On March 7, a multinational association convened in northern Africa to discuss how one of our more important resources will be used and distributed, but in this case the group wasn't OPEC.
It was ICANN: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN is the not-for-profit organization whose job it is to regulate Domain Names, the means by which humans can better understand Internet Protocol addresses.
You're probably familiar with Domain Name Service, or DNS, even if you don't realize it. You use it to avoid dealing with numbers.
Internet addresses in their native form look like nothing more than a series of four values between one and 255, each separated by a period. To you and I — accustomed to human languages — they mean next to nothing.
If I type "207.46.130.149" into a Web browser, what site am I looking at? In most cases, there aren't even telltale signs in the numeric address that would let me decipher its meaning. It's totally arbitrary.
What DNS does is allow sequences that look like human language to be assigned to blocks of numeric IP addresses. So, whereas a computer's TCP/IP networking software wants to see an address that looks like "207.46.130.149," DNS lets you type "www.microsoft.com" into your Web browser, to the same effect.
DNS has become so commonplace that hardly anyone but network engineers and owners of small, private LANs use the original numeric IP addresses directly. The system works pretty well. Sure, ".com" isn't quite an English word — not yet, anyway.
But for most of us, it's close enough to get the point, making network addresses far more intelligible. "Dot-com" is now so entrenched in the common vocabulary, in fact, that it can be heard in the majority of the ads shown during the Superbowl and nobody bats an eye.
So if everything is going so well, why is ICANN convening in Cairo this year? Or indeed, why do we need an ICANN at all? Hey, nobody said managing DNS for a world-wide network was easy. Put it at the heart of one of the greatest explosions in new technology growth in man's history, and you've got some tricky issues on your hands.
Imagine for a moment that you're an entrepreneur planning an Internet start-up. What do you call it? Don't answer too quickly, though. Naming a company is simple enough, but in today's economy you need the network address to go along with it. Try out a few random words, and you'll start to notice a lot of the choice dot-coms are already taken. Still more are being grabbed up every day.
If you think picking a name is tough, though, imagine tracking all the names that are already out there. Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) has traditionally been the place to go when you wanted to register a "dot-com" for your site.
In 1999, the number of new Domain Names registered by the company approached 5 million, more than double those registered in 1998. This increase alone mandates that NSI make improvements to its infrastructure, but in recent years its task has become more complicated still.
Once, Network Solutions had a monopoly on DNS registration, sanctioned by the United States Government. But in 1997, the Department of Commerce voted to open the market to competition, allowing companies other than NSI to assign the coveted ".com," ".net" and ".org" addresses.
NSI still maintains the central database of names, but now it must process registration requests from competing registrars, while still trying to maintain its own business interests.
"No problem," says Stratton Sclavos, CEO of network security vendor VeriSign. He thinks NSI's business will prove so valuable in the burgeoning e-commerce services marketplace, that VeriSign recently shelled out $21 billion to acquire it.
Others see domain names as big business, as well. Domain "speculators" often register hundreds of likely sounding names, in hopes that a company will one day offer them big money in exchange for one. The name "business.com," for example, sold for $7.5 million in November 1999.
This practice has raised some thorny questions. Suppose you're an IT manager for a large corporation, and you want to register a domain after the name of your company — but when you search the records of Domains on file, you find your name has already been taken.
Is this an unfortunate case of "first come, first served"? Or is it a trademark violation? The issues become still more difficult when you take into account the international nature of the Internet. What authority should govern trademark issues on a network that is truly global? What treaties apply?
Worse, in a reformed registration system where multiple companies compete for DNS business, who answers these and other questions when they arise? Who has authority? That's where ICANN comes in, and for an organization formed in late 1998, it already has a lot on its plate.
One plan the organization is debating involves introducing new top-level domains to relieve some of the perceived shortage of choice DNS names. In addition to the popular ".com," ".net," and ".org," we might eventually be able to choose ".firm," to register a law firm; ".med," for a medical organization; or even ".xxx," if we were launching a porn site. Even this decision isn't going to be easy, however. A number of different proposals for top-level domains are on the books.
For example, the Ralph Nader-affiliated organizations Essential Information and the Consumer Project on Technology have proposed that ICANN institute domains like ".sucks," ".union" and ".complaints" in the interest of free speech. They would have it that Microsoft (for example) be forbidden to register "microsoft.sucks."
Instead, that domain would be reserved for anyone who wants a forum to criticize the company's business practices. The ".union" domains would be reserved for "legitimate labor organizations," and so on. ICANN must decide whether this makes sense, and whether it is fair to all the global parties involved.
Whichever plan is chosen, merely adding new top-level domains alone won't resolve trademark disputes or the issues of who should have oversight in managing those domains in a global DNS community. According to ICANN chairperson Esther Dyson, new domains will eventually appear, but not before the organization arrives at solutions to these and many other complex and difficult problems.
But first on the agenda for Cairo was the issue of electing board members. ICANN aims to be a global democratic organization, rather than a dictating bureaucracy. "It's the Internet community getting together, deciding their policies and implementing those," says Dyson.
To that end, current board members debated controversial plans for electronic elections that would allow the Internet community-at-large to vote for ICANN representatives. Plans were eventually formalized to hold the first such election in November.
But when the "real" issues facing DNS will be resolved remains unknown, and some doubt whether the organization is truly capable of addressing them. What's certain is that the use of IP addresses remains key to transporting traffic across Internet routers, and consequently the need for effective DNS isn't going away either. Indeed, the issues facing ICANN will only become steadily more pressing.
Will ICANN be able to achieve an Internet DNS infrastructure that's lasting and fair to all concerned, and do it on an Internet time scale? For the sake of the Net's continued growth, you'd better wish them luck.
