Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Former ICANN chairwoman Esther Dyson says a new domain name system threatens to disrupt the Internet.
Mar 14, 2001 | In early March, Internet watchers reacted with mixed emotions as New.net began selling 20 new domain names.
Some condemned the Pasadena, Calif., company for Balkanizing the World Wide Web. They feared that the technical strategy behind the new top-level domains (TLDs) -- which include such unlikely suffixes as .xxx and .kids -- would create a secondary Internet, one that could only be accessed by users who signed up with one of New.net's service providers, Earthlink, Excite@Home or NetZero.
The new domain suffixes are unofficial: They are not approved by ICANN, the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that manages the domain name system. This means they're not entered in the Net's giant address book, the 13 "root servers" that take Web page requests and direct browsers to the desired site.
To get an idea of what such an exclusion could mean, imagine that the Web's domain names didn't act like phone numbers, offering access to all who know the address and have some kind of Internet connection. Imagine typing the name of a hot new Web site into your browser -- and getting an error message that says you can't access the page unless you download a plug-in, sign up with Earthlink or dig into the guts of your computer and reconfigure the operating system. Imagine the World Wide Web as a not-so-worldly place, a disconnected group of networks each vying for your business.
New.net has now raised all of these possibilities. "It has very limited functionality," says Michael Froomkin, a domain-name policy expert and law professor at the University of Miami. New.net's domains can't support e-mail, he says, and they aren't "equally accessible to all."
But other experts -- including Milton Mueller, a Syracuse University professor who is writing a book on the Internet root servers -- argue that New.net should be lauded for its act of rebellion against the tyranny of ICANN. ICANN's critics say the organization has historically been slow-moving, overly beholden to corporate interests and unwilling to give the Net what it needs most: an unlimited supply of domain names.
So which is it? Is ICANN a rebel with a cause or an invitation to Net-Babel? We decided to ask Esther Dyson for her opinion. The former first chairwoman of ICANN's board of directors stepped down last fall. Finally free to discuss the latest domain name crisis from outside the fray, she says that both ICANN and New.net face serious challenges.
You were still at ICANN when seven new domains (.aero, .biz, .info, .name, .pro, .museum and .coop) were approved. Why weren't .xxx and .kids included?
The application was rejected basically because it wasn't one of the seven accepted. That may sound disingenuous, but ICANN was very straightforward about its goal in this round of new TLDs -- to select just a few that could serve as good tests of the concept of expansion, rather than accept all that might qualify. Thus we consciously eliminated ones with any kind of potential problems, to ensure (we hoped) that the ones we did pick would go into operation smoothly.
New.net's move essentially snubs ICANN and undermines its authority. Do you think others will follow its lead?
In snubbing ICANN, New.net is not the first and has no lead. I think the biggest impact will be to make nontechies more aware of how the whole thing works. New.net actually takes a somewhat different approach, overlaying and using the existing DNS [domain name system] rather than trying to split the root. But for practical purposes -- and trademark purposes -- some of the effects are the same. E-mail, however, will be problematic.
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