The Clinton administration has gotten an earful from concerned foreign officials and other interested parties about its January proposal for the Internet's domain-name system. The biggest general complaint, voiced by both the European Union and the government of Australia: The draft concentrated too much Internet control in the United States.
The US proposal apparently would have, for instance, left Network Solutions Inc. largely in control of what has become the Internet's most valuable property, the .com domain. The plan suggested shifting responsibility for technical addressing issues from the quasi-official Internet Assigned Numbers Authority at the University of Southern California to a nonprofit agency expected to be dominated by American members. The proposal also unilaterally recast an ambitious global effort, the International Ad Hoc Committee, that last year sought to reorganize the domain name system.
White House Net policy man Ira Magaziner has expressed confidence that complaints about the January draft will be laid to rest by the administration's final policy, expected to be released any day.
The Net czar's certainty aside, though, complaints about the US proposal touch on a fundamental issue: No one really governs the Internet, and no one has any clear jurisdiction over policy disputes such as the one that has arisen during the last 18 months on domain names. So if international entities are dissatisfied with the US policy, though, what recourse will they have?
It's not likely the issue will be forced now. Foreign officials say that they see talk and compromise with the United States as the only viable way now to resolve objections that might arise to the domain plan.
"As far as the Australian government is concerned, I think that's a hypothetical question -- we'd probably deal with that issue as it came," said Dr. Paul Twomey, chief executive officer at Australia's National Office of Information Economy -- the Ira Magaziner of Australia, as it were.
"We would expect to have continued dialogue on this issue as it evolves," he said. "And I think from what I've seen from other governments and entities, such as the EU, that they have the same perspective."
Should a dispute arise, a key player would likely be the International Telecommunications Union , the Geneva-based, United Nations-affiliated agency that coordinates telecom resources among governments and private-sector entities.
Tim Kelly, head of operations analysis at the agency, said several options are conceivable for parties displeased with the US policy.
"There's a mountain of comments that have been generated by this topic, but to my mind, there's three -- or possibly four -- alternatives," he said.
"The default option is that we just continue as we are at the moment. That is not, by any means, the most desirable option -- it means that NSI continues to have a monopoly, it means that the people at IANA continue to seek direction," said Kelly. "But my guess is that the default option is that nothing changes -- we continue exactly as we are at the moment."
In Kelly's view, the other options are to adopt the 1997 Generic Top-Level Domain Memorandum of Understanding hammered out by the International Ad Hoc Committee. Or parties could just go ahead with the "highly controversial" plan outlined by Magaziner, and finally, try to find a compromise between those two plans.
David Maher, chairman of the Policy Oversight Committee that succeeded the ad hoc domain panel in May 1997, said he feels it's unlikely Magaziner will propose a plan that will prompt widespread protest or a court challenge. But he added that he's troubled by the underlying jurisdiction issue.
"I have always felt that the claim of jurisdiction has some problems," Maher said. "It's one thing to say, 'We have jurisdiction over the Internet because we are giving money to IANA,' but it's another thing to tell somebody in Kazakhstan that he's subject to the rules of the United States Commerce Department."
Tony Rutkowski, an old Net hand and founder of the World Internetworking Alliance, says it's no mystery why the United States has so much clout.
"More importantly than the DNS being a government project, the Internet itself was a DOD network that was paid for, managed, and administered by the US government," Rutkowski said. "An important component of this is that the responsibility was assumed by the US government [in the case of grievances]."
The opinion of Australia's Twomey seems to mirror that of most officials, in the US and elsewhere: Keep governments out of domain-name administration as much as possible, and ensure that any new governance structure includes global representation.
"We would like to see a truly international, nongovernmental entity to take over this, so that it is sustainable," he said. "Our concern is that we build a system that is sustainable in the long run -- and if the system is too US-centric, it will not be. We're in favor, as much as possible, of governments not having a role in these things -- we would prefer for it to be very much market led."
