Domain-Name Policy Compromise Close

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September 14, 1998 (5:15 PM EDT)

By John Borland,

After a week of closed-door negotiations, the two biggest players in the Net's domain debate say they are close to compromise on a plan for governing the Internet's domain-name system.

The U.S. government plans to hand over control of the Net's domain-name policy to the private sector at the end of September. For several months, entrepreneurs, ISPs, activists, and computer scientists have been meeting and e-mailing each other trying to prepare for the handoff.

But that process has narrowed in the last week. Representatives from Network Solutions (NSI) and the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) have retreated behind closed doors to hash out differences between the two leading proposals. Participants said they have reached agreement on the major issues, and are now working on finer legal points.

"It's been a long time in coming," said Christopher Clough, Network Solutions' director of corporate communications. "It's only really started to gel in the last week."

Network Solutions is the Herndon, Va.-based company whose government-granted monopoly on registering the .com, .org, and .net domain names will expire at the end of this month. The IANA, led by University of Southern California professor Jon Postel, is the government-contracted group that oversees technical management of the Net's address system.

As a part of the government handoff, policy-makers suggested creating a non-profit corporation to direct domain-name policy. Ideas about the functions and membership of this corporation have proved to be controversial. But according to Clough, NSI and IANA representatives have reached agreement in three important areas.

Under the compromise proposal, the functions of the new corporation would be sharply delineated, Clough said. It would have significant influence, with the power to add new top-level domain names, but would look more like existing standards-setting bodies than a regulatory agency.

The corporation's board of directors would be accountable to the broader membership of the group for their decisions, Clough said. Finally, the group would have a "bottoms-up" constituency, with individuals and organizations represented on the board of directors.

Negotiators are now discussing legal details of the corporation's creation. A final agreement could be reached as soon as Wednesday or Thursday, Clough said.

That proposal will then be sent out for comment to the broader Net community, although no official mechanism for voting or approval exists. The plan will have to be approved by overseas and U.S. government regulators, who have called for broad consensus.

IANA representatives could not be reached for comment.

The two parties' retreat behind closed doors has angered some domain-name activists who took part in a series of open meetings and e-mail discussions during the last several months. "Nobody knows what's going on behind closed doors," said Dan Steinberg, a Quebec technical policy consultant who has been active in the debates.

Other longtime players said the summer's open debates had served their purpose. "[IANA and NSI] are the real parties of interest, and it is clearly up to them to come to some basic understanding so this can get under way," said David Maher, chairman of the Policy Oversight Committee, a Geneva-based domain-name policy group.