nettime: The Domain Game--MAVERICK REGISTRIES THREATEN AN INTERNET MONOPOLY

[mf@mediafilter.org (MediaFilter)]

 MAVERICK REGISTRIES THREATEN AN INTERNET MONOPOLY

The Domain Game

by Julie Crysler
(from the Village Voice, Jan 14, 1977)

Imagine that all teachers and students were arbitrarily assigned the
surname Edu, or that all business people were called Com. Imagine a
government issuing those names to its citizens, and-to add insult to
injury-charging each. of them $100 for the privilege.     That's what
happens on the Internet. Commercial names end with com, organiza tional
names with org, educational names with edu, Canadian names with ca, etc. A
nationless network? Not.

This paper's website is villagevoice.com.  But what if the publisher
decided he wanted it to to be village.voice? He'd be out of luck-until now.
.Altemative registries are expanding the number of possitble Intemet
names. Alter NIC is offering addresses with suffixes like biz and xxx .
Name.space provides addresses that end with press, art, radikal, or any
name a user requests.

Internet-regulating bodies aren't exactly happy about the emergence of
these new registries. "They're mavericks, and they present a threat,' says
Don Heath, president and CEO of the Internet Society, an international club
of netizens. "You have to have some kind of centralized way of organizing.
When you allow anyone to register names, you then have to go around to all
the servers involved to avoid redundancy".

Right now, the arbiter of names is In terNIC, which is owned by Network
Solutions, a subsidiary of the defense giant Science Applications
International Corporation (SAIC). In 1993, the National Science Foundation
hired Network Solutions to assign electronic addresses and direct traffic
along the information highway. Under its care, the sprawling maze of the
Internet has a kind of order. There are six major categories of addresses,
all neatly classified by their last  three characters: mil for military,
edu for educational, com for commercial, org for organization, gov for
governrnent,  and net for network. These categories are known as "top-level
domains "

In September 1995, NSF announced a plan to save American taxpayers millions
of dollars: Instead of subsidizing Network Solutions to keep its services
free, the government would allow it to charge user fees. The company is now
processing 50,000 new names each month at $100 each with an annual renewal
fee of $50. Network Solutions has been handed a virtual monopoly. Why?
One reason might be its parent company, SAIC, whose board of directors
includes former National Security Agency chief Bobby Inman, former Defense
Secretary Melvin Laird, and the former head of research and development for
the Pentagon, Donald Hicks. Ex-CIA Director Robert Gates, Secretary of
Defense William Perry, and outgoing CIA Director John Deutch have been past
board members.     SAIC was able to snag an immensely profitable busilless
for its new subsidiary and keep the Department of Defense's fingers in the
Internet pie-all with a fiscally responsible spin. Quite a coup.


There's been an artificial shortage of addresses because they've created a
limited number of top-level domain names, says Paul Garrin of name.space.
All that stops this number from proliferating is InterNIC's database, which
still does not list fanciful domain names. Which means that the creations
of name.space, et. al., are not yet accessible from every computer. Garrin
says Network Solutions will have to recognize these new names or face
charges that they are violating antitrust laws.

A number of organizations are grappling with the question of how to allow
competition on a privatized Internet without losing control. Among them is
Jon Postel, director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority  (IANA),
which determines the numbers that computers read when you type in a name,
in the same way that a local phone company assigns your phone number.
Postel fears that alternative rcgistries will lead to chaos.

To avoid that, Postel has proposed that IANA license perhaps 150 new
international top-level domains to new registries. The Postel proposal has
been rather controversial, since these new registries would be required to
pay $2000 per year, plus 2 per cent of their revenue, to a fund managed by
ISOC. Postel says the money would be used to maintain the computers known
as "root servers," which direct the flow of infobahn traffic.

Oddly enough, most of the root servers are military, government, or
educational computers-already subsidized by the public through taxation.
One is run by Postel himself out of the University of Southern California.

An ad hoc committee of delegates from a number of Internet organizatlons is
now examining Postel's proposal. The committee, chaired by Don Heath,
ISOC's president, recommended last month that an unlimited number of new
registries be licensed.     Eugene Kashpureff of AlterNIC says he is
concerned about the sweeping powers granted to this unprecedented body.
"This ad hoc committee is being run by ISOC, but even there, you're talking
about a new organization with fewer than 10,000  members out of the
millions of Internet users. It smells of the old-boy network "     As the
Internet continues to grow these "old boys" are finding it difficult to
control the outer limits of cyberspace. Alternative registries are already
assigning names, despite their attempts at regulation. Companies like
name.space and AlterNIC challenge a corporate monopoly and offer a
dramatically new vision of how the Net will be structured. Also they offer
funkier addresses, faster registration, lower prices, and a way to get an
address without funding the intelligence community.


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