At 6:37 PM -0700 4/22/97, Kent Crispin wrote:

This is from a story on Top Level Domain Names. Seems like it could apply to anything:

"In Washington DC, officials from the White House, federal agencies and Congress say regulations may be necessary to promote a free-market system. A White House inter-agency taskforce was due to meet last week, after CWI's press deadline, to discuss the matter."

Here's an article I wrote about this last week. The White House interagency task force, under OSTP, has met twice already. -Declan ******* Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 11:36:07 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: fight-censorship-announce@vorlon.mit.edu Subject: FC: Domain name disputes, Network Solutions, and the FCC ***************** http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,847,00.html The Netly News http://netlynews.com/ April 16, 1997 by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) Don Telage, the president of Network Solutions -- the company that oversees Internet domain-name registration -- wants the government to seize control of your Net address. "The FCC should assume interim authority" over domain names, he argues. "These functions need to be institutionalized." Telage says that unless the FCC steps in, a plan to add new top-level domains such as .firm and .nom will bewilder netizens, spark disruptive lawsuits and threaten the "fragile stability of the Net." He proposes that the federal government nix additional top-level domains for now, then pick a contractor to deal with them (perhaps Telage's own firm, Network Solutions). And so the battle lines were drawn earlier this week between a proposal granting the FCC jurisdiction over the Net and the International Ad Hoc Committee's (IAHC) plan to create a Swiss organization to rule cyberspace -- with the backing of the Internet Society, the U.N., the World Intellectual Property Organization and the International Telecommunication Union. Important members of the high-tech community, including UUNET and MCI, have endorsed the IAHC plan, but Network Solutions hopes to muster support for its counterproposal from within the Beltway. Both sides agree that the Net is choking under the clogged .com domain, but they disagree on how to answer these questions: Who gets to sell additional top-level domains, what will they be and who controls the process? At stake, the contenders claim, is nothing less than the future of the Internet. Network Solutions' proposal, unveiled on Monday at a Federal Networking Council Advisory Committee meeting, is only the latest offensive in the increasingly bitter war over who controls the three-letter suffixes that identify organizations. These databases have quickly become hot property: Thanks to its government-granted monopoly, Network Solutions raked in up to $100 million last year. That turned heads. Gold rush fever spread to the would-be profiteers at Image Online Design, who last year thought they'd get rich quick by claiming exclusive ownership of the ".web" top-level domain. (They failed. They're suing.) Which amply demonstrates one thing: The informal, cooperative gentleman's agreement that served the Net so well during its not-for-profit infancy no longer works. This growing realization marks the end of the old Internet and the arrival of the new. No longer can Jon Postel, a little-known but highly trusted network guru, run the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and decide what top-level domains should exist. Not only is he being battered by lawsuits, what happens if he drops dead tomorrow? I don't mean to be morbid here, but this is important stuff in high-powered telecom circles: The Federal Networking Council's Advisory Committee took time this week to seriously contemplate the "Jon Postel getting hit by a beer truck" scenario. The roots of the current controvery stem from when Network Solutions won an exclusive contract from the National Science Foundation to maintain the InterNIC database. After the company started charging for domain names registration in 1995, netizens started to complain. "The community has given us incredibly powerful pushback that they don't like the lack of competition," says Perry Metzger, a member of IAHC and the president of a New York consulting firm. The IAHC proposal aimed to fix that problem by allowing other private-sector registrars to compete under rules created in Geneva. Yet its critics say more guidance is needed from the U.S. government. "There needs to be some sort of nominal governmental action or responsibility to provide a mechanism for the industry to meet and not run afoul of antitrust laws," says Tony Rutkowski, former head of the Internet Society and now a leading critic of the organization. In other words, it's time for the federal government to expropriate what it created. Now, if there's a sure-fire way to get federal officials twitching to regulate, it's an industry appearing divided and in need of help. "What happens when the notion of industry self-regulation fails? What does the government do? Do we have to come in and clean up afterwards?" one Clinton administration official asked me recently. Sure enough, last month a White House interagency committee formed. The goal: to decide what the U.S. government should do with domain names. "We're collecting information. We're collecting advice," says Glenn Schlarmann from the White House Office of Management and Budget. "The FCC probably has a role. The Patent and Trademark Office probably has a role. The government traditionally has been the guardian of public interest." (Of course, other countries may have a different idea of "public interest" and may take a very dim view of the U.S. seizing control.) Even some high-tech firms hardly known for their willingness to cozy up to regulators quietly welcome this move as a way to stabilize the Net. Right now, it's vulnerable not only to beer trucks hitting Jon Postel, but also, more disturbingly, to claims under antitrust laws. That's exactly what a lawsuit filed last month in New York is arguing. PGP Media's complaint claims that Network Solutions "has conspired" to head off "competition in the domain name registration market." Now, PGP Media may have a reasonable claim under antitrust laws -- but if the suit succeeded, it would spell disaster for the Net. PGP Media wants to create an unlimited number of top-level domains, but the Net can only handle a few hundred. Tony Rutkowski suggests the FCC as a way out. The IAHC plan suggests WTO and the ITU. My own suggestion is to steer clear of both bureaucrats and Eurocrats. Instead, netizens should ask the U.S. Congress to pass a law exempting the Internet from dusty, century-old antitrust laws. Where's the Congressional Internet Caucus when we need it? ### -------------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is public. To join fight-censorship-announce, send "subscribe fight-censorship-announce" to majordomo@vorlon.mit.edu. More information is at http://www.eff.org/~declan/fc/