPs.  We've not noticed that there are others out there who are equally able to take their pound of flesh out of the internet.

For example, let's look at our old friend, Verisign, and .com.

Verisign makes no secret of the fact that it is a for-profit company.  And were I part of Verisign I'd be thinking to myself, "how can we make more money out of .com?"

One way would be to drive users to pay for "enhanced" name resolution services.

Here's how I would do it - and as far as I know there is nothing in Verisign's contract with ICANN to prevent this:

I'd begin by limiting my build-out of "public" (i.e. "free") resolution system of .com servers so that the typical free name query/response cycle is on the order of 100 to 200 milliseconds.  That may not sound like a long time but when we start to add up the name resolution cycles that most people generate we will quickly notice that this will make the internet appear sluggish to many users.

At the same time I would build out a "preferred customer" system of servers that would answer queries much more quickly.  Access to these would, of course, require a subscription fee.

It would, of course, require considerable finesse to establish this dual-class regime without causing too much of a shriek from the bulk of internet users.  But if Verisign is anything, it has demonstrated that it can consistently negotiate the pants off of both NTIA and ICANN.  And Verisign need not allow the "free" service level to erode in one obvious jump; it could simply be a slow fade as demand increases without a commensurate build-out of free servers.

And from a technical point of view there might need to be a bit of creative work to separate the first class queries from steerage, but I have full confidence that this hurdle could be overcome.

It's baseball season - and ICANN is striking out

Three strikes and you're out:

1. A few years ago ICANN eliminated publicly selected seats on its board of directors and substituted a system in which selected "stakeholders" (mainly industrial segments who make money out of the internet) have the dominant positions in ICANN.  This made it clear that ICANN had no interest in serving the public or responding to the public view.

2. Recently ICANN approved a new agreement with Verisign that not only confirms ICANN's gift to Verisign of perpetual control of .com but also gives Verisign a built-in profit margin of 25,000% - yes, twenty-five thousand percent!!!.  (This is based on the simple fact that for every paid registration fee of $7 there are roughly 200 unpaid registrations, yet despite this, Verisign is still making a profit.  This means that the actual cost of .com registrations is less than $0.04 while ICANN allows Verisign to charge $7.00.)

3. Yesterday ICANN rejected the application for .xxx.  This makes it indisputably clear that ICANN is a heavy regulatory body that seeks to impose onto the internet ICANN's views on economic, business, and moral policies.

It is now abundantly clear that ICANN is not serving the public interest.  Nor is ICANN doing anything that could, even with a long stretch of the imagination, be considered as promoting the technical stability of the internet or performing any kind of technical coordination.

Unless this situation is quickly repaired, ICANN will soon find itself on the rubbish heap of history.

And if ICANN fails then those who have benefited from ICANN - mainly the DNS registries - may begin wondering whether they have bought the Brooklyn Bridge from someone who has no actual legal right to sell it.  The question will begin to be asked: How did ICANN come to have the power to sell .com, .org, .net, and all those other top level domains?  And it should come as no surprise to learn that ICANN did not acquire any legal power to do this as the US Department of Commerce had neither title nor the authority to convey it to ICANN.  ICANN's pillar of sand will begin to crumble; and although that will not have one whit of impact on the operational stability of the internet, it will cause uncertainty in the domain name businessplace.

ICANN, Secrecy, And Gagged Directors

ICANN has never had a keen grasp of the laws that define how corporations work - I had to sue ICANN when it tried to block me, a director, from inspecting its financial records despite the law that clearly gave me the "absolute right to inspect and copy" corporate records. I won - it was a slam dunk, the judge nearly laughed ICANN out of court.

Yet we now have learned that ICANN's current crop of directors feel compelled by ICANN's rules to remain silent until ICANN's staff collects, collates, and edits director statements.  This despite the fact that ICANN's staff held a press conference about exactly the same matter on which the directors were being gagged!

Even those directors who are attorneys and who ought to know better feel constrained by ICANN's gag rule.

It's time for ICANN's board, and its directors to get a clue.  I have long recommended that the board get its own legal counsel and that each individual director consult with his/her own legal counsel.

Maybe we'd then get some directors who understand that they don't need to accept the nonesense that comes from ICANN's staff and elder directors.

Oh, you might say, there's nothing wrong with a wait for a couple of days.  But there is something very wrong - it means that those directors who were in the minority will not have their points of view picked up by the media: Only the majority will make the news cycle.  And that, in turn, only increases the ICANN's hubris.

Day 1 - SIP, Network Neutrality, ICANN, and the Internet

Well, here I am again, for the 19th year, working behind the scenes at the Interop trade show.  Yes, that's me.

This year I am working with SIP based VOIP, particularly in conjunction with firewalls, NATs, secure VLANs, QoS enabled wireless, and induced packet loss, delay, duplication, jitter, and reordering (and many other impairments produced by my Maxwell system.)

We have seen some of what we expected: that NATs and VOIP live more in a state of mutual hostility rather than halcyon peace.  And it is also fairly clear that the quality that people perceive from VOIP often evaporates fairly quickly when network conditions begin to erode away from some laboratory standard of perfection.

Simply throwing 50 milliseconds of bidirectional jitter on top of 50 milliseconds of bidirectional delay, coupled with a couple of points of burst packet loss, will cause a SIP+RTP/RTCP based call on top of a TCP based VLAN (SSL) to become nearly unusable.  That's not a particularly unusual degree of network degredation.  And the resulting behavior of the phones on the plane of an automobile that loses its tires if it hits a small pothole while traveling at 50mph.

What this means to me is that there are reasons why certain classes of network traffic do need special handling - and thus why the so-called network neutrality debate is more nuanced than might first appear.  As I've said elsewhere, it's my feeling that non-equal treatment of traffic is appropriate, and that slightly increased prices for enhanced service might be appropriate, but that the choice about how traffic is to be handled must be in the hands of the user, not the provider.

Which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to ICANN and environs...

The news and blogs have recently agreed with my prior notes that ICANN's "add grace" system has resulted in a huge number of unpaid, 5-day name registrations.  The ratio of these unpaid registrations to paid registrations is on the order of 200:1.

And that, in turn, means that the entire foundation upon which ICANN has approved the $7 fee registry fee in the proposed ICANN-Verisign contract has no basis in reality.  There are strong indications that rather than $7 a more appropriate registry fee would be about $0.02 if the freebee 5-day registrations had to pay for the registry services they consume.

ICANN's board should realize that they have been hoodwinked about the Verisign registry fee.  ICANN's board should quickly rescind its approval of the contract until it receives a believable and deep audit of the actual registry costs and isolates the effects of ICANN's "add grace" period.

 But does ICANN's board have the courage to stand up to its staff?  I doubt it.