Living on Internet Time:
1995 - 1998
as Successor to InterNIC
After years of internecine battles between governmental, commercial, and private interests, the future of Internet administration is put in the hands of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an entity created by Net guru Jon Postel. Not everyone is satisfied, however, and issues of accountability and public access linger unresolved.
In 1993 the consulting firm of Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI) won a five-year contract with the U.S. government to create InterNIC, an entity that administers domain names ".com," ".net," and ".org." As Internet usage expanded beyond all expectation, many industry observers questioned both the appropriateness and the ability of having one company single-handedly administer the most popular top-level domain names in the world. When time on the NSI contract began to run out, the Internet community began discussing the future of domain name registration.
What started in late 1996 as a discussion about Internet administration quickly devolved into something of a civil war, as multiple groups with varying agendas began putting forward their own proposals. A U.S. Commerce Department report issued in 1997 opened the floodgates of debate and, occasionally, rancor. In essence, the paper outlined the U.S. Government's desire to privatize domain name administration. It called for the dismantling of the InterNIC system, to be replaced by a new, international policy-making board to oversee the Internet.
President Clinton's senior policy advisor Ira Magaziner was appointed to lead U.S. government discussions on the issue, while Internet pioneer Jon Postel spearheaded efforts through his IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) post to influence the outcome. NSI held their own meetings on the future of domain names, and other groups such as the Boston Working Group, the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX), Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Council of Registrars (CORE), and the World Internet Alliance also strode into the fray.
These wide-ranging discussions gain more focus in January 1998 when the U.S. Commerce Department releases its "Green Paper." The paper lists four main areas of concern -- overall stability of the Internet, the introduction of competition into domain name registry, involvement of the private sector, and accountability to Internet users -- and makes further recommendations for an international non-profit body to oversee domain names and Internet architecture as a whole. Amidst complaints that this new body might serve only to recreate the monopoly situation rather than eliminate it, negotiations continue throughout 1998.
A formal proposal for the new body, called ICANN, is posted jointly on the Web by IANA and NSI in September 1998, and it is tentatively accepted by the U.S. Commerce Department in October. The ICANN proposal is not without its critics. Objections are voiced from groups such as the Open Root Server Confederation, CORE, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation on a variety of issues: many are concerned that ICANN will have both tremendous power and no accountability; others point out that no civil liberties questions were addressed by the proposal; still others argue that ICANN's board of directors, handpicked by Postel and headed by Esther Dyson, does not represent the full spectrum of Internet users.
Magaziner and the Commerce Department share many of these concerns, and they insist on a number of policy revisions aimed at creating greater openness and accountability. ICANN cooperates with the Commerce Department, but concerns remain that ICANN is simply entrenching the preexisting Internet elite. A November 25 New York Times article quotes an online post by Bob Allisat, a Toronto-based domain registrar: "ICANN is currently set up only to serve a handful of unknown insiders . . . . Other than that it leaves the rest of humanity and every other commercial and corporate stakeholder very much out in the cold." When ICANN holds its first public meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November 1998, the mood is, by all accounts, surprisingly hostile.
To some, ICANN is just another acronym for just another technical committee. Others view ICANN as the beginning of a global government for the Internet, and to them the stakes are extraordinarily high. But despite passionate criticism, infighting, and the sudden death of Jon Postel in October 1998, the creation of a new administrative body for cyberspace inches forward.
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Corporate America was slow to catch on to the value of the Internet, but when word of the Web finally reached the boardrooms, they made their move. To their chagrin, many companies found that someone else had gotten there first. In the mid-1990s, a gold-rush effect surrounded domain names, and a cottage industry nicknamed "domain speculation" sprung up, in which Net-savvy opportunists deliberately registered names, then turned them over for a fee. As corporate presence on the Web came to be considered de rigeur, the lengths to which companies were willing to go to get their names back -- including the amount they were willing to pay -- hit new highs. For instance, Net lore has it that Microsoft paid $10,000 for the rights to www.slate.com, the site of a Microsoft-funded online magazine. When negotiations failed, big corporations were more than willing to bring in the lawyers, and the number of domain-name related cases in U.S. courts multiplied rapidly. MTV veejay Adam Curry beat his former employers to the punch with www.mtv.com, and when MTV demanded that Curry release the name, he refused. Curry assumed a Patrick Henry-style pose with the media -- he assured Wired in 1994 that the case was "the Roe v. Wade of the Internet" -- but after extensive legal wrangling, MTV ultimately won out. The trademark policy instituted by NSI helped cut down on the number of corporations going to court over domain names, but it didn't address the larger question of intellectual property. In 1996 the animal rights group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) was dismayed to find that www.peta.org was being used as a parody site, People Eating Tasty Animals. Animal lovers can comfort themselves with the knowledge that two years later, Ringling Brothers had to call out the lawyers to fight for www.ringlingbrothers.com, which had been shanghaied by a group protesting the treatment of elephants in the circus. Which group? PETA, of course. Whether the dismantling of the NSI monopoly in 1998, complete with brand-new top-level domain names like .store, will lead to better resolution of trademark and intellectual property disputes remains to be seen. Some pundits argue that fights over domain names are inevitable. To paraphrase a Wired article on the issue, the real world can allow for Samuel Adams law firm and Samuel Adams beer, but the virtual world permits only one www.samadams.com. |