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DNS Structure: Introduction

Part 4

Law and Policy

The rise of "cybersquatting" brought on lawsuits from trademark owners. Soon lawyers and courts were being dragged into this issue, and Network Solutions jumped in with a dispute policy that many claimed was unfair against non-trademark-owners. Anybody who was just trying to use domain names as a technical addressing system was now lost in all of this noise and confusion.

The big companies argued in court that somebody else with a domain name that was similar to their trademark was confusing the public into thinking their site was affiliated with the trademark owner. While there was much truth to this, to a large extent the companies brought the situation on themselves by their own use of endless marketing variations of their name for the domain names of their sites. If they had used domain names rigorously in their original structure, using subdomains of their main corporate domain, then the public might have learned to understand the concept that, for instance, only domains that were within citibank.com belonged to Citibank. If a con artist were to try to use a site at CitibankAccounts.com to dupe consumers into providing personal info to a site not really associated with that bank, he wouldn't have nearly as much success in a world where Citibank didn't really use a whole heap of variant names itself, so it's plausible that they might be using that one too. Thus, corporations that are now complaining about the need to police their name and lots of variations of it in every top level domain, and who are opposing the introduction of new TLDs because of the increased trouble and expense this causes, are really the ones at fault.

But, since the corporations were the ones with the big bucks, domain name policy has been increasingly controlled on their terms, so that the various domain dispute policies have tended to be biased in the direction of trademark owners, and the introduction of new TLDs was delayed and wound up having extensive "sunrise" provisions giving a trademark owner much greater rights in cyberspace than in the real world.

Here comes ICANN!

There was much dissatisfaction over the monopoly profits enjoyed by Network Solutions in domain registration. This ultimately led the U.S. government, which still had formal control over Internet structures due to it originating as a government research project, to create a new organization, ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), to oversee the domain name system and related issues.

This has had mixed results. It did succeed in at least partially ending the monopoly power of Network Solutions. The functions of "registry" (the keepers of the central domain database) and "registrar" (those who deal directly with the people, companies, and organizations who register domains, provide the user interface to register and modify those domains, maintain the "WHOIS" data giving more details on the registrants, and take payments for registrations and renewals) were separated. Network Solutions (or, actually, its parent company Verisign) retained the registry, the behind-the-scenes outfit that controlled .com, .org, .net, and .edu (but .edu was spun off later to a non-profit consortium, and .org is in the process of being separated now; .net could eventually follow... or not) and gets a few dollars in wholesale registration fee for each domain registered. This is much less than the money it made per domain when it was the monopoly registrar, but it's still a lot of money with the millions of domains registered. Meanwhile, the registrars are now in a highly competitive market, with Network Solutions still one of them, but many others offer lower prices and better service. The domain registrations for .com, .net, and (for now) .org still ultimately go into the registry owned by Verisign, no matter who you register them with.

Another change promoted by ICANN was to add additional top level domains. These were run by different registries, hence ending the monopoly of Verisign. (Actually, there have always been country code domains, run by different registries, but they have been less commonly used especially in the United States, where the .us domain was organized in an unwieldy manner -- it finally started to allow direct second-level registrations in 2002.) This new TLD process was very slow to get going, due to the great amount of political squabbling, but it has finally happened, with six new domains live and one (.pro) on its way.

ICANN has come under a lot of criticism, some of it warranted, but some of it appearing to be the sour grapes of people whose own schemes to make money off domain names have been thwarted by ICANN policy. One source of contention is the alternate roots, which some promote as a way to break the ICANN monopoly, while others criticize as bringers of chaos to the naming system, where show.biz can end up going to different Web sites depending on which ISP you're using -- URLs would no longer be uniform or universal.

As time goes by, opposition to ICANN continues to increase, and it is coming under scrutiny by many people and institutions, including the U.S. Congress, which is questioning whether the agreement between ICANN and the Commerce Department, which gave ICANN its power over Internet namespaces, should continue. It hasn't helped things that the original agreement called for half of ICANN's board to be elected by popular vote of Internet users, but in fact only a smaller number of board members were ever elected, and there are no plans by ICANN's entrenched insiders to allow any further elections once their terms run out. The ICANN bylaws are silent on what to do about the "At Large" board members after their initial term, because the concept of how to organize an international election of Internet users was too unsettled at the time to be enshrined permanently there; instead, ICANN was expected to come up with a workable method for future elections by the time they were needed. But they haven't; instead they now propose to do away with At Large board members altogether and just let the cabal of "stakeholders" run the whole show. The U.S. government might just pull the plug on them, though. The future is still very uncertain at this point.

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