ICANN/DNSO
DNSO Mailling lists archives

[ga]


<<< Chronological Index >>>    <<< Thread Index >>>

[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."


<<< Chronological Index >>>    <<< Thread Index >>>