[ga] .ORG panic in the Press...
Technology: Dot-orgs fear eviction
By ANICK JESDANUN, Associated Press NEW YORK (March 30, 2001 3:00 p.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - Brandon
Cackowski-Schnell remembers the hassles when his Seattle area code changed some
years back after the phone company ran out of numbers. Now he's worried he might
have to change his Web address, too.
On Monday, the international oversight body for Internet
addresses will consider how the domain names that end in .com, .net and .org are
managed. The proposal includes a vaguely worded goal that could eventually
restrict .org to nonprofit groups.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
insists it has no current plans to evict anyone. But Mike Roberts, the former
ICANN president who oversaw negotiations on the proposal, says any guarantees at
this stage would be premature.
Any change would be at least two years away, with a good
chance that existing .org sites could keep those names even longer. Still, the
proposal has generated scores of complaints on ICANN message boards and spawned
lobbying sites such as HandsOffMy.org.
Many questions remain unanswered: Will companies that now
have .org names lose them? Do individuals and families qualify as nonprofit
organizations?
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has its rules, but they
only cover a fraction of all nonprofit efforts worldwide. Even in the United
States, most families and individuals have no reason to register themselves as
nonprofits.
Cackowski-Schnell is a software engineer in Ashburn, Va.,
who posts his personal essays at SuburbanJoe.org.
He fears the worst.
"If my domain changes, every person used to coming to my
site would have to find the new one," he said. "Dot-org works really well the
way it is now."
Chris Grady, a Web developer in Arlington, Va., who uses
Grady.org, said changing an address is simple from a technical standpoint.
What's difficult, he said, is getting 1,200 people and groups to update their
address books and bookmarks.
Not to mention the search engines that have cataloged .org
sites - or Web pages that have linked to .org addresses.
According to a 1994 memo from the late Jon Postel, creator
of the domain name system, .com was meant for commercial entities, .net for
network providers and .org for organizations that didn't fit the other two
definitions.
But those restrictions haven't been enforced and people
have frequently taken .net or .org addresses after finding that someone else has
already occupied their preferred .com domain name.
New York dance club Madisons and Syntek Technology Inc. in
Arlington have joined not-for-profit organizations like the Guggenheim Museum
and The Associated Press in using .org addresses.
VeriSign Inc. holds the master lists of .com, .net and
.org names under contracts with ICANN. Although competing registration companies
have been signing up new names since 1999, they all are entered into VeriSign's
master lists. VeriSign now gets $6 annually for each of the 21 million .com, 4
million .net and 3 million .org names registered.
VeriSign now wants to drop .org and submit .net to
competitive rebidding earlier than planned - in exchange for longer rights to
the lucrative .com. If VeriSign's proposal is approved, the company would
contribute $5 million to help another organization run .org after
2002.
Other elements of the proposal have generated complaints
as well, and Internet users had until Saturday to post comments at ICANN's
site.
The ICANN board is to decide Monday whether to accept the
proposal that VeriSign negotiated with ICANN staff.
Under ICANN's brief description of the proposal, .org
would be returned "after some appropriate transition period, to its originally
intended function as a registry operated by and for nonprofit
organizations."
Andrew McLaughlin, ICANN's chief policy officer, said much
of the fear stems from mischaracterizations of the proposal. He said the
organization would consult with the Internet community before any final
decisions on the future of .org.
A statement on ICANN's Web site said that existing .org
owners would likely be able to continue using those names "no matter what
registration policies were adopted." But the statement also said the final rules
have yet to be determined.
"The biggest problem at the moment is that the proposal is
kind of vaguely worded," Cackowski-Schnell said.
John Poindexter, the former national security adviser who
is now a senior vice president at Syntek, wants to keep Syntek.org for his
technology consulting company. He questions how a restriction on .org could ever
work.
"What are they going to do?" he asked. "Use the IRS
definition of nonprofit, set up some bureaucracy to decide qualifications or
some other nonsensical solution?"
And then there's Slashdot.org, a popular bulletin board
for self-described geeks. It started as a nonprofit but is now part of VA Linux
Systems Inc., a for-profit company.
"Making decisions on it, at this point, is a stupid move
by ICANN," said Jeff "Hemos" Bates, a Slashdot editor. "The cat is already out
of the bag."
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