Domain additions to dot Web landscape
Organization plans alternatives to .com
for Web addresses

http://digitalmass.boston.com/news/daily/10/04/domain_names.html

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 10/4/2000

For people sick and tired of dot-com
mania, relief may soon be at hand. By
this time next year, we could be talking
about the latest high-flying dot-biz
company, or the lousy performance of
that new dot-travel company.

That's because the obscure but powerful
organization that oversees Internet
domain names is planning to create some
new ones.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers, or ICANN, administers
all Internet addresses ending in .com,
.net, and .org, the best-known of the
so-called ''top-level domains.'' By far
the most popular of these is .com,
created for use by businesses. These
days, millions of businesses and
individuals around the world have bought
.com Internet addresses - so many that
all the good ones, such as www.news.com,
operated by CNet, have been taken.

So ICANN is looking for a few good
top-level domain names to handle the
spillover from .com.

Suggested domain names could be
submitted by any interested individual
or organization rich enough to pony up a
nonrefundable $50,000 application fee.

This was done to scare off dabblers, and
to ensure that the winners can afford to
actually operate the new domain, a
process that requires setting up
ultra-reliable server computers on the
Internet.

In addition, ICANN has made it clear
that it intends to add only a few new
domains.

Despite these barriers, ICANN's Web site
lists 47 applications from
organizations, trade union groups, and
Internet entrepreneurs. Between them,
they submitted over 200 suggested domain
names, including .tel, .travel, .phone,
.biz, and .sex.

Lycos Inc. of Waltham joined a
consortium of American, Korean, and
Chinese firms to suggest two names, .nom
and .pro. The Finnish cell-phone maker
Nokia put forward eight names, including
.mobile. The International Confederation
of Free Trade Unions in Brussels
recommended creation of a .union domain.

But the most ambitious applicant,
Name.Space Inc. of New York, applied for
118 domain names, including .insurance,
.jazz, .shoes and .sucks. In fact,
Name.Space already operates these
domains over an alternative Internet
domain system run by the company.
Because the Name.Space system isn't
recognized by ICANN, Internet users must
use special software settings to visit
any of the Name.Space domains.

Paul Garrin, founder and CEO of
Name.Space, says his company is seeking
to gain ICANN recognition for the most
popular of his alternative domains. ''We
didn't create them out of greed or
fiat,'' said Garrin. ''We created them
out of public demand.''

Given the billions of dollars of
economic value generated by dot-coms,
these new-generation domain names could
well spawn another Internet gold rush.
So ICANN's decisions on which domains to
approve could mean fortune or failure
for companies that are pushing their own
choices for new domains.

In addition, each new domain spawns a
new cascade of trademark disputes. The
MTV television network had to wage a
court battle to secure mtv.com after a
former employee bought it. Now every
trademark holder in the world is worried
about similar problems in each new
domain. Will MTV have the right to seize
ownership of mtv.sucks? Will every
company have to do battle for its
trademark in each new domain space?

ICANN presently has a trademark dispute
resolution system, but the process has
come in for sharp criticism. In 1996, a
Spanish couple created a travel Web
site, www.barcelona.com. But last
August, after the city government of
Barcelona complained, the domain was
taken away from them and awarded to the
city. Some ICANN critics say that the
organization should leave such disputes
to the courts, and merely hand out
Internet domains on a
first-come-first-served basis.

The argument has enlivened an ongoing
election to a single open seat on
ICANN's 19-member board. Five seats are
at stake, one for each of the world's
major regions - Africa, Asia and the
Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and
North America.

Seven candidates with diverse
backgrounds in law, academia, and
technology are vying for the North
American seat, including former Harvard
Law School professor Lawrence Lessig,
now relocated to Stanford Law School,
and Lyman Chapin, chief scientist for
BBN Technologies in Cambridge.

Also on the ballot are Karl Auerbach, an
engineer and attorney at Cisco Systems
Inc.; Donald Langenberg, physicist and
chancellor of Maryland's state
university system; Emerson Tiller,
associate professor of business,
technology, and law at the University of
Texas; Barbara Simons, former IBM
researcher and former president of the
Association for Computing Machinery; and
Harris Miller, president of the
Information Technology Association of
America. Only Internet users who have
already registered are eligible to vote;
the deadline for voting is Oct. 10.

The election has attracted far more
attention than ICANN's leaders had
expected. The new board members are
supposed to represent Internet users at
large, so any of the world's roughly 300
million Internet users could have
registered to vote. Still, Andrew
McLaughlin, a Berkman Fellow at Harvard
and ICANN's chief policy officer,
figured that hardly anybody cared about
the issue.

''The original goal, when this sucker
was designed, was for 5,000 members,''
McLaughlin said. ''Interest was
considerably greater than we thought.''
About 15 times greater; in the end,
76,000 Internet users signed up to vote.
That's still a tiny fragment of the
online population, but this fragment is
fervently interested in influencing the
future design of the domain system.