The Future of Domain Names
| Tanggal: | 12 Jun 2000 |
| Sumber: | Shiladitya Niyogi |
NamaDomain.com, Brevity has always been the soul of wit; now it is the keyword in Internet domain names.
Ironically enough, domain names are only artifices, which link numbers, or so called IP addresses, to more meaningful names. It might have seemed more logical to create a registry that tied those numbers to words, but while those numbers are potentially infinite, there’s only a limited pool of meaningful words. In a specific line of business, this pool gets even smaller.
The names consequently have become valuable to the extent that they have become cornerstones of billion dollar business ideas.
For years the domain names were run for scientists by scientists. A committee headed by the late Jon Postel allocated the numerical addresses and oversaw the root servers. A company under contract with the US Government, Network Solutions Inc. (NSI), matched Postel’s numbers with .com, .net, and .org domain names. Subsequently, the job of registering was outsourced to NSI. After the US government withdrew its subsidy for the Internet in 1995, Network Solutions started registering domain names for a fee (currently $35 a year).
In June 1998, the American government issued a white paper stating that it wanted to get out of the domain business. It also proposed creating a series of nonprofit corporations to manage the domain issue. With the entry of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) a battle between it and NSI was inevitable – the bone of contention being the ownership of the database that contained information on holders of the domain names registered by Network Solutions. NSI not only claimed that it owned the master list but also that it had plans to sell the same as a Yellow Pages directory (the Dot-Com directory).ICANN ,on the other hand, saw the list as an important public property. ICANN has given NSI till September 10, 2000, to sign an “accreditation agreement” to act as an Internet registrar. If no deal is signed by then, the Internet is sure to be impacted.
[At present there are more than 30 ICANN accredited registrars, who are supposed to deal in selling the Internet domains. For a complete list of registrars, go to www.icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html.]
This domain-buying tendency, gave rise to a highly unlawful activity – Cybersquatting. Cybersquatters are people who grab domain names identical to existing trademarks or products, they don’t have ownership of, for the purpose of misrepresentation. What follows are numerous legal suits and counter suits to determine the righteous owners of these conflicted domains.
The ones that deserve a mention are etoys vs etoy, the Kaplan vs Princeton Review (owner of Kaplan.com), MCI vs Sprint (owner of MCI.com), McDonalds vs owner of McDonalds.com, Omega vs Sportsman’s Market Inc., Microsoft vs owners of microsoftwindows.com and microsoftoffice.com. In order to grab a piece of Kaplan’s market share, for SAT prep course, Princeton Review had registered the domain name, Kaplan.com, which it had to finally relinquish when an arbitration panel disagreed to such a move on grounds of trademark infringement and unfair competition.
Similar was the situation in the MCI vs. Sprint case, where Sprint had registered the domain, mci.com. The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (A.C.P.A), which became a law in November 99, included factors such as a cybersquatter’s intellectual property rights; and a cybersquatter’s intentions, i.e. whether he was using the domain name to offer his own goods and services or whether he was simply diverting customers from the site or disparaging the trademark. Finding the A.C.P.A to be a gesture of “bad faith”, the Domain Name Rights Coalition (DNRC) came into existence within the next few months.
The flip side of cybersquatting, includes who buy these domain names as a mode of financial speculation. In the .com world almost every recognizable word has been taken. Enterprises have no option but to buy an address from the person who owns it, paying thousands of dollars, at times. This encouraged “the shorter the better” concept in domain occupying. The speculators wanted the names to be memorable, with the least possible scope for error, easy to pronounce, and easy to fit on a TV screen or in any 0print advertisement or on a billboard.
Last year, eCompanies in Santa Monica, California, paid $7.5 million for the rights to the Business.com domain name, which remains the highest price on record so far. Following this were other domain names – AltaVista.com ($3,250,000), Loans.com ($3,000,000), Wines.com ($3,000,000), Autos.com ($2,200,000), Express.com (2,000,000), Wallstreet.com (1,030,000) and eFlowers.com ($1,000,000).
The owner of Cool.com, had recently been offered $8 million cash along with a potential $30 million worth of stock but he had to turn it down as he found the opportunities for using a brand, with such a built-in name recognition, for marketing and long term strategy building, a lot more compelling. The name-selling brokerage business saw its rise because of this budding branding market – a reason why companies like GreatDomains.com and HitDomains.com have been highly successful in their operations.
A latest addition to this cybersquatting phenomenon is the string of domain hijacking cases that have recently occurred; Noteworthy was the hijacking of whoami.com, belonging to Solid Oak software, which saw the transfer approval of whoami.com to an unknown entity in front of its eyes, even though its hosting service provider denied such a transfer when asked by NSI.
All said and done, the primary concern still is how to create and manage more domain space for entities not yet registered.
