Questions About Domain Name Game

February 8, 2001 / 2:10 PM EST / AP

The head of an oversight board for Internet addresses acknowledged Thursday that his group may have rejected qualified proposals when it approved seven new domain names last year.

But Vinton Cerf, chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, said the goal "was not to have a contest and pick winners."

ICANN wanted a pool small enough to test whether additions, the first major ones since the 1980s, would cause problems, Cerf said. Thus, he said in written remarks to a congressional panel, "many applications with likely merit were necessarily not going to be selected."

Expanding on those remarks orally, Cerf told lawmakers: "The real news is finally with the formation of ICANN, this long debate is actually producing new" domain names.

cWithout them, users would have to remember complicated strings like 192.0.34.65 to identify specific computers on the Internet, in this case ICANN's Web site.

New names are needed because easy-to-remember addresses have been all but used up, particularly in addresses ending in ".com." It's comparable to phone companies having to create new area codes to address shortages in phone numbers.

But government and technical leaders couldn't agree on what to do. The Commerce Department ultimately decided in 1998 to let a private organization, ICANN, take over responsibilities for Internet addresses.

The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on telecommunications convened hearings after receiving complaints about an ICANN process that required nonrefundable $50,000 fees simply to submit a proposal for a new name.

"In my mind, legitimate questions have been raised by several of our witnesses about the fairness of the application and selection process," said Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., the subcommittee chairman.

In November, ICANN selected seven proposals out of 44 completed ones received. Only two are for general use: ".info" for information and ".biz" for businesses.

The remaining five are restricted: ".name" for individuals, ".pro" for professionals, ".museum" for museums, ".coop" for business cooperatives and ".aero" for the aviation industry.

The names are to appear in use later this year.

Many of the rejected applicants complained that ICANN rushed through the selections and used arbitrary criteria it rejected ".iii," for instance, partly because it was hard to pronounce.

"ICANN is establishing Internet policy in its selections," said Rep. Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, senior Democrat on the subcommittee. "It becomes problematic if it makes policy judgments without adequate policy processes."

Some critics questioned whether Commerce had the authority to delegate the role to ICANN at all, without legislation or administrative rule-making.

But Cerf, widely regarded as one of the Net's founding fathers, defended the decision to proceed slowly.
Domain names, he said, have never been added "in the context of the Internet as it exists today. We want to do so without endangering the utility of what has become a global medium for communications and commerce."