Registration Fees

In 1995, the NSF granted the NSI permission to charge domain name registrants a fee for maintaining the domain name database.

New applicants for domain names must now pay $100 for the first two years of registration and then $50 annually.

"[In my view,] the NSF has the authority to charge fees for government services just like the park service," Bradner says. "There is nothing in the federal budget which would pay for the continued support of free [domain name] database maintenance."

But Washington attorney William H. Bode is betting that Bradner is wrong.

Bode is representing a group of domain name holders in a $100 million class-action lawsuit against NSI and the NSF. The suit charges that NSI did not obtain the right to charge for domain registration through a competitive bid.

If it had, "the registration fee would be negligible or non-existent, and no renewal fees would be required. Many companies would gladly assume the domain name registration responsibilities for no charge because the property rights in the registration indexes are valuable," Bode said in an October news statement.

"NSI isn't going to do it out of the kindness of their heart," Bradner says.

Bode's clients are also contesting the manner in which the NSF and NSI are planning to spend the registration and renewal fees already collected.

"Part of that arrangement [between NSF and NSI in 1995] was that 30 percent of that fee would go into a fund to support Internet infrastructure," Bradner says.

"NSF originally was going to set up a panel to decide how to spend it, but it never got set up," he adds.

Congress authorized the NSF to use the fund for the Next Generation Internet, a federal project to give the net a faster backbone and to investigate new high-performance applications.

Harvard is involved in a parallel project, Internet 2, organized by 110 universities.

According to an Oct. 21 article in The Crimson, the project is designed to build faster and more reliable Internet applications.

Bradner says that while Harvard is funding its participation in Internet 2 through a NSF grant, the money has already been awarded and so will not be jeopardized by the lawsuit.