House Committee to Hold Domain Name Hearing Next Week

By KATE GERWIG

San Jose, Calif. -- The U.S. government yesterday extended its contract with Network Solutions Inc. to run the top-level Internet domain name system (DNS) for seven days, after an industry working group failed to form a non-profit corporation to run the system by the Sept. 30 deadline.

Increasingly alarmed by the lack of progress in transitioning the domain name system to the private sector, the House Science Committee next week will hold an informational hearing to see what progress the working group has made in the past six months.

The Clinton Administration's top Internet adviser, Ira Magaziner, spent the past year trying to facilitate a plan for handing the DNS over to a private body with international representation. Magaziner said this week that he expects to resolve the outstanding issues and receive a proposal for creating the new Internet governing body.

After months of negotiation, still at issue is the management of Internet names and addresses, functions currently carried out under government contracts by Network Solutions (NSI), of Herndon, Va., and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which is run by Jon Postel at the University of Southern California. How NSI will hand over records and equipment it has used as the exclusive registry for the .com, .net and .org Internet domains remains a key issue.

Some DNS stakeholders are concerned that the bylaw process was supposed to be open to all interested parties and has been going on behind closed doors. To that end, Magaziner said he may post the final proposal for public comment to eliminate concern that a majority of interests have not been represented.

In all likelihood, the government's contract deadline may need to be extended again, since the IANA issued the fifth set of proposed bylaws for the non-profit company on Sept. 30, without input from NSI.

"The Internet won't stop working even if in theory these negotiations go on indefinitely," said Anthony Rutkowski, director of the Center for Next Generation Internet in Herndon, Va., at the ISPCon trade show here today.

NSI's CEO, Gabe Battista, agreed, saying that the working group has made progress in the past four months and many more interested parties are now talking to each other about the future of the DNS. "But there was no requirement to flash-cut to the new system as of Sept. 30 deadline," he said.

Postel's introduction to the draft, which was posted on the IANA Web site on Tuesday, said the fact that the draft was not jointly issued with NSI should not be misinterpreted. "NSI is actively engaged in the final negotiations with the United States Government over the transition of its contractual relationship with the United States Government. That is, understandably, its highest priority at the moment. Given the shortness of time, it is not possible to wait for the conclusion of those negotiations to release these new drafts. Many of the changes contained in these new drafts have been discussed with NSI, as they have been with many other stakeholders, but NSI bears no responsibility for these changes."

The new draft also would guarantee that no geographic region dominates the board, a clause that those close to the negotiations say was added to appease European nations. The other significant change was the decision to propose that the organization be based in California. Delaware had been suggested by many as a suitable location.

IANA is expected to post names of the proposed 19-member board on its Web site today, an action that could raise new rounds of protest from other groups.

"Yes, the process is in chaos," Rutkowski said, "A lot of people are working more closely than they did before. Magaziner wanted to be Mr. Clean in all of this, and he's probably going to get dragged in."