Final Draft Of Domain-Name Plan Released

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September 17, 1998 (12:49 PM EDT)

By John Borland,

After weeks of negotiation, two of the biggest players in the domain-name wars have produced a near-final plan for taking over the Internet's domain-name system from the U.S. government.

The plan comes just two weeks before federal policy-makers are scheduled to hand off domain-name system responsibilities to the private sector.

In a joint letter introducing their plan, Network Solutions CEO Gabe Battista and Internet Assigned Numbers Authority chief Jon Postel said they had done their best to represent ideas from across the Net, including input from the business and technical communities as well as other interested parties.

Network Solutions is the Herndon, Va.-based company that has a government-granted monopoly on registering and managing .com, .org, and .net domain names. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, led by University of Southern California researcher Jon Postel, contracts with the government to do technical management of the Net's address system.

The two groups said Thursday that they would accept comments on their draft, but there was little room left for broad change.

"It is simply not possible to make significant concept changes at this stage," Postel and Battista wrote. Anyone with comments should submit them in the next two days, they added. "It is now important that closure occur on these initial basic instruments."

The documents released Thursday were the bylaws and articles of incorporation for a nonprofit corporation that will take over domain-name policy-making responsibilities from the U.S. government. The idea for the corporation stemmed from a June government white paper outlining how the federal handoff should work.

The past four months have seen considerable time, energy, and occasional vitriol poured into the details of creating what will likely remain an obscure organization.

But the new corporation will have substantial influence over the Net's future business practices. Once created, the body will make decisions on how many and what kind of new top-level domains should be added to the Net's address structure and who should have control of these domains.

Those decisions could translate into hundreds of millions of dollars for businesses that want to stake out their own Web real estate or protect their trademarks online.

Much of the controversy over the body's creation has focused on how members would be selected and how decisions would be made.

The new plan allows for outside input and review of decisions made by the group's board of directors, and includes a way that decisions can be overturned. The plan also says nearly half the board members should be drawn from the Internet community at large, ensuring diverse voices in the decision-making process.

But the plan still does not say how the initial board members will be chosen, a subject sure to be controversial in the coming weeks.

"That's still a moving target," said Joe Sims, a Washington, D.C., attorney who helped draft the proposal. "If we knew that, we'd be ahead of the game."

The plan's drafters hope to win the approval of the Internet community over the next few days, although no official ratification process exists. Once the U.S. government is satisfied the draft's support is wide enough, a transition of authority can begin.

"Hopefully, the new corporation can come into existence very soon and assure an effective transition of functions to the new corporation [by] the end of this month," Postel and Telege wrote. "We look forward to working together and with other stakeholders to implement this plan."