Despite opposition from nearly every sector of the American population, the
National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is set to
enforce the deadline for its giveaway of the .us domain.
What that means to the U.S. taxpayers is this: after providing initial
funding for the management of the county code top level domain (ccTLD), the
Department of Commerce (DoC) is letting a corporation take over without
paying a dime.
Said corporation will then be able to reap rewards from what is expected to
be a popular domain extension, a quasi-.com address that will expand the
already congested commercial domain space into a new frontier. That’s
expected to translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in registry fees
over the years, money no one but the new owner of the .us domain will see.
It’s similar to what happened with the .com, .net and .org domains, when
VeriSign, Inc., was given management powers over the
Internet’s most popular extensions, a process that was designed to bring
stability to the fledgling world wide Web (WWW). It didn’t work out quite
the way the government intended, and many advocates consider VeriSign a
monopoly with a stranglehold on the industry.
Critics and Congressmen alike were taken aback by the government’s decision
to declare a 44-day-long Request for Quotation (RFQ) to any business with a
desire to run the .us domain extension.
Edward Markey (D-MA), ranking Democrat on the House Subcommittee on
Telecommunications and the Internet called the .us domain space a “public
resource” that should be managed in a way that reflects American values,
and at least provide recompense to taxpayers.
“If the Bush Administration intends to give this valuable public resource
away to private entities, taxpayers must be compensated,” Markey wrote in
his letter. “If private entities are to be permitted to commercialize the
.us ccTLD and profit from its management, it would be far better to
transfer management to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The
FCC could then sell .us at auction to the highest bidder, rather than
permitting NTIA to give away this valuable resource without adequately
recouping its value for American taxpayers.”
Clyde Ensslin, a spokesperson at the DoC, said the NTIA has been holding
discussions for a long time now about the fate of the domain and doesn’t
understand why critics are just now coming out of the woodworks to
protest. “The process has been open to the public and competitive and
fair,” he said.
But Michael Froomkin, a University of Miami law professor and an editor of
advocacy site ICANNwatch.com, has been watching the .us domain extension
rhetoric increase the past couple months as the DoC put the domain
extension on the open market.
While he agrees the NTIA has been good about opening the year-long
discussion to all takers about the fate of the ccTLD, the follow through
has been less than exemplary.
“They completely ignored the comments or results of the discussion (they
gathered),” Froomkin said. “It’s certainly true that they’ve been in
discussions for a long time, but this RFQ came out of the blue.”
What has many critics of the .us domain transfer of power concerned,
however, isn’t so much the DoC’s failure to get any money for the domain,
but the sweeping powers the new owners will have over the relatively
untapped soon-to-be-commercial extension and the lack of restrictions to
oversee the .us overseers.
Right now, the organizations occupying the .us domain space are largely
K-12 schools, community/technical schools and state and local government
agencies. And in many instances, they don’t pay a domain name fee for
their presence on the Web. All that will likely change when the new owners
move in and take charge.
It’s likely because the new owners of the .us ccTLD, in addition to having
managerial control over the .us registry, will have complete oversight
authority over how the domain is handled with registrars. So, if that
means officials in charge of the .us registry decide its time to start
charging a fee every year or that certain reporting requirements are
necessary that by coincidence favor one company over the other, well that’s
too bad for everyone else.
That’s like giving the fox the keys to the chicken coopor giving control
of the Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN) to VeriSign. The
two organizations, founded when the government ceded control of .com, .net
and .org, have been under fire for years about the cozy relationship the
two maintain when it comes to retaining the “stability” of the Internet
through their version of managed care of the domain business.
The terms of the RFQ document has raised red flags with advocates
everywhere. Following are some of the factors that will prove to the NTIA
a business is a viable candidate:
- Administer the domain at no cost to the government.
- Have a plan in writing describing how to expand the number of
registrants on the domain. - Implement a “sunrise policy” for trademark owners.
- Have a plan in place to allow only people from the U.S. to own the
domain. - Implement a Uniform Domain Name Resolution Procedure (UDRP).
- Abide by government advisory committee principles to avoid conflicts
with U.S. law. - Submit and publicize a progress report six months after taking over
the ccTLD, to prove the company is abiding by its obligations.
Kathryn Kleiman, director of the Association for Computing Machinery’s
(ACM) Internet governance project, said the NTIA’s insistence to include
measures like the UDRP, political compromises brokered and written by Louis
Touton, ICANN general counsel, to appease big corporations and small domain
players alike, infringe on basic U.S. First Amendment rights.
“The requirement of UDRP is extremely dangerous,” Kleiman said. “It is not
consistent with the rights and protections existing under the U.S. First
Amendment. The first amendment protections are much broader than what are
given to people who use the UDRP, which is not a fair and accurate
reflection of the balance, under U.S. law, of the trademark rights of
all. This will create a problem in the .us domain space.
In fact, both policies are currently under fire at ICANN, as more and more
resolutions end up favoring big business and leaving the entrepreneur and
non-commercial domain registrants with the short end of the stick.
Kleiman, one of several advisors during the drafting of the UDRP, said that
with as many problems as the measure is facing in the international arena,
applying it to the .us domain space will spell disaster. Also, the
inclusion of a sunrise policy, which allows trademark owners to reserve
their domain name before any others can take it, is inherently flawed and
unnecessary.
“We have the anti cybersquatting Act, so we don’t need the UDRP or sunrise
policy,” Kleiman said. “We also have the history of the UDRP, which shows
it overwhelmingly and unfairly favors trademark owners over anyone
else. We have to fix the UDRP first: it’s not appropriate to extend it
anywhere else, particularly the U.S.”
The ACM joined a growing list of organizations that includes Congressmen
and schools when it sent a letter to Department of Commerce Chairman Donald
Evens, calling for an extension to the RFQ process. Letters have been
pouring into Evan’s office lately, letters the DoC will be hard-pressed to
brush off with glib reassurances.
The Senate Commerce Committee also threw its weight behind opposing the RFQ
process, with a letter asking for a delay until the DoC names a new NTIA
director, which has been left unfilled since Bush came into office and
named Evans to the DoC.
Ernest Hollings, Commerce chairman, proposed a non-profit organization to
take the reins.
“Several organizations have proposed that this domain be administered by a
non-profit entity that would use any profits from registering domain names
for activities which would promote the public interest,” Hollings wrote to
Evans. “This seems consistent with the Administration’s interest in
promoting competition for domain names while at the same time allowing this
resource to continue to benefit the public.”
DoC spokesperson Ensslin said the agency plans on responding to lawmaker
and organization concerns publicly in the near future, but was unable to
comment on whether that would be before or after the RFQ date.
