Competition has come to the Internet domain name process with Australian registry Melbourne IT taking up a position as one of five newglobal registrars of top-level domain names.
A group of telecom and Internet interests today said that beginning in June, they will offer Internet address registration services in competition with Network Solutions. The announcement marks the first major milestone in privatizing a process that has functioned as a U.S. government-sanctioned monopoly since the early 1990s.
It also paves the way for greater self-governance by operators and users of a system which thus far has resisted most attempts to force it under governmental control.
Esther Dyson, Chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which negotiated with the US Commerce Department to arrive at many terms of the planned transfer, drew on another historic precedent to describe the sharing arrangement behind Internet domains .com, .net and .org.
"What we have here is one small step for three domains, one giant leap for domainkind," she quipped.
New competitors Melbourne IT, America Online, France Telecom S.A.'s Oleane Internet service, Register.com of New York andthe Geneva-based trade group the Council of Registrars will launch a testbed for the new system together with NSI on April 26.
The test should assure that when customers purchase their own top-level domains such as zd.com, w3c.org or telstra.net, all registrars will know the transaction has taken place simultaneously. At least 29 more companies already approved by ICANN are expected to join the fray once the new system goes live June 24.
Under terms of the agreement, registrars like Melbourne IT will maintain their own "mirror" sites of NSI's database, updating all records across the mirror sites simultaneously. AOL and others will pay US$9 per name per year to NSI in exchange for its role as the centralised registry for .com, .net and .org.
Though NSI has charged US$70 per name for two years of registration, competing registrars will be free to charge whatever they want.
The CEO of Melbourne IT, Professor Peter Gerrand, said that the deregulation of the top-level domains will be beneficial to all Internet users.
"We are committed to working with the other four testbed registrars in this historic opening of the .com, .net, and .org registries to competition, which will result in lower costs, better service, and more choices for customers. In particular, we look forward to offering a high standard of service to the diverse and booming Internet market throughout the Asia-Pacific region."
Innovation ahead?
Newly minted competitors shied away from predicting profits, pricing or even long-term success this morning, however.
"This is all new," said Bill Burrington, vice president of public affairs at America Online. "We're figuring it out in Internet time."
Added Burrington: "When you have competition you have innovation. And when people innovate, consumers benefit."
A spokesperson for Melbourne IT, Michael Dowling, said that his company wouldn't be releasing pricing details for the top level domains until it has obtained more details regarding the domain registration process. Dowling said that the company would be likely to release more details "by the end of next week". Though on its face simple, the transition has been at times nightmarish in its complexity for those who have marshaled it since 1996.
Then, domain-name system inventor Jon Postel proposed a consortium of industry and engineering bodies take over operation of the system from the federal government when the government was originally slated to stop funding it in March 1998.
Postel made the proposal as operator of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which controls the numeric Internet addresses that underlie the plain-language addresses people type into their browsers every day.
In the early days of the Internet, that proposal would likely have succeeded, since the network ran largely on consensus derived from a small, volunteer group of engineers and computer enthusiasts.
Showdown
But by late 1996, business in the Net was booming, and millions, not thousands, were connected. A legal showdown between the White House and corporate interests on one side and groups such as the Internet Society, Postel's IANA, the International Trademark Association and the United Nations' World Intellectual Property Organization on the other ensued.
Since the Internet had begun as nothing more than a research and development project funded by the US Defense Department and, later, the National Science Foundation, neither side had clear legal authority to assert control over the domain-name system.
Adding to the mess was Network Solutions' insistence that it had perpetual rights to all domains registered under .com, .net and .org.
Both sides, together with input from the White House, punted. Beginning in 1997, then-White House advisor on Internet policy Ira Magaziner urged Network Solutions and an Internet Society-backed group known as the Internet International Ad Hoc Committee to reach a consensus on policy.
After months of fruitless negotiations, Magaziner called for an expansion of negotiations to cover not just domain names but the underlying numeric addresses and technical standards. With that, the ICANN, which grew out of Postel's IANA, was born. Today's agreement arguably marks its first tangible achievement.
