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Netizens-Digest Volume 1 Number 283
Netizens-Digest Wednesday, March 10 1999 Volume 01 : Number 283
Netizens Association Discussion List Digest
In this issue:
[netz] Who rules your domain?
Re: [netz] Who rules your domain?
[netz] Oram: Names and Trademarks (long
[netz] The Internet and its history discussed in American Historical Review
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 12:03:11 -0500
From: "P.A. Gantt" <pgantt@icx.net>
Subject: [netz] Who rules your domain?
Source: PC World
http://www.pcworld.com/current_issue/article/0,1212,9794,00.html
"Who's the Master of Your Domain?"
by Cameron Crotty
Update
Lead paragraph states:
"...The foundations of the Internet are shifting. This month, after
spending a full six years as a monopoly, Network Solutions
Incorporated will open up the domain name registration system to
competition. That could very well save you some money
and--potentially--let you claim new, more descriptive domain
names. But plenty of important decisions have yet to be made
about just how this brave new Internet will run..."
Comments: Anyone have any info. after you read the article?
What is the real deal?
- --
P.A. Gantt, Computer Science Technology Instructor
Electronic Media Design and Support Homepage
http://user.icx.net/~pgantt/
mailto:pagantt@technologist.com?Subject=etech
http://horizon.unc.edu/TS/vision/1998-11.asp
Common sense is not common, and conventional wisdom is not
wisdom. But at least you can have conventional sense. ~~ Daily Whale
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 20:17:20 -0004
From: kerryo@ns.sympatico.ca (Kerry Miller)
Subject: Re: [netz] Who rules your domain?
Pat -
> What is the real deal?
"Whatever ICANN decides, opening up the system to competition
is likely to benefit end-users. ICANN officials say the price of
registering a domain name should drop from the current $35 per
year; some analysts predict annual fees as low as $20."
I havent heard any ICANN officials saying anything at all about
pricing; NSI last year admitted that while it sure didnt cost $70, it
was definitely more than $20 (Thomas v NSI).
kerry
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 16:49:14 -0004
From: kerryo@ns.sympatico.ca (Kerry Miller)
Subject: [netz] Oram: Names and Trademarks (long
Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 10:04:15 -0500 (EST)
From: Andy Oram <andyo@oreilly.com>
Subject: Article: Names and Trademarks: What No One Owns But All
Wish To Lay Hands On
...
This opinion piece appears today in the American Reporter (go to
http://www.american-reporter.com/ and look under "Ideas and Columns").
Tomorrow the piece can be found online (along with suitable hypertext
links and an index of related articles) at:
http://www.oreilly.com/~andyo/ar/dns_trademark.html
The article can be redistributed online, with author and newspaper
attributions intact, for non-profit use. For printing or commercial
use, please contact Joe Shea, publisher of the American Reporter, at
joeshea@netcom.com.
... None of the activities here represents my employer.
Andy
- ---
NAMES AND TRADEMARKS: WHAT NO ONE OWNS BUT ALL WISH TO LAY HANDS ON
by Andy Oram
American Reporter Correspondent
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- A geeky debate over costs and dispute
resolution procedures in Internet domain names has, in the past year,
taken on the look of a Frank Capra film. Will Mr. Deeds win his
fortune or be committed to the loonie bin? Will Mr. Smith may lose his
seat in Congress? And will the Internet become a twenty-first century
virtual Pottersville?
Recently a software company offered me a free personal domain,
something like oram.net (though that one happens to be taken
already). It was an attractive prospect: no matter what ISP I used or
where I worked, I would be able to maintain the same easy-to-remember
email address and URL for my Web site. That's the kind of future
envisioned by the entrepreneurs and public-interest groups. The Domain
Name Rights Coalition suggests that the .us domain be used for
experimentation and low-cost or free domains for small organizations.
The visionaries went even farther. They hoped to end monopoly
control over the registration domain names, stimulate innovation in
every aspect of the technology, and show the world that the Internet
community could regulate itself without leaning on governments. Hopes
have deflated rapidly.
Entrepreneurs and public-interest advocates have been reading
various drafts from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers, the new corporation that met last week to make policy for
domain names. We've been reviewing recent recommendations by the World
Intellectual Property Organization to protect trademarks in domain
names. And we've been discussing a number of serious critiques of
these developments.
The ICANN board met last week in Singapore to lay foundations
for its own operation as well as domain name policy. General issues
included membership criteria, a call for open board meetings, and
ensuring a fair international balance.
