DNS facing reforms

The US Department of Commerce is expected to unveil plans this week to reform the governance of the Domain Name system (DNS).

The announcement was expected at the end of last week, but as PC Week went to press it was still delayed. "It's still going through the inter-agency process," confirmed Page Darden, director of public affairs at the National Telecommunications and Information Agency, the section of the Department of Commerce dealing with the proposals.

Ira Magaziner, the "Internet Czar" appointed by Bill Clinton to oversee the transition of the DNS from US control, was in Brussels last week at a telecoms trade show. He hinted that the new proposals would allay European and Australian concerns that the plans to reform the DNS were too US-centric.

When the Department of Commerce issued its "Green Paper" in February this year, thousands of companies, organisations and individual Net users responded to the call for comments (see PC Week, 17 February and 31 March).

Magaziner said the new proposals would call for an industry-led, international, non-profit authority that would subscribe to a more decentralised, stakeholder philosophy than that outlined in the original plan. The new "domain name board" would comprise 15 representatives from the international Internet community.

No national member quotas would be enforced, he said, and the board would not have the authority to regulate the entire Internet. Instead, it would have four key areas of responsibility: management of the DNS; allocation of domain address numbers to the regional domain registries; management of the root servers; and coordination of new initiatives in IP technology.

No mention was made of the role of Network Solutions (NSI), the company that has a virtual monopoly over registration of the .com, .net, .edu and .org domains. Magaziner did imply, however, that the decision to allocate top-level domains (TLDs) to registries would be in the hands of the new authority.

"Our contracts with NSI and the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) will end at the end of September, so our intention is to get the new body up and running as soon as possible," he said.