Feds: Domain Name Proposal Needs Work

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October 22, 1998 (10:58 AM EDT)

By John Borland,

Almost a month after the domain name system was scheduled to be turned over to the private sector, the U.S. government said Tuesday it wasn't quite ready to hand over the keys to the Net.

In a letter sent late Tuesday to the authors of the leading proposal for domain name privatization, U.S. Commerce Department officials said the plan still needed work.

"The Department of Commerce regards the ICANN [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers] submission as a significant step toward privatizing management of the domain name system," wrote Becky Burr, associate administrator of the Commerce division handling the domain name efforts.

"We note, however, that the public comments received ... reflect significant concerns about substantive and operation aspects of the ICANN," she added. The letter asked the authors to revise the plan to reflect critics' concerns about the new organization's membership and accountability to the public.

This round of the privatization process is focused on creating a nonprofit corporation, dubbed ICANN, to take over the U.S. government's responsibilities for managing domain name policy.

The leading proposal for the new corporation was submitted by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the University of Southern California group that has long contracted to manage the technical aspects of the Internet's address system. Although the plan won wide support from the business community and Net technical organizations, it was criticized by some groups that felt the governing system proposed would not be open enough.

Several of these groups submitted their own proposals to the Commerce Department. Most of the alternative plans called for expanding membership of the nonprofit group, and asked the group be required to make its decisions publicly.

The plan's authors said Wednesday that they would try to meet the Commerce Department's concerns as soon as possible.

"We will pay attention to the Commerce letter and see what changes would be appropriate to include," said Joe Sims, a Washington, D.C. attorney who helped draft the IANA proposal. "But it would not be successful to accept ideas from small groups of people and then lose the support of large groups."

The supporters of the original plan are still reviewing the Commerce Department letter, and do not have any official process for revising and winning support for a new draft, Sims said. The plan's authors will likely take into account many of the comments given to the Commerce Department, include them in a new draft, and then post it online for new public comment, he added.

The revision process will be complicated by the death last weekend of former IANA head Jon Postel, the University of Southern California researcher who was widely viewed as the most influential figure in the domain name debates.

Sims said the process could be slowed slightly by Postel's absence, but the ICANN already had enough momentum to succeed. "The process is mature enough that I don't think his absence will cause any significant change," he added.