Network Solutions and the National Science Foundation
Ray Van Eng (03/31/97) .
Among those who have not remitted the customary fee of $100 to cover the first two years of domain ownership, about 35% of them are delinquent which are subject to cancellation with their domain names put back into circulation. Under terms of an agreement, Network Solutions, the agency that collects the fees is obliged to hand over 30% of all proceeds to the US government's National Science Foundation and into the Intellectual Infrastructure Fund. Initially, the NSF wants to have the feedback from the Internet community on how the money should be spent but no consensus has been reached. As of the end of January '97, InterNIC, the national registry for domain names said the fund amounts to about $15 million. Network Solutions sees collection as a major problem and is considering some sort of pre-payment scheme. If aggressive actions are not taken, the company could be subject to severe criticism as there are many private firms and government branches eager to get into the domain name registration business. Chris Clough, a spokesman for Network Solutions indicated that a significant number of unpaid accounts is due to a small group of people who registered a large number of domain names for speculation. And many of them would not pay for what they have acquired unless there are potential profits to be made in reselling the names. It is well known that especially in the early days of the Internet these opportunists would register well establish trademarks such as Harrods, MTV etc. in cyberspace in order to extract ransoms from corporations who are actual owners of such names. That issue is partially resolved by a willingness from corporations to take vigorous legal actions to defend their marks and by a warning that accompanied the domain name registration form which stated that registering a domain name in cyberspace does not guarantee any legal ownership should disputes arise. Recently, the International Ad Hoc Committee, an Internet industry group proposed to add seven more Top-Level Domain (TLD) names to the existing roster which uses Internet address suffixes such as .com, .org, .gov etc. to signify that the institution is a commercial, organization or government entity. The proposed names are web (dedicated to the web), info (information providers), arts (culture and entertainment), firm (companies), nom (individuals), rec (recreation and leisure), and store (retail stores). The IAHC also want to have more organizations to provide registration services. Just as we go to press, an anti-trust lawsuit is being filed against Network Solutions by PGP Media. The allegation is that Network Solutions has the monopoly on domain name registration services because of their exclusive control of the Internet Root Servers that matche an URL request (e.g. for a web address) with the location of the web server. There are currently eleven such root servers around the world that contain a list of all the registered top level domain name e.g. .com, .org, .gov etc. Any other domain name not listed there are rendered as unreachable. PGP offers domain name services, but with no access to the root servers, they can not register their clients' requests.
The Enhanced Domain Name System (eDNS) registry becomes operational and users can register TLDs such as .biz, .corp, .per and .web. eDNS is running a number of root servers in the U.S. where Internet service providers are required to obtain regular updates so as to make the newly registered domain names reachable.
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