November 12, 2000
VIA FACSIMILE and EMAIL
Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
4676 Admiralty Way
Suite 330
Marina
del Rey, CA 90292Attention: Board of Directors
Mr. Louis Touton
By this
letter, on behalf of The dotNOM Consortium ("DNC") and The dotPRO Consortium ("DPC"),
we are formally expressing our objection to the Report on New TLD Applications, issued
by ICANN on November 9, 2000 (the "Report"). Factual errors and damaging, inflammatory
misstatements are irresponsibly presented in the Report -- clearly the result of
a hasty and fundamentally flawed application and review process. These critical
defects in the application and review process have materially and wrongfully prejudiced
the DNC and the DPC, their respective constituent members, and possibly other applicants.
We respectfully demand that ICANN: (a) immediately and publicly retract the false
and damaging statements made in the Report concerning the DNC, the DPC and their
constituent members, and (b) recommence the application and review process in a manner
which allows for the full and fair review of all applications, and which provides
applicants the opportunity to address any significant concerns raised by the ICANN
review board.
The Report issued by ICANN contained a number of factually inaccurate
and rash, damaging assessments of the DNC, the DPC and their constituents that illustrate
not only that these applicants were unfairly assessed as candidates for new TLDs,
but also that the entire process undertaken by ICANN was materially flawed.
Futhermore, as a result of these damaging, public misstatements regarding the scalability,
performance, security and reliability of, in particular, The .TV Corporation International
("dotTV") as a provider of technical registry services, the existing and prospective
business relationships of the constituent members of these consortia have been gravely
undermined.
On the attached Exhibit, we provide a non-exhaustive list of
serious misstatements made in the assessment of the DNC and DPC applications, clear
indicators of a deficient process. If ICANN had serious concerns about any
statement made in the proposals submitted by the DNC and DPC, a supplemental inquiry
should have been the minimally appropriate response.
While ICANNs initial objective
may have been to conduct a full, fair and open application and review process, in
actuality, the process has been materially defective and has resulted in a denial
of due process to the applicants. By way of example, the request for proposals
lacked sufficient specificity, the review and assessment phase was conducted in a
closed forum and provided the applicants inadequate opportunity to address any questions
or concerns, and the entire process was conducted on an unrealistic timeline.
These material shortcomings (in addition to the factual inaccuracies outlined on
the Exhibit) require ICANN to immediately reopen its review and assessment of, not
only the DNC and DPC proposals, but also of all similarly situated applicants.
We are confident that with an opportunity to address ICANN's concerns regarding the
DNC and DPC proposals, we could readily provide adequate assurances concerning the
technical capabilities of our proposed registry operations.
Finally, we
take issue with the manner in which ICANN has publicly presented its Report.
Inflammatory statements by ICANN such as: "DNC plans to throw a huge domain registry
on top of a small one that has been moderately successful for about six months" are
inappropriate for ICANN to make, as well as seriously damaging to the DNC, the DPC
and their constituent members. We decline to comment further at this time,
however, we reserve all of our rights to pursue legal redress if ICANN does not take
steps to promptly remedy these inflammatory statements, as well as to recommence
the application and review process.
dotTV is one of only a handful of companies
in the world currently operating a robust, global registry, with in excess of 99.99%
uptime. We have successfully registered over 120,000 domain names in a shorter
period of time than any other registry. In addition to the wealth of experience
we have to offer, our applications proposed price points that were lower by half
than other proposals submitted to ICANN. Finally, we firmly believe our technology
infrastructure provides the most scalable, reliable and secure solution in the industry
and we welcome any of ICANN's technical experts to examine such infrastructure.
In conclusion, we respectfully demand an immediate retraction of the damaging statements
made concerning, among other things, dotTV's technical capabilities, and demand that
ICANN immediately recommence the application and review process for further evaluation
of all proposals.
Respectfully,
Anthony J. Bishop, Esq.
Senior Vice President
and General Counsel
The .TV Corporation International
130 West Union St.
Pasadena,
CA 91103
Fax 626 535 2701
Email a@www.tv
on behalf of:
The dotPRO Consortium
and The dotNOM Consortium
EXHIBIT
1. SCALABILITY
THE REPORT:
ICANN's
assessment of our Projected Growth Rate states "they project growth up to as many
as 17 million domain names within five years. It is difficult to assess whether the
enhanced dotTV platform will scale that far."
"DNC plans to throw a huge
domain registry on top of a small one that has been moderately successful for about
six months."
THE APPLICATIONS:
It is inaccurate and inappropriate for
ICANN to make such a statement. The DNC and DPC are relying on dotTV, which is one
of the few actual operating registries involved in the application process. dotTV
has designed its technical infra-structure for infinite scalability.Our application
clearly states "dotTV believes it currently has the ability to process approximately
10,000 registrations a day at each of its two data centers. This is based on the
cluster of 10 web servers and adequate credit card processing capacity. Each of the
data centers' cluster can easily be expanded to handle volumes of transactions. The
vault space currently leased by dotTV would be adequate to grow the web server cluster
to handle well over 2 million registrations per month. If further growth needs to
be accommodated this could be addressed simply through leasing more collocation space,
thereby allowing for virtually unlimited scalability."
