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Red tape slows naming game to a standstill: Date for resolvingissue is now anyone's guess after politicos interfere withassigning domains - Internet/Web/Online

Think back, think way back. Time sure flies on the Internet, but even in real-world terms, it has been a long, long time since we were promised some new top-level domains, or TLDs. It was the winter of 1997 when the Reston, Va.-based Internet Society's (ISOC) Internet international ad-hoc committee announced that soon, very soon, the traditional descriptive TLDs like COM, NET and ORG would be joined with seven new names.

It was a solution to a pressing problem -- we're just running out of good domain names. Between 1995 and 1996 alone, the number of Internet domain names, like "plesman.com," quadrupled. It seemed that the only way out of the mess was to add a bunch of new TLDs, like WEB, REC and INFO to take the pressure off of the old domains. Registration was supposed to start that spring but nothing happened.

The problem is even more pressing today. The number of domain names has continued to grow, but it's beginning to look like all the good names are taken. That's why you've started to see bizarre concoctions like "www.thereallygoodsoftwarecompany.com" all over the Net. Yet we're no closer to an expanded domain name system than we were some 19 months ago.

So what happened?

If the good people at ISOC, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and the ad-hoc committee had had their way, the issue would have been settled in the network engineers' time-honored fashion. A bunch of propellerheads would have gotten together, talked about the issue, published a Request For Comments, and then someone would have gone out and mapped some new domains to his or her DNS server.

Network Solutions, the Herndon, Va. company engaged to handle the dirty work of domain-name registration by NSFnet many years ago, would have started registering new domain names, and DNS servers all over the Net would have been updated to handle the new names. That's pretty much how the Internet has always worked, and that's how propellerheads expected the new TLDs to work. Unfortunately, they didn't count on the U.S. government.

You see, the Internet has become a hot issue in government circles, and Washington saw this as a great opportunity to step in and establish an Internet policy. Governments seem to like creating policies, even if it sets the work of engineers back a couple of years every time they do it.

To make a long and impossibly twisted story short, what was a fairly straightforward technological fix has become a major political and policy issue. Washington, Ottawa, Paris and London have all issued white papers, green papers and papers of any number of colors. Washington decided that Network Solutions should no longer have a monopoly on registering the COM, NET and ORG TLDs, and that the whole process should be privatized and opened up to competitive bids.

In the narrowest sense, that's probably a good idea. There have been a lot of complaints over the last few years about the way Network Solutions manages its business, so it's probably time to let other people have a go. And running a domain-name registry is almost a license to print money. Everyone wants a domain name, and an automated registrar could do boffo business.

And there are other issues like conflict resolution for when two companies and individuals want the same domain name. There's the not inconsiderable problem of copyright currently under study by the World Intellectual Property Organization. There's even the question of who's entitled to the cool TLDs like COM, and now WEB and INFO, and who has to make do with geographical TLDs. These are things that someone should be considering.

However, the wheels of government move slowly while the domain name shortage isn't getting any better. Just when it seemed like the whole privatization issue was finally settled last month, with Network Solutions' monopoly finally broken up, Washington extended the company's contract for at least another week and the whole process was delayed yet again.

So here we are, exactly where we were in the winter of 1997, waiting for new TLDs that will become available in a few months.

Maybe I'm cynical, or perhaps I'm just experienced, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Matthew Friedman is a Montreal-based journalist. His e-mail address is mwf@netcon.ca