U.S. Domain Name Handoff Delayed

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September 30, 1998 (12:53 PM EDT)

By John Borland,

The U.S. government's handoff of domain name system functions to the private sector will be delayed for at least a week.

The monopoly granted to Herndon, Va.-based Network Solutions by the government on the .com, .org, and .net domain name registrations was slated to end on Oct. 1. Simultaneously, the government was scheduled to hand off its policy-making responsibilities for the Internet's address system to a new private-sector organization.

But late Tuesday, Commerce Department officials said they would extend Network Solutions' contract by another week, to Oct. 7, to finish talks on how the transition to a competitive market will work.

Meanwhile, the plan for a private corporation that is supposed to take over responsibility for domain name management is still being discussed. After months of online discussions, a final plan for creating this body will be submitted to federal officials on Thursday, but will still require at least 10 days of public comment before becoming official.

NSI and federal officials are still negotiating how other companies will be granted access to NSI's database of .com, .net., and .org domain names. Under the new system described in June in a revised Commerce Department document, called the white paper, companies will compete to register new addresses in those top-level domains.

"The Internet community's response to the white paper has moved us closer to the development of competition in the Internet name and address space," said Andrew Pincus, general counsel for the Commerce Department.

Network Solutions will likely retain control of the database that holds all of information on those top-level domains, however. The final details of Network Solutions' responsibilities will be determined over the next week of talks.

Plans for handing off domain name policy-making responsibility to a private-sector group also will be extended at least until the middle of October.

A plan for creating a nonprofit corporation to manage the Net's address system will be submitted to the Commerce Department on Thursday. Federal officials have said they are happy with the process so far, but will allow at least 10 days of public comment while the plan is posted online.

But outside Washington, D.C. the plan has proved controversial. The final draft was put together by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the government contractor that now does technical management of the Net's address system. Some of the organizations and individuals that spent the summer helping to create the plan say the contractor ignored critical consensus points when it made a series of last-minute changes.

Some of these individuals have submitted a competing plan to federal policy-makers, saying their draft more accurately reflects the consensus developed over the course of the summer's meetings and e-mail discussions. The federal plan does not include enough public accountability for the new body's decision, they said.

"We are creating what is, in effect, the public-utilities commission of the Internet," said Karl Auerbach, a Cisco programmer who played a leading role in drafting the competing plan. "This is a regulatory body whether people want to admit it or not."

The group has little confidence that their draft will overturn IANA's proposal, however. "I expect we'll be ignored," Auerbach said.