By any other name

ONE OF THE badly under-covered stories of the last five years is the ongoing revamping of the domain name system: too geeky for the business press, too policy-ish for the technical press, too arcane for the mainstream press. A lot of what interest there was, even on the Net itself, has died down. But the wranglings over the composition and conduct of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ( ICANN) continue unabated.

Like a lot of people, I had sort of forgotten about ICANN in the last few months, despite all that spam email offering me new addresses in .biz and .info, part of the newly revamped structure. Wandering past a few sites, I can see why: little has changed. They are arguing over the composition of committees, and accountability, and representation exactly the kind of useless politics that the original working methods adopted by Internet pioneers were designed to circumvent in the interests of getting something actually built. Much of the Internet's inner workings were defined in documents known as RFCs, for Request for Comments - and that polite name made it clear no one was imposing rules.

The most interesting bit of the dispute, however, is the ongoing fight over the country code domains, uneuphoniously known as cctlds (for country code top-level domains) - you know, things like .uk, .de, and .fr. To wit: these domains, on which multiple billions of pounds/dollars/euros worth of businesses depend, have little in the way of contractual agreements with ICANN that guarantee anything like a level of service. The whole business is a legacy of the rather casual way responsibilities were allocated when the Net was young.There are two types of top-level domains: generic (such as .com, .net, .org, and the new .name, .info, .biz), and country code. Originally, US-based organizations were intended to follow the same practices in use elsewhere in the world and use .us, with second-level identifiers like .com (or, in the case of .uk, .co) or .org to specify whether the organization was commercial or non-profit. Instead, they largely gravitated to the generic .com and .org, which had been intended to be international. Yet another system ruined by the users.

The management of country code domains was handed over to national representatives appointed by constant administrator Jon Postel, according to policies he explained in an RFC here. Many of these arrangements have been more or less formally accepted by the relevant national governments. In the UK, domain names are managed by the membership organisation Nominet (http://www.nominet.org.uk), and anyone can become a member by paying the subscription fee. Nominet was formed at a time when the UK government, like many, wasn't particularly interested in domain name issues; notes from its AGM last July say that there is now interest in formalizing the relationship. There are cctlds whose administration is far more casual - a computer under some academic's desk.

ICANN, which likes to describe its role as technical oversight, has come under fire in the years since its creation (shortly after Postel died in 1998) for being autocratic, unaccountable, and expensive. In one sense, ICANN has everyone else by the balls: it manages the 13 root servers worldwide that store the database of name-to-Internet number matchups.

It could, theoretically, bully registrars by threatening to cut them off if they didn't agree to specified contract terms. It was just this threat that had a number of ICANN critics ( here) worried a couple of years ago. In fact, the situation for cctlds seems to be the opposite of those fears. It's not that they're being tied to unacceptable contracts, it's that they don't *have* contracts.

The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries ( CENTR), an organization representing the many European (and soon-to-be European) cctlds, plus a couple of strays, Japan and New Zealand, was briefly in the news in late 2000 with claims that its members were thinking of breaking away from ICANN's control. CENTR has been objecting for some time that ICANN wants the cctld registries to pay a substantial amount (35 percent) of its operating costs, but in return is not offering much of a say in how the organization is run or guaranteed service levels. For its part, ICANN complained that the whole business of coming up with contracts to cover the myriad different situations - for-profit, non-profit, governmentally supported or not - was incredibly difficult.

Both sides said a year ago they expected significant progress in 2001. As the BBC's Mark Ward discovered recently ( here), they didn't get it.

Meantime, ICANN is introducing seven more gtlds before the first few have even made a dent in the Net. Have you ever gone to a .biz or a .info? Ironically, the problem ICANN was created to help solve - the shrinking number of available "good" names in .com - is much less of an issue now that so many dot-coms have gone bust. Meanwhile, as peer-to-peer networking - instant messaging, file-sharing networks, Web services - the DNS becomes less relevant because none of those services use domain names. Where the DNS matters is the Web which, for the moment, is where the money is. Expect continuing fireworks.

Previous Columns
Creative Accounting
Dumber people can run Windows
2001 in review
Care in the community
Remembran ce of postings past
BT's Stupid Patent Tricks
Preserving our freedoms
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Net is the mother of re-invention
Save the Cookie
Digital rights and the new era of world terrorism

Wendy M. Grossman, whose Web site is pelicancross ing.net, is author of From Anarchy to Power: the Net Comes of Age (NYU Press, 2001), net.wars (NYU Press, 1998), and the Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet (Macmillan, 2001). She can be reached at this email address.

Copyright on all articles published in the INQUIRER is hers.