88 Important changes in store for the .ro ccTLD

As you can imagine, a country’s top level domain (aka ccTLD) is quite an important asset. Most countries deal with theirs with at least passable competence. Not Romania. All proof considered, the Romanian political leaders’ knowledge of IT must be good enough to not allow them to mistake computers for microwave ovens. While commendable in itself, this level of knowledge has sadly let them down many times in the past. Let us see what they managed to make out of the whole ccTLD business.

1. What’s wrong with the .ro administration today

1.1. Poor management

The .ro ccTLD was thrown at some point at an organization called RNC (”Romanian National R&D Computer Network”), a front developed specifically for this purpose by ICI (The National Institute For IT Research And Development), whose history you can read in brief here (Romanian).

Imagine a park filled with dinosaurs who try to pass for keen researchers. Before the Romanian Revolution of 1989 their main concern was wrestling each other for full-expense payed trips abroad to scientific conferences. After the Revolution they were handed the .ro ccTLD on a golden platter, after which the government simply forgot about it for, what, 17 years.

Rumour has it that the kind of people who work at ICI are either young college graduates without ambition, or the aforementioned dinosaurs. They all get by on state-issued projects mainly, doing small crappy jobs for various state organizations (city halls across the country and such). This leads us to the next point, which is their overwhelming technical skills.

1.2. Substandard technical features

By “substandard” I mean crappy. Everything seems to have been put together in a rush, by bored, uninterested and unskilled people. The user interface for domain administration and the DNS management are the ones that stick out like a sore thumb.

In today’s day and age, the entire management is done manually. The main .ro administration website merely offers a couple of forms which are processed entirely by humans. Dumb humans, all evidence considered, who are also underpayed and work very short hours. (”We’re only open until 2 PM, buddy. Take a hike. What, you want to pay for the domains you ordered? Try next week.”)

All confirmations are done via email, and we know how well that worked out a decade ago for other TLD’s — the possibilities for abuse are staggering. The DNS is refreshed oh, twice a day, on a good day, as they probably have to wake up an old donkey to push a wheel around or something.

In order to pay for a domain you have to do a bank transfer or show up with the money at ICI’s door, in Bucharest. Credit cards? Why, sure, send us a fax of a photocopy of the actual card and we’ll charge it for you! Cheques? Sorry, this is Ankh-Morpork Romania; we don’t trust cheques and for good reason (yes, grand scale embezzlement).

1.3. Narrow-minded policies

To add insult to injury, the poor technical setup was joined by poor administration.

Back in the 90’s it was decided to make the domain aquisition fee a one-time, lifetime fee of about $70 (USD). While it may have made sense at first as a method of encouraging domain buying, it certainly stopped making sense only a few years down the road, when the practical outcome was that anybody with $70 could block a domain forever.

By 2000 the ill effects were becoming obvious. In 2004 there were as much as three different independent surveys being conducted periodically, making use of the DNS zone transfer (which means the big list of all the .ro domains) to see which ones are actually in use. You can find mine here. What they showed was that the total number of domains grew at a constant rate of about 20,000 a year, yet only roughly half of them, at best, actually got used. That’s 10,000 domains wasted, every year.

At the beginning of 2005, the problem became obvious and RNC’s director, Eugenie Stăicuţ, must have felt obliged to exercise a bit of a smoke and mirrors campaign claiming fake numbers for the unused domains, intended to make the situation look better. This, after they had pulled the plug on the zone transfer in May 2004, so that the independent surveys couldn’t check up on them anymore.

On to other issues. The domain name dispute resolution is a joke. You don’t stand much chance of getting anything solved if a cybersquatter manages to grab the domain you wanted first. RNC’s policy in such matters is very strict and dumb: just suspend the domain and leave it like that. Obviously, it doesn’t make any practical difference, since the cybersquatter wasn’t doing anything with the domain anyway. All someone has to do is cough up $70 up front, then they can sit on a domain forever, out of sheer spite. There were extremely few cases of favorable resolutions, and that’s because the complaints went all the way to WIPO, not because of RNC or the Romanian courts.

Furthermore, according to the terms RNC makes domain buyers agree to when they get a domain, selling and buying domains is forbidden. Domains can be revoked at any time, for any reason. There’s no freely regulated market governing the movement of the domains about. You get them from RNC or not at all.