Note that this capability
exceeds the current demand for .com, .net and .org worldwide.
FURTHER EXPLANATION:
Our technology platform is designed to handle a large
volume of domain name registrations, domain name look-ups and general web site traffic.
Each of our DNS sites was designed to handle the load that
the .com, .net and .org sites currently handle across all of their 13 centers.
This over-building provides us a safety net that no other registry currently has
and anticipates significant growth in the registry business of not only .tv but also
other top level domains. As of September 30, 2000, we were using approximately
one percent of our available capacity. Our existing technology platform can
handle up to 200 million domain name registrations with no modification and no significant
added costs.
2. PERFORMANCE
THE REPORT:
ICANN's "technical team concluded
that the application of the dotNOM Consortium did not demonstrate the technical ability
to operate a TLD targeting a large group of potential registrants and end users with
high reliability, good performance and strong security."
THE APPLICATIONS:
It
is inaccurate and inappropriate for ICANN to make such a statement. In fact, ICANN's
own statements contradict its summary conclusion. The preliminary TLD Application
Analysis Chart released on Nov. 9, credits both the DNC and DPC with the necessary
experience and infrastructure to administer a new registry.
Indeed,
ICANN commended DNC, finding it to "respond to all elements; wide Internet and technology
experience," while DPC is credited with "redundancy, firewalls; and core registry
functions spanning two continents."
FURTHER EXPLANATION:
Our
registry function uses the conventional Berkeley Internet Name Domain, or BIND, application
in each of our DNS Centers and a proprietary DNS service from an outsourced provider.
The outsourced service is built upon an Oracle database that maintains domain names
as indexed fields, rather than the flat file look-ups that the BIND protocol uses.
Building the DNS service on top of a database enables much faster look-ups and DNS
responses. Our combined DNS infrastructure, DNS centers and outsourced DNC
service allows us to support up to 300,000 lookups per second on a global basis.
3.
SECURITY:
THE REPORT:
ICANN's "technical team concluded that the application
of the dotNOM Consortium did not demonstrate the technical ability to operate a TLD
targeting a large group of potential registrants and end users with high reliability,
good performance and strong security."
THE APPLICATIONS:
It
is inaccurate and inappropriate for ICANN to make such a statement.
As clearly
stated in our application: dotTV's current technical staff has previous experience
securing e-commerce company web sites. This experience and conventional best
practices for securing ecommerce sites is applied to dotTV's ccTLD data center sites
and to each of the remote DNS centers.
These best practices
currently include: limited port availability, SSH (Secure Socket Handler), wherever
appropriate, and other data integrity reviews to ensure adequate security.
These policies will continue to evolve as more is learned about best practices in
Internet e-commerce security.
Note, if ICANN had any concerns
about any of the foregoing, further inquiry should have been made.
FURTHER INFORMATION:
Our technology incorporates a variety of security measures
designed to protect domain name registration data. For example, our technology
platform handles domain name updates through a [SSL]-protected web page instead of
using conventional email templates. In addition, the data passed
over our secure channel is encrypted and digitally signed. Our security features
make our system less vulnerable to domain name deletions, rerouting and other disturbances
that have from time-to-time plagued other registries.
4. RELIABILITY
THE
REPORT:
ICANN's "technical team concluded that the application of the dotNOM
Consortium did not demonstrate the technical ability to operate a TLD targeting a
large group of potential registrants and end users with high reliability, good performance
and strong security."
ICANN's "technical team concluded that
the technical plan as presented was inconsistent with and insufficient for the load
predicted by the applicant for the TLD, particularly at startup."
THE APPLICATIONS:
As stated in our application: "All of dotTVs web and DNS
server hardware is Linux based and is clustered in quantities of a minimum of 10
servers per function. That is, in the Data Center, there are 10 Linux servers
for web servers and 10 separate Linux servers for DNS services. The network hardware
is duplicated within each data and DNS center and we use two manufacturers of the
hardware to provide even further reliability. The database system was chosen because
of its long history of use in high volume transactional situations. Further
it is one of the few database systems that can be configured for near real time updates
across a large geographical distance between the servers. Thus, if a disaster
were to befall one or the other coasts the data center on the opposite coast should
be available to continue operations with minimal or no interruption of services,
DNS responses or data integrity issues."
Again, if ICANN had
any concerns about any of the foregoing, clearly further inquiry should have been
made.
FURTHER INFORMATION:
Our architecture incorporates
a high amount of redundancy to ensure reliability in our registry services.
For example, we have clusters of servers at every center, we use two different network
vendors and four different backbone carriers for Internet services. We also
use a non-traditional DNS resolving service to provide further backup and redundancy.
Our technology infrastructure has been designed to provide the most
reliable solution in the industry, leveraging our five proprietary name servers and
over twenty-five name servers operated by third parties. We have two database servers
located on each of the east and west coasts of the United States to provide geographical
redundancy. Each of our server locations has sufficient power redundancy, fire
suppression, bandwidth and backbone redundancy to ensure the reliability of our current
operations and support significant additional growth in our business.