Domain Name Group Digging For Seed Money

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May 13, 1999 (12:00 AM EDT)

By Tim Scannell,

Efforts to raise $500,000 in seed money for thenewly formed Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) are on track, although that amount is still far less than the $1.2 million the group expects it will need to function.

The ICANN estimates that it will need at least that much to fund first-year operations for the group. It was appointed earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Commerce to share the responsibility for the IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignments and the issuance of domain names. Those duties now are handled primarily by Network Solutions Inc., which was granted the exclusive authority to register these names by the U.S. government in 1993.

The $1.2 million in start-up funds -- the organization says that when pledges are added to the total, it is about two-thirds of the way toward its goal -- is needed to cover the cost of forming committees, supporting an administrative staff, purchasing computer equipment and contracting for legal and professional services, according to ICANN, based here.

Initial fund-raising activities are being handled by the Global Internet Project (GIP), an international group of senior executives helping to foster the growth of the Internet worldwide (www.gip.org). The group was founded by Jim Clark, chairman of Netscape Communications Corp., and includes 13 member companies primarily from the software and telecommunications industries.

It is this group of IT executives who have managed to raise close to $500,000 for ICANN, mostly through donations and contributions.

The GIP held a meeting last month in Washington, D.C., and plans another in September in Brussels, Belgium.

"A lot of [GIP] board members are using their own credit cards," said John Englund, senior vice president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), which is GIP's secretary. "They want to make sure they have the money to continue and help make it through the first year," he said, adding that bank loans are another option.

ICANN recently selected five groups to handle the technical details of Internet domain names and protocols. They are America Online Inc., the Internet Council of Registrars, France Telecom/Oleane, Melbourne IT and Register.com. These groups now are involved in a trial phase, reportedly scheduled to wrap up next month. Later this year, as many as 29 more organizations could join in the competition (www.icann.com).

The GIP is more than just a bunch of executives gathering to sing a high-tech "Kumbaya." At the planned Belgium meeting, for example, the GIP group plans to continue discussions it had at its most recent gathering. These discussions include what can be done to help speed the development of the Internet in developing countries, next-generation Internet policies, the growth of Internet usage in Asia, and what actions the group might take to counter legislation that might impact the growth of the Internet worldwide.

One recent effort was an educational statement released in response to actions by the European Parliament to pass laws prohibiting the use of caching on the Internet, which is based on recommendations by the recording industry that relate to piracy.

"It is not that easy by the average person to understand what caching is and how it works," said ITAA's Englund. If the legislation moves forward, "it could dramatically slow down the Internet," he said.