In the recent years a reseller agreement was made possible, but it only meant that you could get .ro domains for a slightly lower price. The whole arrangement is a joke all things considered: no automatic processing, playing favorites with certain resellers, utter lack of transparency (this from an institution which is technically state-controlled).

As you can imagine, getting the domain you want can be downright impossible today. Of the estimated 125,000 .ro domains already allocated quite few are actually used for anything relevant. RNC doesn’t check for owners lost in action, be they companies or persons. Often a domain’s data simply decays, as the owner’s contact info changes, and there’s no way to reach them anymore. This could be taken care of by an yearly tax, since the burden of keeping the data valid is distributed among buyers, but not with a lifetime tax, which places all the burden on the registrar.

1.4. The hunt for easy money

One could say that the outcome was predictable. Give these kind of people a monopoly ruling over a valuable country resource and they will try to make the most of it. Most money for themselves that is, while keeping the system just a hairline above “utter crap”.

What has RNC and ICI done for the .ro ccTLD during these 17 years? Let’s see:

• They based the entire system on a sub-standard technical solution, early on, and hardly ever updated it since. The current solution is something one grad student could put together in two weeks.
• They killed the .ro domain market by cumbersome, closed procedures, dictatorial terms of use and a locked pricing scheme.
• They held back meaningful adoption of .ro domains by clinging to the outdated lifetime tax and completely ignoring owner data modifications.
• They raked in a lot of money and nobody seems to know what they did with them. We’re talking about a million USD a year income, tax-free presumably, and all they had to do with it was maintain a couple of DNS servers, a couple of processing workstations, an Internet connection and a few trips to ICANN meetings and whatnot.
• They entered various dubious deals with resellers. There’s no transparency, which is downright alarming given they are technically a state-controlled institution, under the direct subordination of MCTI (The Ministry for Communications and IT). Some deals were obviously strange, such as the one with mobile telephony operator Connex (now Vodafone) which was awarded a contract to rent as many domains as they wanted for a fixed monthly fee, a feat yet unmatched as far as I know by any other reseller. The whole reseller affair is a can of worms which if ever brought to light would be quite interesting to examine.
• They tried to cover their tracks with FUD campaigns and by cutting off the means for independent reports, whose figures showed that something strange is going on and could pinpoint shady resellers and cybersquatters. They claimed to do this in the name of spam protection for the owner email addresses, a laughable pretext if there ever was one.

Why did they do this? Simple: for the money. You have to look at things from their point of view to understand. They woke up one day and there it was, the golden goose in their backyard. They had no idea when it would be taken away from them by the same authorities that have graciously entrusted it to them. They chose to make money, and to make them fast and constant. All the other issues (system reliability, performance, modernization, transparency) were not important.

2. Questions we want answered

What happened to the millions of dollars that came in over the years? What are the details of all the reseller deals ever made by RNC? Why aren’t they public? Is RNC and ICI a public institution or a private one? If the former, the public has a right to know everything that went and goes on in there. If the latter, why has such an important resource like the .ro ccTLD entrusted to a private institution? What have the current and the past RNC directors have to say about all this?

3. What the state is trying to do now

Simply put, they’re trying to start from scratch and sweep the whole RNC affair under the carpet.

As reported by many proeminent representatives of the Romanian Web, they are putting together an association called ANRCTI, which among other things is supposed to take over the .ro ccTLD management. They are working on an updated management interface and sane terms of use as well as an annual tax.

It remains to be seen how well things turn out.

4. What about the current situation?

It’s even more interesting to see how they propose to settle the current situation. The out-of-touch domain owners will supposedly get taken care of automatically with the annual tax. Still, they have several main concerns:

1. Some kind of reimbursment for those who bought a .ro domain recently and will want to get their full $70 worth under the new annual tax amount. The legal ground offers them only a wobbly leg to stand on, since the RNC terms state that those terms can be changed at any point, at RNC’s will. It remains to be seen whether such laws as the “Consumer’s Code” can be used here, or if anyone is even willing to make the effort.
2. There will be a horrible rush to grab cool domains as they expire in the next couple of years. Count on it. If the proposed system is not rock solid and well thought out we’ll get a hell of a mess.
3. Domain name arbitration is an important, ongoing process, essential for the well being of any kind of TLD. Will there be an organism meant to take care of this? If not, we’ll be simply thrown back to the current apathy and anarchy.
4. Hopefully, the terms for domain buying and selling will allow free pricing and circulation. A good domain name is an asset, and a healthy Internet economy needs a free market in this respect.