Say NO to APJII!

Prolog
At the end of 1997, I went back to Indonesia from my studies and work in Canada. The .ID domain management in Indonesia at that time was in a confusing state. Nobody wanted to manage it. Universitas Indonesia (UI) - the original maintainer - was in a fight with APJII (the Association of Indonesian ISP).
In the end, IANA gave me a mandate to manage the .ID domain. Since then, I manage the .ID domain with open management. There are problems, but mostly minors.

Until recently, when APJII (again) is trying to take over the .ID domain management from my team. Here's a short info to give you a head start.


Short summary

APJII (the association of ISP in Indonesia) is trying to takeover the .ID domain management in Indonesia. They have tried and will try everything to take over.

Long description

I've been managing the .ID domain since the end of 1997. At that time, nobody wanted to run the domain management.

First of all, a brief description of how we run things. To run the .ID domain, I am assisted by several domain admins. Each of these domain admins is responsible for second level
domains. For example, there is a domain admin for AC.ID, then there is also a different domain admin for CO.ID, etc. These domain admins are volunteered based. (No ne get paid, except for the CO.ID admin who is also helping the day to day operation.) All of this was done informally. I am personally responsible for everything. We use "IDNIC" as the name of our operation.

There is a fee to register a domain, except for sch.id, go.id, and mil.id (which is allocated for schools, government, and military - they are free). Most of the domains are registered with one time fee, except for web.id which has a yearly fee. In the future we would like
to implement a yearly fee to make sure that there are no dead domains (domains that are not used at all). Billing was outsourced to APJII (the association of Indonesian ISP).

To serve the domain users better, we are now in the process of using registrar-registry, just like gTLDs. We would like to be the registry and stick with policy and backend. Whereas registrars are doing the business.

To implement this concept we have to formalized the organization. We decided to create a formal entity, which consists of all the domain admins (the de facto operational). This organization is a non-profit oriented. We are in the process of discussing the by-laws publicly (through open mailing list).

Now... the issues.

APJII (the associations of ISP) feels that they are being left out. They insisted that they should be part of the registry (AND registrar). They do not like the registrar-registry concept. So, they sent mails.

1. First mail stated that we cannot use the word / brand "IDNIC" anymore since they have trademarked the name IDNIC. (in 1998) (Yes, they have done this without my knowledge. It was a stab in my back.)
   
2. They will use the name IDNIC to serve IP allocation and AS numbers, which they are doing right now. (Note: apparently, this is just the beginning of the take over)
   

We have no choice but to stop using the name IDNIC in our services. We are now using "ccTLD-ID" as our name. (And we have changed IANA database.) We move forward with our registrar-registry programme. Currently, we have selected 5 registrars.

The next letter was a threat to sue me.

A couple of months ago, APJII have an election and new officials were announced. As part of the election process, they also have programme. To my disbelieve, one of the programme was to create an entity called IDNIC that manages IP numbers *AND* domain name. I have no doubt that they will send a letter to ICANN to redelegate that mandate to them. Since this is their internal organization issue, I could not (and would not) do anything. But I have to give you a warning.

A few days ago, they went to the Government and asked the Gov to support APJII (or they use the name ID-NIC) as the domain management in Indonesia. Now, I am pretty sure APJII will send an email to IANA/ICANN as well, asking for a redelegation to them.

Just to give everybody a head start.

Regards
Budi Rahardjo