Esther Dyson says she was for "the little guy." But some of the losers in this week's Internet land grab complain that the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which Dyson chaired, was anything but.
In one of her last official acts as the head of ICANN, Dyson helped seal the decision to dot the Web's landscape with seven new top-level domains (TLDs).
The winners include .biz for businesses, .pro for professionals, including lawyers and accountants, and five other Web-address suffixes. Other new TLDs, expected to start registering users in the second quarter of 2001 are .info, .aero, .coop, .museum, and .name.
Behind most of the winning TLDs were a slew of companies expected to cash in on millions of dollars in registration fees.
During two arduous days of hearings and meetings Dyson repeatedly said that one of the board's goals was to foster competition, breaking what was once a government-approved monopoly on the .com, .net, and .org TLDs held by Network Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq: NSOL).
The big winners
But one of the winning bids -- for .info -- was backed by a company called Afilias, which is a partnership of 19 existing registrars, including Network Solutions Inc. The TLD, for general purpose Web sites, is meant to be a direct competitor for .com.
As ICANN detractors pointed out, four of the companies that will now be negotiating with ICANN to register addresses with the new TLDs are considered major players in the tech industry.
"There was clearly some prejudice. They didn't favor the small business," said Paul Garrin, CEO of Name.Space Inc., which lost out on its bid to become a registrar for about 180 different TLDs.
Garrin's bid was supported by Dyson and another ICANN director, Linda Wilson.
Stability a criterion
The World Health Organisation, which lost out on its bid for .health, is also taking ICANN to task, threatening some form of "future action."
ICANN staff members pointed out that fostering competition was one goal of the Web address expansion, but Internet stability was another. Financing, experience, and existing infrastructure were key to the successful bids, they said.
"This is unfounded," said Shonna Koegan, a spokeswoman for Register.com, which was part of two winning bids. "ICANN did an incredibly thorough job in balancing needs."
Register.com was among the 19 registrars in the winning Afilias bid. Koegan noted that none of the Afilias partners are allowed to own more than five percent of the company, and some are so small they register no more than a handful of names in a day.
Rich get richer
Register.com was also part of the winning bid for .pro, which will administer Web addresses for attorneys, CPAs, and doctors. The company is partnering with Virtual Internet and Baltimore Technologies in that TLD.
There is no denying that some rich Web players will get richer as a result of ICANN's decision.
The JV Team, which won .biz, includes Washington-based NeuStar, which provides registry services for the entire North American communications industry and controls a registry database that is critical for routing all telephone calls in North America.
That partnership also includes Melbourne IT, the service provider for Australia's leading commercial Web domain registry (.com.au). Melbourne IT claims to be the largest registrar of generic TLDs (including .com, .net, and .org) in the Asia-Pacific region.
Nameplanet.com, Ltd., an eight-month-old company, owns the Global Names Registry, which won the right to register .name TLDs. Its subcontractor is IBM, which will provide the hardware for the registry service.
