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Fred Langa is a senior consulting editor and columnist for Windows Magazine. Fred's free weekly newsletter is available via subscribe@langa.com. You can contact him at fred@langa.com or via his website at http://www.langa.com.

New Rules In The Domain
Name Game

By Fred Langa

The old, familiar way that Internet domain names get assigned is about to change forever. Domain names, of course, are the .com, .org, .edu, and other suffixes used to distinguish different types and nationalities of Web sites from one another.

Until now and by an accident of history (in that the Arpanet was the precursor to today's Internet) a U.S. company has held what amounts to a sanctioned monopoly on the business of assigning these names. Network Solutions of Herndon, Va., maintains the master databases that map Internet names to their real, numeric IP addresses. (For example, www.informationweek.com is mapped to the real address of 192.215.17.45.)

Last year, the Clinton Administration authorized a nonprofit body to "to take over responsibility for the IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain name system management, and root server system management functions now performed under U.S. government contract." The idea was to open up registration to multiple competing companies; to get the Internet, as a new kind of industry, to start maintaining and policing itself; and to provide some redundancy that's absent in today's all-the-domain-names-in-one-company's-basket approach.

The nonprofit body set up to do this is called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and it's starting to move into high gear. About two weeks ago, it issued "Draft Guidelines for Accreditation of Internet Domain Name Registrars" and it's now soliciting public comment until March 3; on March 4, the ICANN board will vote on the guidelines, and any public comments they decide to consider.

Ultimately, the ICANN guidelines may affect who is able to act as a domain name registrar; how disputes will be resolved between companies with competing claims to the same domain name; what new domain names are allowed (.firm, .info, .nom, .web, etc.) and much more.

If everything goes according to ICANN's schedule, by the end of March, five new registrars will be selected and will participate in a "test bed" project starting in April. The five new registrars initially will operate in parallel with Network Solutions. Starting in June, the new system will be stabilized and expanded to include additional registrars. By October, the new system should be completely in place and the current way of handling domain name registration will be defunct.

Clearly, this is a Big Deal: It affects every business and person with a Web site. And it puts ICANN in a position of incredible power: ICANN will determine who can and cannot act as a registrar. It will decide numerous technical issues involving the generation and propagation of new domains and names. And it will define policy issues that can affect everything from the fees we'll pay for domain registration to privacy rights in the registration databases.

But curiously, there hasn't been a lot of media attention to this issue, and public comment is all but nonexistent. In fact, to date, there are only a handful of comment threads on the ICANN site. For an issue affecting tens of millions of people, the silence is curious---and disturbing.

As InformationWeek readers, you're probably already better informed than most because InformationWeek has had more and better coverage than just about anyone else. For example, these are some of the best articles I've found anywhere on what's up with ICANN:

http://www.informationweek.com/author/internet.htm

http://www.informationweek.com/author/internet10.htm

http://www.informationweek.com/story/TWB19990122S0014

http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990209S0010

You also can visit the ICANN home page itself at http://www.icann.org/; you'll find the draft Guidelines on both Word and HTML format at http://www.icann.org/drafts.html.

What's your take? Is anyone at your organization closely following ICANN's moves? For that matter, if you're a Webmaster or involved with your company's Web operations, have you been following ICANN? Does the concentration of so much authority in a non-governmental body alarm or reassure you? Do you think the new domain name plan will lead to lower prices and better security---or increasing chaos and contention? Join in!

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