Article on spammers and their infrastructure

Sun Jan 3 16:54:07 UTC 2010

On 1/2/10 11:38 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
 > ... it would be interesting if some process were developed to
 > deaccredit or otherwise kill off the shell registrars

Suresh, Why?

ICANN accreditation provides the registrar with a right to attempt 
OT&E with registries, the Verisign operated .com registry in 
particular, and with that, the right to specify a range of addresses 
from which the .com registy EPP server must accept connections.

That is the asset.

Every day "mumble.com" is dropped by the .com registry and every day 
registrars "race" to register "mumble.com". For some reason 
"mumble.com" has value not present in "mumble.bar", where "bar" takes 
on some 20 values other than "com", possibly because "mumble" is a 
generic or hyphenated concatenation of a generic and some other 
string, possibly also a generic, possibly because strlen("mumble") is 
less than 5.

If every registrar has the right to a fixed number of connections, or 
"threads", at the .com registry, then the probability of acquisition 
of "mumble.com" is 1/N, where N is the number of registrars competing 
to register "mumble.com". Note that this might not be sufficient to 
motivate investment in a "secondary market", in the abstract, however 
the verisign registry, and others, identified the "secondary market" 
as having high value and attempted to obtain non-random distribution 
of secondary registrations.

Therefore, while the value of "threads" was significantly greater than 
the cost of ICANN accreditation (a subject of note in its own right), 
it was a rational economic activity to form registrar legal entities, 
obtain ICANN accreditation, and rent the "threads" to entities which 
specialized in the "secondary market", that is, in collecting "back 
orders" on "mumble.com" from entities seeking to become the registrant 
of "mumble.com", presumably ranked by value (bids at auction), and 
execution of registrations for "mumble.com" in a race environment.

That's auction to 3pm minus some delta, and race at 3pm minus some 
epsilon to 3pm plus some epsilon. So, a well-ordered sequence sensor 
and slots on a roulette wheel. Clearly, the more slots on the roulette 
wheel, the greater the likelihood of winning.

So, the root cause for shell registrars is the value of expired names, 
and the association of acquisition resources with accreditation.

Value arises from (a) strings which can be repurposed economically (I 
claim that should Qualcom forget to renew "q.com" that "q.com" can be 
repurposed as something other than a domain name for a communications 
goods and services vendor), and (b) strings which cannot be repurposed 
economically, but have some fungible value, aka "traffic".

Now, shell registrars are a pain in the ass, not for operational 
reasons, but because every time someone wants to say something stupid 
and get away with it they say "<some large number> of registrars".

For example, at the ICANN Seoul meeting an unidentified male (in the 
transcript) who I recall was  Dan Halloran, ICANN's Deputy General 
Counsel, said, while discussing the proposed new gTLD registry 
agreement (note, it isn't called a contract):

"... the central idea is still there that ICANN does retain the right 
to modify the agreement..."

and a minute later

"... the point is there's 900 registrars and ... We don't have to go 
individually and negotiate bilaterally with each registrar."

Source, transcript [1].

So the number of shell registrars is offered, by ICANN's DGC, and 
presumably by ICANN's GC (John Jeffrey) as well, as an absolute bar to 
contractual distinguishment.

Registrars can be "bad" because they fail to pay ICANN (the commonest 
form of registrar deaccreditation) or because they aren't responsive 
to email or because they are claimed to be in breech of some specific 
term in the current accreditation agreement. Other than that, it is 
ICANN's consistent position of record that registrars cannot be 
distinguished in contract since the divestiture of Network Solutions 
(registrar) by Verisign (registry).

Now to me (Eric Brunner-Williams, hat=="operator of ICANN accredited 
registrar #439 and CTO of ICANN accredited registrar #15 and operator 
of the sponsored gTLD .cat and .museum" registries for their 
respective ICANN contracted sponsors), the inability to distinguish, 
in contract, between an application advanced by the RBN and the IRC is 
... a pain in the ass.

CORE's "business" is socially useful, socially responsible registries, 
its been our business since Jon Postel and others [2] drew up the 
IAHC-MOU [3], forming CORE. We'd like to see a contract for .com's 
clones, where "policy" is completely defined by first $6 offered, and 
a contract for .cat's kittens, where "policy" is consistent with the 
language in section 3, subsection 2, of RFC 1591.

The IRC contacted CORE (thanks to the ICANN staffer who suggested us 
to them!) for a .red-{cross,crescent} (Latin and Arabic scripts) but 
because ICANN won't create contractual constructs now, having done so 
in the past (the initial 7-10 round was partitioned between what is 
now called "standard" (biz/info/name/pro) and "sponsored" 
(aero/coop/museum), and the 2003 round was sponsored), the IRC (and 
CORE, and all of CORE's other registry partners, from the Provincial 
Government of Quebec to the Government of the City of Paris) has to 
wait until ICANN's crafted an evaluation process capable of evaluating 
every currently imagined scheme the RBN (or any other rational 
economic actor) puts forward.

Oddly enough, this appears to require unbounded time, and naturally 
enough, someone on NANOG will opine that one or more of, particularly 
the last item of this list -- {dnssec, ipv6, idns for ccTLDs, new 
gTLDs (ADH or IDN)} is "a bad thing". As an Indian, I will simply 
observe that the partition of Indian Countries into "Canada", "US", 
... is suboptimal, and the further partition into "native" namespaces 
under each of the iso3166 associated namespaces is also suboptimal. We 
could do better, but even if the nsn.us namespace, to pick one 
well-ignored example, were turned over to me personally, that wouldn't 
meet all the needs of two of the three tribes I have cultural and/or 
political association with, which exist "in" both the United States 
and Canada. That is, I offer the claim that at least one TLD ought to 
exist, a claim made to Jon prior to the Green and White Papers. I 
expect the time from request to delegation will be 20 years, assuming 
the unbounded time requirement becomes bounded in 5 or so years from 
the present.

Shell registrars are not, generally, the source of primary 
registrations of arbitrarily abusive intent. That problem lies 
elsewhere and is adequately documented.

 > .. and the bogus
 > LIRs (which is how the thread started).

This has been a tutorial on why shell registrars are not the source of 
operational issues that could reasonably be characterized as problems. 
Problematic use of the DNS exists, but the registrar association is 
otherwise than to shell registrars. These are different exploits.

Eric

[1] 
http://sel.icann.org/meetings/seoul2009/transcript-gtld-registries-constituency-1-27oct09-en.pdf 
at pages 32 and 33, respectively.
[2] ISOC, IANA, IAB, FNC, ITU, INTA, WIPO
[3] http://www.gtld-mou.org/