Internet names to go beyond the pervasive .com

Eric Auchard and Eric Lai

LOS ANGELES: The push to expand the Internet's naming system beyond the

pervasive ".com" category comes to a head this week as the technical

administrators meet to select new suffixes such as .biz, .health, and .nom.

But ICANN, the US government-backed, nonprofit group charged with setting

Internet naming conventions, faces a contentious week-long meeting here as

backers of new names like .web to .kids and .xxx fight for last-minute

acceptance.

Controversy is nothing new to ICANN, the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names

and Numbers, which has weathered criticism from all sides in the short-time

since the US government handed it control of the explosively growing

communications medium.

Many observers believe that ICANN's own legitimacy hinges on the success of

this expansion, the first broad policy move since the organization was formed at

the White House's invitation in 1998.

If a consensus does not emerge from this experiment in virtual grass-roots

democracy, the ICANN board may elect to once again delay any final choices,

fearing any missteps could lead to a new "land rush" to stake out

prominent names by so-called cyber-squatters.

"With ICANN, you never know what's happening," said Chris Ambler,

the chief technology officer of Image Online Design, whose proposal to formalize

a .web category on the Web has been left in limbo by an ICANN staff evaluation

report on the subject.

"It's hard to believe that ICANN as a body could ignore doing something

on behalf of kids," Tim Yrastorza, vice president of business development

for .kids, a proposed "safe-place" for children on the Internet.

"The market is scrambling for a solution in this area."

The new generic names would compete with the .com suffix used in more than 20

million Web names and which continues to grow at an exponential rate. The

Internet's hodgepodge of names is organized into two categories - seven generic

Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) such as .com, .net, .edu and country-code Top-Level

Domains (ccTLDs) such as .uk for United Kingdom or .cn for China.

Fourteen of the original 44 proposals for new generic domains were

recommended in an ICANN staff report last week. Others were labeled

"premature" for this pilot stage. A final decision will be made by

ICANN's board of directors, after hearing public comment at the conference and

from Internet discussion boards at the http://www.icann.org.

But the board's choices are expected to diverge little from the staff report.

Applicants in the running come from three basic categories, including

general-purpose names such as .biz and .web and personal names such as .nom.

Special-purpose names including .health and .union won support.

Continued...

Also making the hurdle was an innovative plan by think-tank Stanford Research

International of Menlo Park, Calif., to create a new location-based naming

system called .geo for use by companies.

Advocates of the name expansion plan say the new categories would introduce

meaningful naming categories instead of the catch-all .com category used by

millions of individuals and families along with businesses ranging from the

world's top corporations to the adult entertainment industry.

Among the proposals to advance was a .biz domain name proposal put forth by a

powerful industry consortium known as Afilias LLC. The group is backed by most

of the existing domain name registrars, including VeriSign Inc.'s Network

Solutions unit and Register.com.

Also passing the staff report hurdle were plans to create the .union category

for trade unions, .museum for qualified museums and .health for groups meeting

World Health Organization medical standards.

Criteria used to select the winners include how the proposal enhances the

utility of the Internet in new ways, balanced against the need to protect the

technical stability of the Internet and the intellectual property rights of

existing name holders.

Competing plans to create a .tel category were rebuffed by ICANN staff after

the International Telecommunications Union intervened and called for more time

to settle the political and technical complexities of such a plan.

Also failing to win support was the .travel category put forth by the airline

industry and a .mas category for mobile Internet devices put forth by global

wireless handset leader Nokia of Finland.

Several proposals that failed to win ICANN staff support are seeking to build

a groundswell of support among ICANN's menagerie of stake-holding groups, which

include technicians, the world's governments, industry groups and loosely

organized Netizens who often dominate ICANN's proceedings.

Critics of the expansion process said the vague selection criteria and the

pell-mell speed of the decision-making process had left them confused over how

to proceed with their proposals. The complex, rudderless structure of ICANN has

frayed tempers and fueled grass-roots protests at the conference. The threat of

lawsuits overhangs every ICANN move.

Louis Touton, ICANN's general counsel, left open the possibility that those

proposals among the 44 that fail to win acceptance in this first round will be

considered later. "No application is ever permanently rejected," he

said.

"This is a proof-of-concept phase to establish a limited number of TLDs

(top-level domain names)," Touton said at the conference.

The name expansion is also meant to once and for all boost the international

diversity of the Internet, which remains very much in the grip of US-centered

administrators such as ICANN, based in Marina del Rey, Calif.

(C) Reuters Limited 2000.