Plan for new domain name organization almost finalized

By Kristi Essick
IDG News Service, 8/25/98

Industry representatives, Internet users and academics around the world have essentially agreed on the structure for a new global organization for the assigning and management of top-level domain names, which will be put into operation at the end of next month.

The agreement comes after months of discussions, meetings and whitepapers that have had as their common goal the formation of a new entity to replace the Internet Assigned Names Authority. IANA is the U.S. government-funded organization that currently handles the back-end administration of so-called top-level domain names, such as .com, .net and .org. The international Internet community has called for a new, global non-profit organization to be put into place to allocate and manage top-level domain names.

The way top-level domain names are allocated, registered and managed has caused heated debate over the past two years, after the existing U.S.-controlled system came under fire for its non-international approach.

As it stands now, the U.S. government-funded Internet Network Information Center (InterNIC) registers top-level domain names, while IANA maintains the technical architecture behind the names and has the power to issue new ones. Individual countries register their own domain names, such as .fr for France, but InterNIC has a monopoly on the registration of the coveted .com and .net names.

When the U.S. government released a greenpaper earlier this year suggesting the formation of a new, U.S.-based organization to handle the tasks of IANA, including the delegation of several new top-level domains, the international community angrily called for a more global approach. In return, the U.S. government issued a whitepaper in June suggesting that the private sector should handle the task of creating a private, international organization to take IANA's place.

The U.S. government whitepaper stipulated that this new organization, sometimes referred to as the New IANA, would have to be put in place by Sept. 30, when IANA's and InterNIC's contracts expire. Because the job of creating the New IANA was given to the private sector, interested members of the Internet community, members of the existing IANA, businesses and academics have spent the last two months scrambling to come up with a plan.

Yesterday, IANA issued a whitepaper on its Web site outlining the structure of the new organization. While the paper is not a final plan, it comes close to what will be the structure of the new organization, said Jon Postel, director of IANA, in a mass e-mailing to interested parties. However, the plan is still open to comment and could change slightly before the new organization is put into place at the end of September, he said.

"We hope and believe that this third version is essentially the final version and that it will be endorsed and supported by nearly all of those stakeholders participating in this process, and will protect the legitimate interests of the millions of individuals and groups that have an interest in the outcome of this process but have not been able to directly participate in it," Postel said in his e-mail.

Some of the main points made in the whitepaper include:

The New IANA will be a non-profit organization based in Los Angeles.
Its main objectives will be to undertake whatever is necessary to maintain the operational stability of the Internet and to manage the allocation of new top-level domain names.
The organization shall be managed by a board of directors that will notify the public of any meetings via the Internet at least 14 days in advance. The initial 9-member board will serve until Sept. 30, 1999, when it can either be replaced or voted into continuance for one more year.
No government member can become a board member, but governments will have their say through a special advisory committee.
No more than half of the members of the board of directors can be from one geographic region (defined as Europe, Asia/Australia/Pacific, South America, Africa, North America and Elsewhere.
To avoid conflicts of interest, directors on the board will be prohibited from acting on any policies in which they or their companies may have a financial interest.
"Supporting Organizations" will undertake to fund part of the new organization, though a final funding plan has not yet been established and will be one of the first topics of discussion for the new board.