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T A B L E__T A L K

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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

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"I don't know what Jay Fenello tells Ira Magaziner," says Don Heath, president of the Internet Society -- the self-described "non-governmental international organization for global cooperation and coordination for the Internet" that includes many of the Internet's founders and builders. "Most of us are standing around saying, 'Who is this guy? Should he be treated equally in this debate?' I don't think so," Heath says.

But Heath and the Internet Society have approached this issue with a slightly renegade spirit as well. The Internet Society is proceeding with its own plan to open the domain name system to competition without the government's support. Along with Jon Postel -- a professor at the University of Southern California and unofficial Net godfather who administers the numbering system that makes Internet addresses work -- Heath has signed up more than 80 small businesses as registrars to seven new top-level domains such as ".store" and ".firm."

Those small businesses -- ranging from a translating service in Japan to a small Internet service provider in Australia to a sunscreen manufacturer in Los Angeles to an individual living in New Jersey -- have paid the Internet Society $10,000 a pop to join the illustrious-sounding Council of Registrars, or CORE. Shortly after Heath and Postel announced their plan to start the seven new top-level domains in Geneva last year, the White House chose not to endorse it, and instead called on Irving and Magaziner to find a suitable alternative.

Whether any of those 80-odd companies who make up Heath's CORE ultimately will register domain names or see a return on their $10,000 investment remains to be seen. In the meantime, some are already running ads on such high-trafficked sites as Pathfinder, urging consumers to be the first to claim their new domain names.

Heath's brazen tactic of creating seven new top-level domain names with no support from the U.S. government and minimal support from international authorities is exactly the reason why Magaziner has gone out of his way to meet with anyone with an opinion and a server. Diverging views about how the domain name system should be run could lead to a fragmentation of the Net and disruption of Net service.

We've already caught glimpses of such a future. Last summer, Eugene Kashpureff, a 33-year-old engineer and towing-service operator from Washington state, rerouted service for the .com top-level domain from Network Solutions' server to his own, disrupting Web and e-mail service for several hours. Although Kashpureff settled out of court with Network Solutions and issued a written apology, he now faces FBI charges of computer and wire fraud for his antics. Kashpureff was extradited back to the United States from Canada on Christmas Eve, released on a $75,000 bond and is awaiting trial.

Then there is Paul Garrin, founder of an Internet name-space company called pgMedia who filed an antitrust suit against Network Solutions and flooded the Commerce Department with more than 100 petitions against the domain name registrar last summer. Garrin describes the administration's green paper as a plot to keep Network Solutions in control of their monopoly, and the U.S. government in control of the Internet. In a recent e-mail, he said the plan amounts to a diversion tactic "sprayed out in anthrax-like fine aerosol mist into the ether of the media and the Net, silently closing in to be inhaled inconspicuously as all eyes are on the bombs falling on Iraq."

And there is the more reasonable but potentially more damaging Christopher Ambler, president of Image Online Design in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Ambler, who has claimed the domain ".web," also met with Magaziner at the meeting in New York last week, and says he is cooperating with the administration's plan and is ready to start registering addresses.

Despite this very real threat of what one administration official involved in the discussions describes as "a bunch of guys playing G.I. Joe," the big corporate players have remained oddly silent. While more than 200 companies responded to a request for comment last summer by the Commerce Department, many have since been silent on the issue.

"I think there was a feeling after the request for comment that this was the end of it," says Brian O'Shaughnessy, director of public policy for the Interactive Sevices Association, which represents more than 300 companies such as AOL and AT&T. "I think that because this issue is so complex, everyone is waiting to get educated on it before coming down on either side."

In fact, corporate involvement in domain name issues has more to do with brand preservation than electronic commerce. Members of the administration's inter-agency task force on domain names say that though AOL, AT&T, Bell Atlantic and IBM attended some meetings, their interest was mostly from a trademark perspective. Would ibm.com be guaranteed the domain name ibm.web, for example? The administration invited Microsoft lobbyists to put in their two cents but got the cold shoulder. And though the Information Technology Association of America, the Washington trade association that represents most high-tech corporations (like Netscape and Boeing), sponsored a two-day conference on domain names last summer, it later dropped out of the discussions.

One trade organization vigorously involved in the government discussions last fall was the Association of Interactive Media, which claims to represent 300 companies, including Citibank and AOL. AIM's president, Andy Sernovitz, rails against Heath's Internet Society and its CORE registry plan. When testifying before the House science subcommittee on basic research last September, Sernovitz went so far as to accuse Heath of being a "puppet" of the Swiss government and of conspiring with Libyan nationals. Today, he says that the Internet is in danger of becoming fragmented not because of the Eugene Kashpureffs but because Heath's CORE registrars "have all gone cowboy."

Despite the possibility that the transition from monopoly to competition in domain name registration will be rough, leaving us with interruptions in e-mail or Web access, we'll all be better off in the long run: We'll have the options of lower prices and more choices in where we plant our stakes in cyberspace.

As David Johnson, director of the Aspen Institute's Internet policy project and outside adviser to the administration in the domain name debate, says: "The most interesting question is not whether we have chaos on the Internet, but where order will come from -- the top down or the bottom up. I think we are learning that the bottom up is better, though that concept is new to Washington."
SALON | Feb. 4, 1998

Rebecca Vesely writes frequently about technology and politics.