CORE members face defeat

Washington, D.C. - Internet Society (ISOC) officials today acknowledged their plans for new Internet domains and a system to run them likely will die next week when the Clinton administration unveils its own domain overhaul (See story).

At a press conference today, ISOC President Don Heath conceded that ISOC's Council of Registrars (CORE) plan is unlikely to win government approval. ISOC had planned a March start-up date for a database, shared by several dozen companies, to register sites in new generic top-level domains, such as .firm, .web and .rec.

However, as reported first on Network World Fusion, White House Internet advisor Ira Magaziner is studying a plan that would create a new nonprofit entity to oversee all domain naming - and that would add a single, as yet unnamed, new top-level domain. The plan also calls for a competitive registration system. However, Network Solutions, Inc., the company that now oversees .com, .org and .net registration, would continue to run the CORE database.

If the government does reject the CORE plan, its members would be out the $10,000 they ponied up to hire Emergent Corp. to build a registration database. Heath said CORE would put the database into the public domain for use in trademark registration.

"The money is gone," Heath said. "It's spent."

The government plan will call for the possible later addition of four more new domains, but specifies that CORE would be allowed to administer only one of them.

Heath said the anticipated government plan - due out by the end of next week - is going down hard with CORE members. "They're going to be pissed," he said. Many already had started taking preregistrations for domain names and now would have to tell customers they do not exist.

CORE members accepted customer credit-card information but had pledged not to process it until their system was up and running. However, some "renegade" sites had begun taking customer money with plans to forward the requests to CORE members.

Heath said he would not be surprised if some CORE members sue - although he doubted their chances of success. "Have you ever tried to sue the government?" he asked.

According to Heath, no contracts were signed and no guarantees were made about the creation of the seven gTLDs. Instead, ISOC presented CORE as an investment in something that had potential, he said.

But one CORE member said his customers will not buy that. "Our customers are afraid of trademark litigation; that is why they preregistered with us," said Andrea Naldi with Italian domain name registrar Alinet. "Now we are getting calls about when the system will be up." If the government approves an alternate plan, users will have to register domain names all over again.

Another member said he is angry with the government for "micromanaging."

"I'm not happy about a drastic readjustment of things," said Antony Van Couvering, president of NetNames USA in New York. "After the apparent go-ahead by the government, and now the uncertainty ... uncertainty is not good for us, for our customers or for the Internet."

"The government has stayed out of the Internet for 10 years. Why are they getting involved now?" Heath said.