An unlikely battle has been heating up over the question of who gets to supervise the assignment and administration of domain names - in this case, Web addresses that end in the most popular set of three letters, .com.
It's not that the battle per se is unlikely, but the individuals who are now the focus of anger from the world's Netizens. The question of administration has vexed Net users since the dawn of the medium and, in the past, much fury has been vented at Network Solutions Inc, the Virginia, US firm that until very recently had, by US government contract, sole rights to manage .com, .net. and .org domain names.
NSI charged a registration fee which enabled it to make millions from people and companies who wanted a domain name. Many people felt this basic administration of the Net should not be a lucrative source of revenue for a single, private company. There were complaints that NSI acted secretively and inappropriately. For example, last year NSI rerouted traffic to InterNic - the site to which a browser goes to find out if a domain name has been registered already or to file for a domain name - to its own business site. As part of its government contract NSI does administer InterNic, but people were furious that the company had taken a basic Web resource and made access only possible by going through its commercial site.
And that's the way things have remained. If you type in www.internic.net, you are bounced to a commercial NSI page which offers, at a cost, everything from "dot com gear" Tshirts, hats, and other sportswear for promoting your Web business, to business cards and a search engine registration service for your Web address.
It's hard even to tell if the site has any formal administrative function as most of the resources at InterNic - such as performing a WHOIS search to find out who owns a given domain name - are now reduced to small-type links in the left-hand corner of the page. With so little evidence of a government-supported administrative function and so much on the site dedicated to hyping NSI and its miscellaneous business ventures, the tiny note at the base of the site that says: "The InterNIC is a co-operative activity between the US Government and Network Solutions, Inc." might come as a surprise to most people.
There have been other similar annoyances which have not earned NSI many friends over the years. In 1997, when the US government announced a massive plan to overhaul the administration of the Net, part of which includes opening up the registration of domain names to numerous competitors, the project was widely welcomed.
The idea is that although registration services will be placed out in the private domain, competition in an open market will keep prices for domain registration low, perhaps even, in some cases, free. There's also been an attempt to get more international input into the way the Net is run, since to date it has been basically a US affair.
The US government put the overall administration of the new approach to administration in the hands of a new group
called ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, composed of some of the leading figures in the Net world and run by the Net entrepreneur and pundit, Ms Esther Dyson. Ms Dyson was in the Republic last year to present a keynote at a conference; she writes books, a weekly column for the Guardian and a syndicated column for other outlets, and pops up endlessly on the techie-conference circuit.
Ms Dyson is an enthusiastic Net fanatic and believer in the free market. She has funded many Net start-ups, with a particular interest in those developing in Eastern Europe and Russia. She also set up, with well-known Internet privacy advocate Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org), a non-profit group called Trust-E that provides an Internet seal of approval to websites that comply with a range of better business practices.
She seems the ideal person for the task laid out by the US government because she knows the issues, the history and the tensions behind this particularly onerous job. Yet now libertarian and privacy groups are angry with her and ICANN and the latter group and its members stand accused of being secretive and of placing themselves beyond accountability.
Mainly this is because ICANN decided that domain-name owners should have to pay an annual administrative "tax". Critics say that a private group cannot impose such set charges when it is supposed to be opening the market for registration services and, legally, a private group cannot impose a tax.
Ms Dyson has argued that the charges are legitimate.
Nonetheless, the US government seems to feel the situation needs some looking into. It appears increasingly likely that the US Congress will hold hearings into just what ICANN is up to. It's hard to predict what will happen. NSI is supposed to lose its monopoly any day now, yet no one seems clear on what will take its place. The only certainty is that sorting out this brouhaha must be given top priority because the development of the Internet will be stymied, perhaps even halted, by such administrative turmoil and uncertainty.
Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie
