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R E C E N T L Y

The little city that could
By Doug McLellan
Tacoma's power company rolls its own Net and cable service
(02/03/98)

Drudging admiration
By Mike Godwin
Why the gossip may win in court -- but lose in the press
(02/02/98)

Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
The unholy union of technobabble and marketspeak
(01/30/98)

Is Bill Gates a closet liberal?
By Andrew Leonard
The money trail of his philanthropy suggests just that
(01/29/98)

Can technology be beautiful?
By Scott Rosenberg
David Gelernter's "Machine Beauty"
(01/28/98)

BROWSE THE ARCHIVES FOR Let's Get This Straight

BY REBECCA VESELY | Remember the notion of the Internet as a Wild West frontier? It seemed to give way a while ago to a more jaded consensus that the Net is nothing more than a virtual corporate theme park.

But the current debate about expanding authority over domain names -- the addresses (like "salonmagazine.com") that tell your browsers and e-mail where to go -- has given new life to the Gold Rush analogy. A good number of online buccaneers have played a part in the evolution of the Clinton administration's new proposal on opening up domain name registration to competition -- and they hope to play a bigger role if the policy is enacted.

"There are still a lot of cyber-cowboys out there," admits Larry Irving, assistant secretary of commerce and head of the National Telecommunications Information Administration, which advises the White House on telecom issues and last Friday rolled out a new plan to administer the domain name system. "And we're trying to be an arbitrator to them, not a dictator."

The administration's proposal, among other things, calls for a governing body to administer the domain name system -- a group made up of consumer representatives, small businesses, registrars of country domains (like ".uk") and, of course, the big telecom companies. Basically, anyone who wants to sell domain names and proves basic technical know-how would be given an opportunity to do so. The registrars would need the governing body to ensure equal access to the "root servers" -- the computers at the heart of the Net that apportion Internet address information.

This system would replace the current monopoly on domain name registration by Virginia-based Network Solutions. Through a five-year agreement with the National Science Foundation that ends in March but will likely be extended through September, Network Solutions has gotten rich charging the millions of people using the Web $50 per year for Internet addresses in the popular top-level domains .com, .net and .org.

The plan (or "green paper," as the administration calls it) is still provisional; it must go through a comment period and subsequent fine-tuning. What's striking is that corporate America was, for the most part, absent from the negotiations that hashed it out. Instead, it was the "cyber-cowboys" who rode into Washington, D.C., and helped government officials formulate the first test of the administration's plan for electronic commerce.

Last Monday, senior White House adviser and electronic commerce architect Ira Magaziner met with a few of those entrepreneurial cowboys in New York City to, as one official said, "get them on board" the plan's final draft. Those who attended the Magaziner briefing represented obscure companies that are hoping to see a cut of Network Solutions' profits.

"The Net gives small businesspeople like me a voice where we otherwise would not have one. That is the reason this has been such a passionate debate," says Jay Fenello, president of Iperdome, who was at the Magaziner meeting and soon hopes to administer the new ".per" domain. Through his Atlanta company, Fenello plans to provide Net users with personal domain names that, he says, will help people remain online if they change jobs or ISPs. ("If your name happens to be John Smith, please hurry," Iperdome's Web site reads.)

And Fenello, a relative Net newbie, has taken his campaign not just to Magaziner but to other Internet users though multiple e-mail lists on the domain name issue, like gtld-discuss@imc.org, that offer vigorous debate and frequently ruffled feathers. Broadcasting his opinions about the domain name process to whoever will listen undoubtedly helped Fenello and others bend the administration's ear.

N E X T_P A G E | Who are these people, anyway?