In the area of domain names, the board moved forward toward
creating a subordinate group called the Domain Name Supporting
Organization. Strangely, it also made policy rulings that one would
expect to be left open until the DNSO could meet and handle the
matters itself.
The intended DNSO reflects a compromise between those wanting
a hands-off organization dominated by small and non-commercial users,
and those wanting a strongly interventionist organization enforcing
the interests of trademark holders and companies in the Internet
business (who lost little time in registering a domain name of their
own, dnso.org). ICANN claims in a press release to "use the best
features of both in the new document." An examination of the outcome
suggests that ICANN adopted the procedures favored by the
anti-interventionist interests and the structure recommended by the
large commercial interests.
Writing in the March 1 issue of the online journal First
Monday (at http://131.193.153.231/, which gives you an idea of what
Internet surfing would look like if the Domain Name System didn't
exist), Ted Byfield traces domain name conflicts to the philosophical
differences between the "idealized cooperative norms" supposedly
characterizing the groups that originally created the Internet, and
the intellectual property interests of new commercial players,
"dominated by massive corporate efforts to extend proprietary claims
indefinitely."
It must be stressed, however, that lines between the factions
cannot be drawn along simple historical or professional lines. Some of
the founders of the Internet have helped to form ICANN and forged
alliances with the large corporate forces. Conversely, an implacable
rancor remains between ICANN supporters and Network Solutions, the
company that holds a (soon to end) monopoly on the .com domain and
that was hitherto the nemesis of the small-business forces.
Shortly before last week's meeting began, anti-interventionist
interests had coalesced around a proposal called the Paris Draft, and
large commercial ones around one called BMW (not to be confused with a
famous trademark). Members of both sides met and created "consensus
principles" called the CENTR document, though how much was actually
sacrificed by the large commercial interests is still being debated.
The CENTR document calls for open meetings -- a key plank for
the anti-interventionist interests, who went so far as to wear gray
ribbons protesting the ICANN board's choice to meet in private -- and
a General Assembly that charges no member fees. These procedures were
a nod toward the anti-interventionists.
The structure of DNSO, however, ensures heavy representation
for narrow interests: organizations maintaining the computers that
store domain names (registries), organizations handing out domain
names (registrars), businesses, trademark holders (who of course are
usually businesses too), Internet Service Providers, and "national
Domain Name Policy Organizations." Never saw a critter resembling that
last category before -- it looks like the bud of a new bureaucracy.
By their representation in the leadership of the DNSO (the
Names Council) the above-named interests would outweigh the interests
of ordinary domain-name holders and non-profits. That alarms the
participants who want as open an Internet as possible.
This is not to deny that positive movement is taking place.
ICANN is seriously pursuing an open membership model (although some
opponents grumble that all the important decisions will be locked up
before the membership has a chance to meet). And the CENTR document
clearly says that this membership will take primacy over the DNSO ("an
open consensus based expert policy advisory and recommending
body...not an ICANN decision making body.")
ICANN teeters precariously on the edge of legitimacy. While
presented to the public as the "new corporation" called for in a White
Paper by the U.S. Commerce Department in June 1998, ICANN did not
arise from the consensus-building process surrounding the White
Paper. It was the brainchild of a single pioneering Internet technical
specialist, Jon Postel. The nine initial members were hand-picked by
him, deliberately bypassing all the participants in the domain name
debate.
When the Commerce Department was faced by this proposal and
its critics, they waffled. Ira Magaziner, the well-known architect of
White House policy on the Internet, departed just before the proposal
arrived, leaving behind a policy hiatus and ultimately a policy
cop-out.
On the one hand, ICANN received heavy backing from important
representatives of the founding Internet technical community, as well
as from some large corporations such as IBM and MCI/WorldCom.
Furthermore, it recently won the endorsements of several national
governments.
On the other hand, it faced opposition from large numbers of
experts who had been debating the domain-name question for over a
year, including many Internet Service Providers and companies in the
business of registering domain names. The best organized of these
diverse (and often deeply divided) forces joined a coalition called
the Open Root Server Confederation, one of the main drafters of the
Paris Draft.
In November, the Commerce Department signed an agreement with
ICANN allowing it to move ahead, with the vague proviso that it
address ORSC issues. Representatives of OSRC and others claim
strenuously that these issues have not adequately been addressed.
