The federal government will likely exercise its option to extend its exclusive contract with Network Solutions, the registrar of top-level domains, six months past the March cutoff date, an official told a congressional panel today.
"We've not been able to see a way to reach a solution without exercising our ramp-down option," Larry Irving, assistant secretary of Commerce and head of the department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said during the first congressional hearing on domain names.
Irving told the House Science subcommittee on Basic Research that a government task force will release within the next month a proposal on privatizing the system of doling out Internet addresses. But he said that putting the plan into action before Network Solutions' agreement expires would be impossible. The agreement includes an option to extend the contract by six months.
Joseph Bordogna, acting deputy director of the National Science Foundation, which in 1993 awarded Network Solutions its contract, agreed that the timeline is extremely tight to develop a completely new competitive system within the next five months.
"Although we are saying the end is coming in March, that is not to say the end would happen," Bordogna said. "We have six months flexibility [in the agreement], and the NSF is not going to walk away without a plan in place."
The task force is likely to recommend that the government work with the Internet community to set up an independent international body to centralize the issues of Internet governance, Irving said. Also, he said, the memorandum of understanding developed earlier this year by the International Ad Hoc Committee and signed by major telecom companies in the United States, Europe, and Asia, must be amended or replaced.
Irving said the system, which is taking the first steps of hiring new global domain registrars and creating seven new generic top-level domains, does not adequately address concerns about trademark protection and dispute resolution raised in the 400 or so public comments submitted to the Commerce Department this summer.
Irving emphasized that the task force plan is intended as a vehicle to get the US government out of the business of registering domain names and open the process up to competition.
"The only perfect document ever created was the Ten Commandments, and people even tried to change that," Irving said. "We want this to be an open process."
For almost five years, top-level domains .com, .net, .org, and .gov have been administered by Network Solutions in an agreement with the National Science Foundation. In that time, the Web has grown into a businessplace where many see a chance to do what Network Solutions has done: make money off the registration of domain names. So far, 1.6 million domain names have been registered. The government agrees that the system should be open to competition, but with so many players - from national governments, to multinational corporations, to small business owners, to individuals - finding a solution that pleases everyone is not easy.
"The main reason for concern is that domain-name registration has become more a business than a service," said Jon Postel, director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which manages the root of the Domain Name System.
Network Solutions CEO Gabriel Battista told the committee that he's open to competition, but said a new system of name administration must be tested, and be subject to "clear oversight."
Postel told the committee he thought it would only take "a couple of months" to develop a shared registry system among competing registrars.
House members, who will hold a second hearing on domain names on Tuesday, appeared to agree that the US government should turn over the process to the private sector.
"We want to see the government out of the Internet," said subcommittee chairman Charles Pickering (R-Mississippi). "One thing of concern is that we get our act together on time."
