WASHINGTON -- A long-simmering battle over additional domain names to supplement the still-crowded dot-com suffix has spilled over into Congress.
On Thursday, a House subcommittee will give critics a chance to complain about the process the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers used when approving or rejecting the additions.
Over 40 companies bid for new top-level domains, and each paid ICANN a non-refundable $50,000 application fee. Since ICANN approved a mere seven of those applications last fall, there's plenty of discontent to go around.
"This could very well be the first in a series of hearings on this issue," says Pete Sheffield, a spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce committee. "ICANN has the authority to set public policy for the Internet and it's got a history of perhaps trying to overstep that power."
The hearing, dubbed "Is ICANN's New Generation of Internet Domain Name Selection Process Thwarting Competition?" takes place Thursday morning before the panel's telecommunications subcommittee.
The lineup of critics set to testify includes Lou Kerner of dotTV -- it unsuccessfully asked for dot-tv -- who is expected to testify that ICANN should immediately suspend plans to go forward with the domains, which include dot-biz, dot-info and dot-name. Also testifying is David Short of the International Air Transport Association, which tried, and failed, to grab dot-travel.
One of their big complaints: Writing checks for $50,000 in application fees, and having nothing to show for it.
"I think it was fair," says ICANN spokesman Brett LaGrande. "It was used to pay for consulting fees and everything else."
(One consolation prize is that ICANN seems inclined not to require another fee if those same firms want to re-apply in a future round of expansion.)
ICANN chairman Vint Cerf, a well-known Internet figure, Democratic party supporter and MCI-Worldcom executive, will be representing the organization.
Not everyone is unhappy about ICANN's selection process. "From our standpoint, we thought it ran very smoothly," says Shonna Keogan of Register.com, which successfully bid for dot-pro.
"If you're a small upstart company, you're going to have a hard time ponying up this fee to even be considered," said Sheffield, the committee's spokesman.
He said the hearing will also cover the arbitrary nature of ICANN's selections: "How did they choose these suffixes? How were they approved?"
In 1999, the House Commerce committee held hearings when ICANN proposed what could have amounted to a $1 fee on domain names.
Michael Froomkin, a professor of law at the University of Miami School of Law, plans to testify that ICANN's decisions were so arbitrary they hurt competition, and could harm the future of e-commerce.
"Instead of considering the applications solely on technical merit, or indeed on any other set of neutral and objective criteria, ICANN selected seven winners on the basis of a series of often subjective and indeed often arbitrary criteria, in some cases applied so arbitrarily as to be almost random," Froomkin says in his prepared testimony.
Alan Davidson, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, will offer a different criticism: ICANN is not representative of Internet users, and the U.S. government should step in.
"While we do not believe the Commerce Department and Congress should intervene in the initial selection decision, they have a role in this reform," Davidson says in his prepared testimony.
"Just like any national government, the U.S. has an interest in making sure that the needs of its Internet users and businesses are protected in ICANN. While the U.S. must be sensitive to the global character of ICANN, it cannot ignore that at least for the time being it retains a backstop role of final oversight over the current root system."
A report by Congress' General Accounting Office last year said that the Commerce Department, not ICANN, had the ultimate authority over adding new top level domains.
On Wednesday, CDT and other groups sent a letter to ICANN asking for detailed information about how its pseudo-membership organization, which appoints a minority of board members, handled its election last year.
Of course, if you don't want to wait for the ICANN-blessed domains to appear, you can always configure your computer to recognize an alternative root server. They've been around for years -- although few people use them -- and they already support additional domains such as dot-god, dot-sex and dot-linux.
One existing domain is dot-biz, which happens to conflict with ICANN's dot-biz, which is scheduled to appear this year.
Leah Gallegos is expected to testify how her company, Atlantic Root Network -- which currently runs a dot-biz alternate-root server -- was shut out of ICANN's application process by the high registration fees.
The hearing will be webcast.
