What's in a domain name?

As the Internet has evolved from a U.S. defense research project to an international commercial marketplace, the naming conventions it has inherited have left it mired in a host of controversies and lawsuits, and the future of names on the Internet is by no means certain.

Communication in any form requires cooperation, but on computer networks the need to agree on common rules of communication is paramount.

As the Internet developed out of military and academic networks, a system of numeric "IP addresses" emerged which uniquely identified computers.

"Sometime along this protocol development, this concept of domain names [surfaced]. Before that, people referred to the IP address directly," says Scott O. Bradner, a technical consultant for University Information Services.

Domain names, such as "harvard.edu" and "whitehouse.gov" are uniquely linked to the numerical addresses which identify computers and the Web sites and other services they host. No two computers can share the same domain name.

Like 800 numbers, domain names have become valuable advertising resources, and the assignment of domain names is at the center of a growing controversy over intellectual property.

"The [responsibility] of making sure that an assignment is unique was taken up by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority [IANA]," Bradner says.

IANA administrates top-level domains (TLDs), the right-most portion of an Internet domain name. Each TLD, such as .com, .us and .edu, is assigned to a unique organization, which can subsequently assign lower-level domain names.

This system of naming computers transcends political and geographic boundaries, leading to a lack of clear sovereignty in setting policy for the domains.

The largest TLD, and therefore the most highly-disputed, is the .com domain administered by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) along with .edu, .net and several other international TLDs.

In 1992, the NSF delegated responsibility for its TLDs to Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) after a public bidding process. NSI agreed to register new domain names in a database that links the names to the IP addresses of their corresponding computers.

It is this database which directs Web-browsers and other Internet applications to the computer associated with a domain name.

According to NSI CEO Gabriel A. Battista's testimony before the House Judiciary Committe's Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property on Nov. 5, this task involved the registration of 200 new domain names per month in 1995.

Today, this volume has soared to 125,000 registrations per month, primarily in the .com domain. And with this growth on the Internet, NSI faces a host of legal quandaries which have precipitated Congressional hearings.

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.

"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."

Keller says that the Internet Ad-Hoc Coalition [IAHC]--a new organization made up of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Association--has proposed a competitive international process for domain registration and an additional seven new TLDs.

Among the new TLDs proposed under the plan, .firm, .store, .web and .arts would open new categories for domains and would alleviate some of the competition for .com domains.

The IAHC proposal, based on "a traditional set of institutions," does not satisfy some members of the Internet community, who have called for more decentralized control of the domain name system in keeping with the Internet's spirit of individualism, Keller says.

"The whole history of the Internet is based on the voluntary cooperation in a set of norms for how you behave on the Internet with regard to technologies," Keller says.

But he adds that individual registration of domain names would be chaotic.

"Time has a way of resolving things," Battista told Congress, and, indeed, a wait-and-see attitude seems to be the dominant reaction of observers of the Internet's name game.