The Clinton administration released Friday its long-awaited "green paper" draft proposal for phasing out US government involvement in running the Internet's naming and address system.
The position outlined in the 15-page paper comes as no surprise to those who have been hotly debating the issue over past months, as many of these parties have been periodically briefed or consulted by Ira Magaziner on the issue.
The new system, said the paper, should be based on four principles: Internet stability, competition, a private-sector coordination process, and representation by the Net's diverse users.
To this end, three functions - IP address management, the root server network which coordinates domain addressing, and the upkeep of addressing protocols - would all be coordinated and managed by a new private, not-for-profit corporation, with the existing Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) rolled into this new corporation. Current IANA staff would move to the new organization, which would also hire a CEO with experience in the corporate sector. The paper also presents guidelines for creating a board of directors.
John Wood, involved in consultations with the Administration on these issues with the Private Sector Working Group, said that evolving the Internet into a commercial, self-governing body is the vision that Magaziner is trying to put forth.
"We owe a great legacy to the historical development of the Internet and the technology community," Wood said, "but the Internet now needs to mature and evolve into a adult, commercial, and legal framework."
This transition is to begin as soon as possible, with the new, yet-to-be-named corporation fully operational by 30 September.
As expected, the domain name registration process - long monopolized by government appointees Network Solutions, Inc. - will be made open for competition and split into two functions. Registrars would register customers for domain names, while registries would manage the databases for top-level domains.
"It's a devolution of [Network Solutions'] current situation," said Magaziner in a Wired News interview last Friday. "They'll become one competitor among many."
Commerce Department official J. Beckwith Burr said the proposal was unlikely to end debate over the issue but added that the government hoped to have a plan approved by April.
"We very much expect that there will be lively debate on this topic," Burr, associate administrator at the department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, told reporters at a news briefing in Washington DC today.
The biggest source of debate will most likely be how new gTLDs are created during the transition period. Up to five new registries would be permitted to add a single top-level domain.
This may not go down too well with the Geneva-based Council of Registrars, the group that proposed, under outline of their Generic Top Level Domain Memorandum of Understanding, the addition of seven new gTLDs which they have spent considerable energy planning and are ready to make operational at any time.
An appendix to the paper outlines a set of technical, managerial, and site requirements that would-be registries must have in order to be considered for operating one of the new gTLDs or for offering registrar services.
The paper also suggests further exploring the .us hierarchy for commercial expansion, and considers the movement of the .gov and .mil gTLDs - currently reserved for US government use - to a new position under .us. This would be a benevolent move; criticism of the US government's sovereign right to ownership of .gov and .mil was among the points contested by Eugene Kashpureff during his domain name protest last summer.
Finally, the paper calls attention to the kind of intellectual property disputes that trademarks bring, a dilemma for which forging a workable solution isn't easy.
But getting a workable solution is what this paper calls for, being a draft document presented in the hopes of forging "as strong a consensus as possible," which Magaziner admitted was no easy task. He has called for public discussion and debate on the issue.
"We'll just try to iterate it and keep revising it until we get it right," Magaziner had said last week. "Because we've got to get it right." Reuters contributed to this story.