Nevertheless, Commerce Department representative Becky Burr implicitly
endorsed ICANN by her presence at last week's Singapore meeting.
Let's turn briefly to a draft proposal from WIPO, the
organization responsible for harmonizing world policies on copyright,
patents, trademarks, etc. The U.S. government White Paper called in
WIPO to recommend policies for handling trademark disputes and related
issues. It was a mistake to ask.
Imagine that your local community wants to develop policies
for handling open land. If the mayor assembles a committee of real
estate developers to make recommendations, the result will naturally
involve condos, office parks, and shopping malls. Parks, refuges, and
other non-commercial uses are inevitably going to get short
shrift. The committee will listen politely to the importance of
maintaining undeveloped land; they may even set some aside for the
sake of public relations; but they'll lean heavily toward the uses
that lie within their expertise. The same thing is happening in WIPO.
Trademark holders have a natural interest in keeping other
people from registering domain names that might confuse users. In
recent court cases, organizations critical of Planned Parenthood, Jews
for Jesus, and Ringling Brothers were forced to give up the domain
names plannedparenthood.com, jewsforjesus.org, and
ringlingbrothers.com, respectively. It may be argued that the names --
which were used to attract people to Web sites criticizing the
organizations -- were deceptive and diminished the value of the
trademarks. On the other hand, if somebody published a book titled
"Planned Parenthood" that was critical of its subject, who could
prevent him?
Another beef of trademark holders is speculation in domain
names, whereby random individuals register domain names reflecting the
names of large companies like neiman-marcus.com. Sometimes the
speculators succeed in selling the names for large settlements; in
other cases they relinquish them under legal pressure. While I oppose
speculation because it hinders communication, it is also rather silly
and by no means deserving of the vituperation expressed by advocates
of trademark holders.
These trademark holders revile speculation in emotionally
weighted words such as cyber-piracy and cyber-squatting. Besides
betraying a bourgeois prejudice (squatting is a survival mechanism of
desperate indigents), these words create in the public mind the notion
that registering a name as a trademark gives the holder a God-given
right to control every use of the name, which could not be further
from the truth.
It is an axiom of the domain name debate, upheld by WIPO as
well as others, that trademark holders shouldn't get more rights in
cyberspace than they have in traditional arenas. But that axiom is
violated routinely. A controversial study by policy professor Milton
Mueller finds that a large number of legal actions don't involve
either traditional definitions of trademark infringement or
speculation in domain names.
Now WIPO is trying to straighten out the mess -- but the cure
is a harsh regimen with an oddly small chance of succeeding. A widely
circulated paper by attorney A. Michael Froomkin points out that the
recommended dispute resolution procedure leaves every domain name
holder (except those who already sprung for a national trademark) open
to challenge, while the policies for resolving disputes depend on
legal precedents that are yet to emerge. But I can't do better than to
quote an alarming scenario Froomkin informally wrote up:
"Hand over the domain name, or we will take you through a
procedure we understand and you do not...We think it only fair to warn
you that if you lose you will pay all arbitral fees and costs...If we
win, the decision will go into effect immediately, without even a
decent interval for you to find a court to appeal to....And if our
courts are slow, and the goodwill, traffic, or other interests
associated with your domain are destroyed by our action, you have no
claim in tort, absent outright fraud on our part, since you agreed to
all this in your registration contract..."
Small businesses, non-profit organizations, and individuals
derive no benefit from the WIPO proposal because they usually cannot
go through the expense of registering their name as a trademark. Its
unintended effect is to hold over small domain holders the constant
and eternal threat that somebody, somewhere in the world will
challenge their right to a name.
I also worry that attempts may be made to create an artificial
scarcity in domain names, scuttling hopes of people like me to have
our own someday. One WIPO suggestion, quite benign in itself, says
that "domain name registration should be made conditional upon the
receipt by the registration authority of the registration fee." The
assumption behind the proposal is that the fee is high enough to
discourage speculators from registering hundreds of domains that are
open for sale. Given the high value placed by major corporations on
particular domain names, it is hard to imagine a fee that is high
enough to discourage speculators while still keeping costs down to the
ideal minimum for small-scale content providers.
Competition among registrars, under ideal conditions, should
lower fees to the small amount required to keep highly reliable root
servers and TLD servers running, and perhaps partly to fund ICANN and
its Domain Name Supporting Organization. It would be ridiculous to
pump up charges for domain names, when all other costs of
participation in the Internet (computers, Internet access, training
for content creation) are becoming more affordable.
