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Market For .COM-petition
Gabe Battista, CEO of Network Solutions, was expected by press time to outline NSI's suggestions on how to handle the emerging competition in domain-name registries--including a few surprises. Battista said in March that he favors a wide-open market to issue top-level domain names in addition to .com and .net. In fact, he has no problem with the Enhanced Domain Name Service (eDNS) rebels building registries that contradict more circumscribed rules proposed by a blue-ribbon panel of the Internet Society. NSI, he says, should have exclusive rights to register users under .com, .net and .org. (The Internet Society [ISOC]-commissioned proposal suggests .com be shared by 28 lottery-selected registries.) Battista says new registries should meet minimum standards ensuring database reliability and shared access, but he adds that continuing with existing proposals could fashion an International Telecommunication Union-like bureaucracy for d omain names. He also suggests limiting the number of top-level domains in which a user registers. Open competition creates both opportunities and complications for users--the opportunity to use nontrademarked names in a URL that may already be taken, as well as the burden of policing multiple registries to prevent trademark dilution.

Harmony In The Key Of CDSA
Interoperable business authentication has moved a step closer to reality. The Open Group Public Key Infrastructure Working Group reached a ground-breaking unanimous decision to adopt a cryptography and authentication scheme from Intel Corp.--the Common Data Security Architecture (CDSA) and its Common Security Server Manager (CSSM). Intel's Milind Khare says Netscape Communications Corp. plans to ship CDSA-based products by year's end. Entrust, IBM Corp., Netscape and Trusted Information Systems agreed to work toward a June deadline to expan d CSSM for key and certificate life cycles, nonrepudiation, key recovery and portability of credentials. Novell officials are considering adopting CDSA but say they would like to see more security smarts in protocols versus APIs. Microsoft Corp. was conspicuously absent, but Khare says Intel is considering layering to let CDSA "comprehend" Microsoft's export-approved Crypto API. Khare expects widescale deployment of products based on the API by late 1997 or early 1998.