"I don't break things," Eugene Kashpureff says from his chaotic office in Bremerton, Washington. Indeed, it might be more accurate to say that he specializes in bending things - preferably the rules.
The enterprising Kashpureff built his first computer by hand when he was 10 years old and currently makes a decent living hawking coveted .com Internet domain names. Now he's gone on to create Alternic.net - an ad hoc registry experimenting with the development of new international top-level domains (iTLDs) like .sex or .biz.
The problem, of course, is that the .com zone is filling up at the rate of several thousand names per day - leaving few options for new Internet sites to choose from. The powers behind the Net infrastructure agree on the need to create new iTLDs as quickly as possible, and they're busily preparing for the rollout of up to 100 new domains within the next year. But Kashpureff is thumbing his nose at the Net power structure - and pushing Alternic.net as an alternative registry.
The triumvirate of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society, and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) makes it its business to assign new iTLDs and registry managers, as it did last year with InterNIC's .com domain monopoly. IANA director Jon Postel, the top dog within the Internet architecture �lite, scoffs, "Kashpureff is not cooperating. If some people went along with him and some people didn't, the Net would become a jungle."
That may well be, but the fixes Postel has proposed will allow only the competition that he approves. Postel once even suggested charging US$100,000 for the management of each new iTLD - a far cry from the open market for domain name registries many have called for. It's ideas like this that feed the fires of Kashpureff's rebelliousness.
Besides, Kashpureff says he doesn't need Postel's blessing to push ahead with his new top-level domains. "InterNIC and the IETF would like to think they're the sole authorities," he says. "But those tigers don't have any teeth. No one out there is really in control.
"And so Kashpureff continues to rail against the party line. It's possible that he'll be rendered impotent by Postel's new plan, or he may get co-opted with the promise of a lucrative registry contract. But whatever happens, get your browsers ready for the likes of .inc, .xxx, and .wir.
Roderick Simpson
SCANS
Dueling Domains
