.pk for sale

[Haris Shamsi]

I am not sure how relevent it is "TELECOM" grid , however keeping in view that IP has won the battel "finally" and convergence has started happening i would like to share the breaking news on long debated ".pk" and PKNIC issues.

 

In yesterdays PTA meeting, PKNIC was represented by Barrister Omer who has announced that PKNIC owner is willing to sell of .pk or bring it to pakistan "as per the direction of PTA" - so finally we are going to see .pk domains hosted within Pakistan rather than US. 

 

I personally think this is going to be a turning point in the industry and would benifit other intiatives "localization of traffic", "local Content Development" etc   

 

Under the chairmanship of Member Technical PTA, a focused group would be formed "shortly", to decide the role of regulator and the roadmap for .pk migration to Pakitsan ( the group will discuss the methedology , either total Govt owner ship, or Private public partner ship or a oppen bidding of this asset )

 

Good Day,

Haris Shamsi

 

[Tee Emm]

Giant news Haris. Can't say if the impact would be good or bad, but it would surely be huge. Please keep this forum regularly posted on this. This is highly relevant here.

Fellows: PKNIC and Pakistan is a sweet & sour story. Very (very) briefly, some background: First the good things about these people: PKNIC's early owners (it has reported changed a couple of hands, I am short on this data) put Pakistan on the TLD early on way before lots and lots of other countries were on the net. They have managed the whole thing without any serious, sustained outage for the .pk TLD as a whole. I can't remember that in the past 11 years at least I have seen a major 'not there' issue with them. However, stories of customers getting high-rates, bad support and 100% irrelevant 'collateral damage' outages on their business production sites are abound. They have no real office in Pakistan, no staff (the Barrister sb mentioned by Haris deserve a photograph on flickr so the millions of PKNIC customers can, for the first time, put a face to the name of the company that is responsible for their digital identity linchpin). The processes and policies at PKNIC were initially closed door but later went through a corporate whitewash to include a number of stakeholders. Domain disputes and hijacking were the most dreaded aspects of life of a PKNIC customer due to various reasons. PKNIC continued to offer free .gov.pk domains to GOP requirements where, reportedly, the only requirement was a letter (not an email!) sent to them on the official letter head of the government agency and the domain get registered and activated. Electronic payments at PKNIC (something we take for granted while dealing with something as 'nety' as domain registration) arrived very late

Brining PKNIC back to Pakistan is logical and desirable. But how and when? What would the rules be? What is the collective track-record of Pakistan (regulatory and industry combined) in terms of Internet Governance? Are we ready to face an 'Network Solutions/ICANN' and post ICANN issues in a Pakistani light?

Some people (including this scribe) are of the view that PKNIC's obscure and non-customer-friendly thorns aside, the consistency of the service might have heavy attribution to the fact that the body was being managed outside Pakistan in a rather 'private' matter. Of course this is highly debatable and views and proves are welcome.

My strictly personal views is that PKNIC is doing a good job and unless we are 100% sure that we can snatch the responsibility from them and run it on our own without making a joke of our digitalselves, we should not proceed in the direction of a total ownership change. My own suggestion in this regard is to let PKNIC continue the operations but bring them under some regulation net. Let there be some customer service benchmarks set for them, pricing would be next and so would be the issue of physical presence of the DNS server inside (and their backups outside) Pakistan.

-T

--
Tariq Mustafa MSN: t...@hotmail.com
Current Cell Number: http://tinyurl.com/2ob35t
Pakistan's Telecom Blog: http://pakng.wordpress.com

[Shakeel Ahmad]

Oh what a news, i would 101% percent agree with you both. We know we all had been victims of PKNIC and their policies from a long since. We should welcome PTA for this move and perhaps try to guide them.

 

regards,

Shakeel Ahmad

 

[Majid Farid]

I haven't dealt directly with PKNIC but the stories I hear from my
close friends aren't very nice and they are frustrated. The domain
registration authority should be governed under the regulation from
the government (thats my opinion).

I have dealt with www.cira.ca in my previous life as sysadmin for .ca
domain and things worked out pretty smooth the support was there i.e.
you can pick up the phone and scream at people...but then again
dealing with PTA might not be even close to dealing with PKNIC at
least now you have the luxury to register domain quickly .. :)

/Majid

On Aug 1, 1:39 pm, "Shakeel Ahmad" <shakeelah...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Oh what a news, i would 101% percent agree with you both. We know we all had
> been victims of PKNIC and their policies from a long since. We should
> welcome PTA for this move and perhaps try to guide them.
>
> regards,
> Shakeel Ahmad
>

[Zaeem Arshad]

On 8/2/07, Majid Farid <majid...@gmail.com> wrote:

.but then again
dealing with PTA might not be even close to dealing with PKNIC at
least now you have the luxury to register domain quickly .. :)


/Majid

If PTA keeps on acting as the regulatory authority and provides adequate protection to the customers, things will stay on track. Not sure how will things be if they try to take things in their own hands.


-Zaeem

[Haris Shamsi]

Guys

 

we are not talking a blunt cutover , what we have suggested initially is to have a mirror locally ( BGP ANYCASTING technique ) so that atleast we can start localizing the traffic. we had a very successful expereince with F-ROOT mirror site at Karachi and in my opinion the same should be followed to avoid any operational issues.

 

We know that the transition would be long, resource plannig, training, data center arrangements etc would take some time - for now atleast we have seen a movement from the regulator.

 

However i am of the opinion that it should not be commercialized fully ( a private-Public Partnership where regulators role is evident could be one solution )

 

In any case to run IX, Roots , Certificate authority ..some day a technical entity should be required to govern  - i think Regular/authority and ministry should seriously start looking into it as all of these fall into national assets i guess.

 

just a thought though

 

Good Day,
Haris Shamsi

[Tee Emm]

Haris,

That is reassuring to know. However, I still fear that an unguided PTA can mess up the .pk TLD in a disruptive way too. We need to have a list of problems and issues that we think exist with the current set up. This could either be a list of required features or a list of envisaged eco system (of course with the dirty details of how the behemoth would work).

-T

[Zaeem Arshad]

On 8/2/07, Tee Emm <tariq....@gmail.com> wrote:

. We need to have a list of problems and issues that we think exist with the current set up. This could either be a list of required features or a list of envisaged eco system (of course with the dirty details of how the behemoth would work).

-T

And this is what  exactly  the working group should work on  (hopefully).

-Zaeem