The foremost solution is to extend the possibilities in the present nomenclature system and reduce the constraints on domain names. Now, more registrars offer the ability to register names up to 63 characters in length up from the earlier 22 character names. That apart, many registrars are now offering low registering rates. RegisterFree.com had even gone to the extent of providing an hour of free registration to the users. The other registrars who have been trying to get the prices down are Tucows.com and BulkRegister.com. To reinforce the presence of companies on the web and to bring consumer attention to these company web sites, a New York based domain name brokerage has launched a service that allows online businesses to match their Internet addresses with toll free telephone numbers.
A second possibility might be to have more top-level domains (TLDs). “Within a few years there may be thousands of new top level domains. Technically, the DNS system could support a huge number, so the current 7 Top level Domains is a pretty small number” opines James Love of the Consumer Project on Technology. He maintains that once people realized that it was possible to have long TLD strings with the existing DNS system, there might be more TLD’s like .software, .humanrights, .fightaids, .pharmacy, etc.
ICANN is still deciding on the idea of introducing 6-10 new top-level domains. . The World Intellectual Property Organization, however, has been asked to provide ICANN with globally recognized trademarks so as to ease the inevitable legal battles arising from the cybersquatters snapping up the brand names when the new domains are released for public use. ICANN’s subcommittee is asking registries to submit proposals regarding the specific names they want to administer and any charters underlying them for the test bed phase of the new domains.
Fred Baker, Chairman of IETF, feels that having thousands of TLD’s is not necessarily the solution, and that the issue is not “how many TLDs can be there” but rather “at what point does a flat name space defeat itself”. He also mentions the load on the .com server, apart from the bandwidth and numerous other networking intricacies, as a possible reason of not always receiving a response from the com server. Till ICANN reaches a decision on this, the more important questions are: which registries are going to be selected for administering these domains; who decides what the new domains will actually be; and finally even if these domains are introduced could cybersquatting be stopped and everyone be accommodated.
A. Michael Froomkin, Professor of Law at the U. Miami School of Law and the co-chairman of ICANNWatch, speaking on those lines points out that there is no technical obstacle to multiple domains as is evident in the ccTLD’s which are technically identical to the gTLD’s. At the same time, he also mentions the possibility of alternative DNS’s being brought to use, if some desired content is made available through it or if a major ISP such as AOL adopts it.
One must not forget, however, that there is enough space in the .net and .org domains amongst the top-level domains; it is in the .com space that 78% of all top-level registrations are made. There is a possibility that these new domains will remain unnoticed just as the .org’s and .net’s. Scott Bradner, the ISOC VP for Standards and a faculty member at Harvard University, supported this opinion and pointed out that adding domains would not change the present scenario for it would take time for everyone to realize the abundance so brought about.
A third way of doing away with this scarcity might be by popularizing and enforcing the country code domains. The European Union wants to propose “.eu” as a top level domain, because it believes that such a move would send a political signal of the EU’s commitment apart from making it easier for the European firms to identify their products as European.
ICANN uses only those ccTLDs that have been registered by ISO 3166. Since ‘.eu’ has only been reserved so far, it is not eligible under the current rules. However, Baker points out that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with using ‘.eu’ as a ccTLD if ISO 3166 were to register it. The Korean country code domain, ‘.kr’, has experienced a surge in its registrations, of late. In India, on the other hand, instead of setting up a server and going to the National Center for Software Technology (NCST) to register an URL with an ‘.in’ extension, a user prefers to buy space on a US server and go for a .com domain. But, with the improvement of the infrastructure, particularly the bandwidth, this scenario might change and more people might go for ‘.in’ domains.
A fourth alternative may be the introduction of Multilingual Domain Names. While the whole world is concerned about domain names that are in ASCII form, the Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC) has been thinking of domain names using Japanese Characters from users as well as service providers. In May 1999, JPNIC established iDN task force to identify conditions to introduce multilingual domain names and to implement an experimental DNS system to support them.
A fifth option might be the using new methods for accessing sites. Real Names is one such company that works on directory systems to bypass domain names and use other means to link people with the sites they seek. The product has capability of embedding itself in search engines like AltaVista, Inktomi, Google and MSN, to name a few. It uses Internet keywords to allow Internet users to more quickly and easily find brands, companies and products on the web using familiar names
Recently, Microsoft Corp. announced its commitment to Real Names Internet Keyword Solution by taking an equity stake of 20% in RealNames. Together, they are to ensure the adoption of an open and well-documented standard for how names are allocated in order to preserve the user experience and trademark/brand ownership. They have plans to support International languages.
But these keywords don’t always come for free and they work only for companies that have purchased the keywords and only on search engines that have them embedded. This still gives RealNames a promising 70% unduplicated reach. Though RealNames always recommends the clients to subscribe to the misspellings of the keywords, the possibility of typo’s can never be done away with. RealNames has approximately 2 million Internet keywords, as of now. What if two companies ask for the same keyword? In other words, what appears to be an alternative to DNS system might itself be a Super-DNS system.
