Robert Shearing, a Net newbie with a big plan to create a global congress to administer domain names, says the nature of cyberspace can be summed up in a word: participatory.
Shearing is one of at least 300 individuals and organizations that have filed comments with the US Department of Commerce on the subject of who should control the lucrative and complex system of doling out Web addresses. And Shearing says his idea, one of the more complex to be submitted, would inject a dose of democracy into the global information infrastructure.
"No one solution will make everybody happy," Shearing said in a phone interview. "It is, however, in my opinion, possible to find a solution that the majority supports."
His plan, hatched with help from Texas service provider Internoc, calls for the creation of the Agency for Internet Names and Numbers. Anyone who wants in would pay a yet-to-be-decided membership fee, and would elect a board of trustees annually to oversee operations of the agency. An elected general administrator would manage day-to-day operations, and a judicial review board would decide rules and regulations for domain-name management, including who has permission to administer the domain names.
Shearing admits it's uncertain that any single organization would be accepted by every person on the Internet. But he says, and many others agree, that without such a consensus, the Net could become a hostile, Balkanized, and chaotic place.
Since 1993, the business of registering .com, .net, .org, .edu, and .gov domain names has fallen to Network Solutions, a Virginia-based company under contract to the National Science Foundation. The prospect of the contract's March 1998 completion has caused a worldwide flurry of proposals, meetings, and at least one very elaborate signing ceremony; also debate, recriminations, and endless listserv threads involving just about everyone with a hope of getting a piece of the action.
Shearing, like many others, is diving into the treacherous waters of Internet politics. A former doctor, lawyer, and health-care executive with degrees from University of Southern California Medical School and Stanford Law School, Shearing has only been involved in the Internet for about a year. He now heads a soon-to-be-launched support service for ISPs, called Priori Networks.
"It's put up or shut up at this point," he said.
Shearing may sound like just another virtual entrepreneur with a pie-in-the-sky plan that will end up in the trash bin. But some involved in the Great Domain Debate say his idea, though flawed, has some merit.
"It's definitely a step in the right direction, because it invites an open process," said Jay Fenello, president of an alternative domain-name registration system called Iperdome, who describes Shearing as a "very reasonable and well-informed person."
Fenello says that of the public comments sent to the Commerce Department, there are about 30 to 40 "solid proposals" (including his own, naturally), and that the main weakness in Shearing's is the difficulty of rounding up the Net's tens of millions of users and getting them to participate. "Only about 2 percent of Internet users have been on the Internet for more than two years, and most Internet stakeholders aren't even on the Net yet - a global Net government needs time to evolve."
But architects of the International Ad Hoc Committee's system for handling domain administration, other addressing issues, and intellectual-property rights say it's impossible to create a truly democratic process with so many players involved.
"In theory it's democratic, but you don't know if the dice is loaded," said Marty Burack, executive director of the Internet Society. "That's been the main complaint" against the international committee's work and the framework it put in place.
The system is described in the IAHC's memorandum of understanding. The enterprise, backed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and the Internet Society, would create seven new top-level domains and expand the name sign-up system by signing up more than two dozen new registrars worldwide. Many - from Network Solutions to the host of small entrepreneurs with plans for new domains to everyday users - have criticized the system as the work of a closed process dictated by interested parties.
Shearing also proposes simplifying Net addresses by dropping generic top-level domains altogether. So instead of Wired's stag-komodo.wired.com, for instance, all that would be necessary is www.wired.
That idea, which would remove distinctions between, say, government agencies and commercial Web sites, is just one of hundreds of ideas floating around cyberspace. Those ideas, Shearing hopes, will be discussed at a conference he is planning for September in San Francisco.
"We need to get all parties together and hammer out a solution," the would-be founding father of Net governance said.
