A Clinton Administration task force is on the verge of releasing its recommendations on the direction of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) in the Net's domain name system, or DNS. This pending and much-awaited "green paper" discussion draft will influence the shape of the Net's addressing scheme - its namespace - as management of the gTLDs shifts from its current government-appointed structure into the private sector in March.
While the administration - headed by Clinton's Net guru Ira Magaziner - had made the same promise to release the draft on 1 November of last year, this time it looks like Magaziner's got it.
"We'll have it up for comment, and if it gets completely shot to pieces, we'll take the criticisms and go back to the drawing board and start over again," Magaziner said. "If people say, 'Well, it's got some good points and here's ways we'd change it,' then we'll try to iterate it over a month and see if we can reach a consensus on it."
Many parties await the paper with baited breath, as the issue is a power play for dictating the Net's future. "Many of the people [involved] have been verbally briefed by Magaziner on what the report will entail," said Christopher Clough, who was one of them. He is a spokesman for the company that is right in the middle of it: Network Solutions Inc.
Network Solutions is the government-appointed keeper of the InterNIC, who register and manage the ever-popular .com, .org, and .net TLDs.
"NSI would have to devolve into a competitor among a number of competitors, so that we'd have a competitive marketplace," said Magaziner. "The way we're envisioning that right now is that there would be two businesses: a registrar business - somebody who registers customers for domain names - and a registry business, somebody who manages databases for top-level domains."
The registry business, Magaziner said, would have to offer its top-level domain registration to any registrar on an equal, non-discriminatory basis. Furthermore, NSI's .com, .net, and .org TLDs would have to be shared, with any registrar allowed to register to it. So in a sense, NSI will operate as usual - it will just have to share.
"We'll be in a position where we will continue on with most of the functions that we do today," said Clough.
The one big difference is in the root zone servers, which coordinate the addressing functions of the Net's top-level domains and are currently managed by NSI. They would be handed over to a private, non-profit organization that Magaziner said would be a "bottoms-up sort of stakeholder formed for the Internet."
What Magaziner is essentially recommending is that the US government get out of the management of the Internet. He said that certain functions require coordination - such as assigning blocks of numeric IP addresses, currently handled by the government-chartered Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA. This coordination, Magaziner said, "should come from the Internet community and not from our government, or any other governmental institution. It rests from our government for historical reasons, but we need to get away from that."
He is advocating the creation of a new non-profit, private sector institution - made up of the stakeholders of the Internet - to handle this kind of coordination, with current agencies such as IANA folded into it.
The trouble is in getting there, because the US government's current stewardship of the Net should not be ended in an irresponsible way: "We can't just say we're getting out of this tomorrow and good luck, before any new organization's up and going - that would destabilize the Internet," he said. "The hardest thing we've had to work on is what to do in that transition, because then we are still asserting some authority. And however we assert that, there will be some people upset about it."
Adding to the controversy are the seven new TLDs chosen by a group of global participants - all working in some way with operational issues of the Internet - after more than two years of deliberation. The Geneva-based Council of Registrars (CORE) have been pushing to operate the root name servers under a "governance framework" which they call the Generic Top-Level Domain Memorandum of Understanding (gTLD-MoU), and want to see their TLDs put into effect immediately.
While the CORE/gTLD-MoU policies sound like the kind of democratic group-think that could be called the Internet Way, some say it isn't. Many players in the namespace game - including the alternative registries who currently offer their own TLDs - are not fond of it, and are concerned about the implications should they become adopted. Clough said these registries are among those whose voices need to be heard.
"Our hope is that [Magaziner's paper] is a good thing, and that it will give a framework for a broad discussion by a lot of the stakeholders that frankly haven't had an opportunity to participate in the discussion," he said.
"We're very encouraged by what's transpiring, and we're extremely impressed with Mr. Magaziner's consensus-building abilities," said Jay Fenello, president of Iperdome, Inc., providers of the .per TLD. "We do know that they agree with us as far as the governance implications go, they agree with us as far as the business model under which the root should operate, they agree with us under representation for the stakeholders," he said.
Interestingly enough, in a press release issued last Thursday, the CORE said that they too were generally on the same wavelength with the Clinton Administration.
"We agree on the big picture, but not yet how we get there," said CORE executive committee chairman Alan Hanson in the release. "To put it simply, CORE wants to advance the Internet from .com to .competition."
While CORE agrees with Magaziner that there needs to be a central authority in the form of a reinvented IANA organization, the government should not be dictating specific operational functions, said Donald Heath, president and CEO of the Internet Society. "He's trying to subvert the way the Internet has worked, and dictate it," he said.
"The impression that I got from Mr. Magaziner was that ultimately he thinks that this authority should not be with the US government, it should be with IANA. It's just that in the meantime, he seems to want to have some say on that," said John Gilmore, a trustee of the Internet Society. Gilmore thinks there is an internal contradiction in what Magaziner is saying, that Magaziner should relinquish control to IANA now, not after the transition period in some "pie-in-the-sky future."
Magaziner said that trying to handle this transition period is the hardest part, because it will take some time to get everything running - and in the meantime, there are currently 197 signatories pitching the CORE party line who are ready and waiting to offer their services.
"What's happened is, Mr. Magaziner looked at all sides of the issues, and he realized that there really were some very significant implications of the CORE plan that were not in the long-term best interest of the Internet," Fenello said. "And that's what's being revealed right now. It's messy because so much momentum has gone behind the CORE plan without any kind of authority to do so."
"I think the administration is attempting to find an orderly transition, as opposed to one that's based on rough consensus or driven by one segment of the Internet community," said Clough.
But the actual specifics are to be worked out - there is still no final decision on exactly how the name space will be expanded.
"The way I describe it is that we've won the war, but we're not sure if we've won the battle," said Fenello. "It appears that Mr. Magaziner's response is going to be what's in the best interest of the Internet, but we're still not sure what that means for private registries like Iperdome."
"We want to basically get the US government out of it, and we don't think that it should be regulated," Magaziner said. "Some people say, 'Who's going to govern the Internet?'"
This is a question that almost makes him laugh. "Our answer to that is," he said, "nobody should govern the Internet."
