The webpage was very 'thrown together' so we could get to work on actually getting the servers built. Our policy is to provide clean versions of the COM and NET zones. Minus all of VeriSign's hackery. If you register a .com domain, it will appear in our zone, if you don't renew one, it disappears. We plan to mimic exactly how a responsible TLD operator should work. We don't want to change the world, we don't want to expand the number of TLDs, and we really don't even want to run a root. The root we are (temporarily) running is just a hack to allow people to access our gTLD zones, everything else is pointed to *.root-servers.net. At this point, nothing really works. But we hope to have it operational within the next week. If you don't like it, don't use it. This is the last post about this you'll see on NANOG from me about it. -Mike -----Original Message----- From: Stephane Bortzmeyer [mailto:bortzmeyer@nic.fr] Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 4:44 AM To: Mike Damm Cc: 'Jared Mauch '; 'nanog@merit.edu ' Subject: Re: When is Verisign's registry contract up for renewal On Sun, Sep 21, 2003 at 07:53:19AM -0700, Mike Damm <MikeD@irwinresearch.com> wrote a message of 63 lines which said:

This sort of not-for-profit is exactly what I proposed when the VeriSign discussion started. A non-technical response to a non-technical problem. Since my inital email, I've recruited a few other NANOG folks and put up a website: www.alt-servers.org.

In what way your proposal is different from the other "alternative roots" (such as ORSC, www.open-rsc.org)? All of them are facing the same problem: we don't like ICANN's policies, OK, but what are ours? Do we redelegate .md? Do we give .com to someone else? To who? Do we delegate .god to the jerk that just asked? I'm not aware of any serious policy work from any of the alternative roots: they just claim that they work very hard but they never explain the details. You claim to have working servers already (the easiest part) but you say nothing about your policy...