Top-Level Domain By Any Other Name
One Ringy Dingy
Until recently, this useful app
aratus operated on the "consensus" principle, quietly governed by right-minded people in the name of the common good. Policies were invented as needed by a loose association of groups like the Internet Society (ISOC), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). These were aided and abetted by a handful of individuals with broad but undefined powers who were there-when-the-Internet-started.
This system functioned in obscurity until the World Wide Web explosion hit and conflicting requests for second-level domain names, particularly in the .com domain, began pouring in. All of a sudden the "Who is the real foobar?" problem took on enormous commercial import.
Rather than letting existing trademark law use the courts to refine the property-rights boundaries asso
ciated with trade names, the Mount Olympus crowd decided to impose its "common sense," developing policies governing who would and who would not be granted domain names. As you can imagine, this became a legal morass, careening toward a potential restraint of trade lawsuit that could keep the beards and Birkenstock crowd busy giving depositions until the new millennium. The situation was compounded by the NSF, which decided to certify a single contractor to process domain name applications, allowing it to charge $50 a year for the privilege. As you can imagine, this has turned into a huge money faucet, causing many people to ask, "Hey, where is all this money going?"
As if this weren't trouble enough, commercial ISPs began asking, "What's so sacred about .com? Why can't we have a .biz and a .mall or .sex?" If there's room in the root servers to accommodate a couple of weenies on the Isle of Man, they ask, how come there's no room for the thousands of customers we represent? And why can't I run a TLD serve
r and charge people to register?
Monopoly? Who, Us?
Thus was born the AlterNIC movement, a group of like-minded ISPs that realized that the entire DNS monopoly rests on nothing but a few p
ointers in a root.cache file. Using a first-come, first-served homesteading approach, they staked out new top-level domains, set up their own TLD servers, and even established their own root servers--hundreds of them spread around the world. These are beginning to find each other in a project called Root 64, which is attempting to create an alternative ring of synchronized root servers that operate under the discipline of open competition. (You can learn about this and other AlterNIC efforts on the newdom mailing list at www.newdom.com/lists/).
The incumbents alternately scoff at this effort while threatening dire calamity if it succeeds. They claim having multiple competing directories will "bifurcate" the Internet. The sounds emanating from the I-was-there-when-the-Internet-started cabal remind me of my
early days at Bell Labs, back before divestiture, when it was widely maintained that plugging any product into the phone system that was not manufactured by AT&T would surely lead to chaos.
In one of the deep ironies of the Internet, end users have learned that they are not obliged to be faithful to their own ISP's name server and can take matters into their own hands if they would like to check out some of the new domain names that are springing up.
After all, this is a promiscuous medium. Some months ago, I repointed my DNS stub resolver to an AlterNIC server (IP address 192.160.127.90). Now I can surf sites not only in the standard .com and .edu domains but in .biz and .mall as well. Beyond the psychological gratification of tweaking an entrenched monopoly, the AlterNIC server provides more prompt and efficient service. No longer do I hang for what seems like minutes waiting for my overloaded local name server to look up a name.
Will the AtlerNIC movement blossom or fade? That probably depe
nds on how the sovereign states of France, Canada or even Microsoft approach this issue when they wake up to the possibilities. There's ample opportunity for both innovation and mischief. But that's what fre
e markets are all about.
Bill Frezza is the President of Wireless Computing Associates. He can be reached via e-mail at frezza@inter-ramp.com or on the Web at techweb.cmp.com/nc/frezza/frezza.html.
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