"It might affect the extent of the grant in the future, [however]," he says.

Bode calls the infrastructure fund "a $30 [out of $100] tax for the purported welfare of the Internet. NSF has no authority to levy such an assessment or tax without explicit Congressional authority."

Bradner says that "$50 is a remarkably small fee for worldwide recognition in the namespace."

"It costs a large organization more to create a check for the $50 [renewal fee] than $50," he says.

In addition to questions about the funding of domain registration, NSI has become entangled in a web of lawsuits over intellectual property rights on the Internet.

According to a report by Phil L. Sbarbaro, NSI's outside general counsel, as many as 50 lawsuits have been filed by copyright holders against owners of domain names which they feel infringe or dilute their copyright, and several have named NSI in their suits.

Sbarbaro compared domain names to New York Stock Exchange trading symbols, which the courts have declared are not trademarks.

Proposed Reform

At the root of the growing complaints against the current domain name system, in which Bode's suit is the latest, is the incompatibility of U.S. government control with the international, largely ungoverned nature of the Internet.

"Because the Internet is an international resource, it's not clear that any government has any authority to [register domain names in the .com domain]," Bradner says. "I was in Beijing [recently], and all of the domain names I found were .com."

As the NSF's contract with NSI nears its March expiration date, NSF representatives say it wants out of the domain name business.

"It is clear that the Internet is now the domain of the venture capitalist, not the adventurous academic," Joseph Bordogna, acting deputy director of the NSF, told a Congressional subcommittee in September.

Many are looking forward to NSF's withdrawal from domain registration as an opportunity to introduce international competition into the industry.

"The issue which gets a lot of people upset is the fact that there's only one place you can go to get a .com registration," Bradner says. "They would like to have competition. You would go to the one that best fits your needs."

Research Associate at the Kennedy School of Government James H. Keller says that several proposals are getting "a lot of attention."