There's No 'I' in .US

Who will get a free franchise to charge local goverments and schools annual registration fees? Why will the U.S. government endorse ICANN's Uniform Domain Name Resolution Procedure (UDRP)? These questions and more are being asked as the U.S. government prepares a big Net giveaway.

by Jim Wagner of internetnews.com [July 25, 2001]

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.

Compensate the taxpayer
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. 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 it's 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 coop—or 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.

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