On another issue, the Center for Democracy and Technology
submitted comments arguing that WIPO and ICANN proposals did not
adequately protect the privacy of domain name holders. Of course, some
copyright interests complain that domain holders have too much
privacy, even though there is a clear path to finding information
about them in case of a dispute.
I frankly could never get excited over the frenzy of the
trademark holders. My own company, O'Reilly & Associates, faced a
domain name problem and handled it with finesse. The name O'Reilly
possesses some of the highest recognition in computer publishing, but
when we found that the name oreilly.com had been registered by someone
else we simply chose another name. We advertised ora.com heavily and
gave it such widespread recognition that many of our customers still
use it, even though the owner of oreilly.com eventually let that name
lapse and we picked it up.
Our customers, admittedly, lie along the more
computer-literate strata of the public, but you don't have to be
technically sophisticated to read a URL from an ad.
Dozens of strings that can represent a particular company. So
trademark holders can always work around speculators, but innocent
small domain-name holders can't work around harrassment from tenacious
trademark holders.
The DNS battle is not the only area where narrow interests are
threatening the infrastructure of the Internet. While businesses and
governments are gradually getting more clueful, pockets of
irrationality remain. For instance, the EU is considering regulations
that would render unfeasible the caching of Web pages -- one of the
most basic computer technologies, and one that is essential on the Web
for keeping traffic down -- because some companies have complained
about people intercepting copyrighted files from caches. When some
companies and governments embrace the Internet, they do so in the
manner of a boa constrictor.
-30-
Andy Oram is moderator of the Cyber Rights mailing list for
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and an editor at
O'Reilly & Associates.
=========
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 01:15:06 -0500 (EST)
From: Ronda Hauben <ronda@panix.com>
Subject: [netz] The Internet and its history discussed in American Historical Review
The Internet has come of age :-) A review article on writing
Internet history appeared in the December 1998 issue of the
American Historical Review.
Observing that currently there is no mention of the Internet
and little mention of computers in history books, an essay on
"Writing Internet History" suggests that this will and should change.
In his review essay in, Roy Rosenzweig looks at 4 recent books about
the history and development of the Internet and discusses them and the
significance they have to developing a historiography of the Internet.
The books he includes are "Where Wizards Stay Up Late", "Transforming
Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986",
"The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold
War America", and "Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the
Internet". (He also mentions a few other books in his comments or notes.)
The review essay looks at the social context of the Internet and of
Usenet and recognizes that this is a vital aspect to consider.
He says about "Netizens", it offers an interpretive perspective that
should be central to any future Net history...They argue that the Internet
has created a new kind of citizen, the "netizens," who they define as
"people who decide to devote time and effort into making the Net, this
new part of the world, a better place" -- "a regenerative and vibrant
community and resource." The Haubens see the democratic nature of
the network growing out of its grass-roots source in the people who
created Usenet.
Following are some quotes from Rosenzweig's essay in the American
Historical Review:
"Crocker and the Haubens suggest alternative contextual frame to that
emphasized by Edwards, who puts the rise of digital computing (and
implicitly the Internet) solely within the Establishment 1960s of
the Vietnam War and the Cold War."
"Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie, the bearded and longhaired Bell
Labs' programmers who, in 1969, developed Unix, the operating system
behind Usenet, later described themselves as seeking 'a system
around which a fellowship could form'."
"In different ways, both Levy and the Haubens help us to see that the
more profound challenge to this 'open' vision of the Internet that
was rooted (at least in part) in the 1960s came not from its
heritage in the Defense Department but rather from an alternative
closed system -- corporate capitalism."
"In the 1980s, when most forms of publicly owned goods and sevices --
from public schools and public housing to public parks -- were
in decline and an ideology of privatization and deregulation was n
ascendance, it seemed like conventional wisdom to turn this public
utility over to private ownership."
"Yet this synthesis retains its own internal tensions and contradictions.
While free marketeers today cleebrate the Internet as the home of
'people's capitalism,' it also seems headed down the road to oligopoly.
Three companies--the newly merged MCI WorldCom, Sprint, and Cable &
Wireless -- probably control three quarters of the Internet backbone.
"Yet the road toward monopolization and centralized control is not
preordained. The current antitrust cases against Microsoft and Intel
- -- or, less plausibly, the revival of popular anti-monopoly sentiments --
might alter the corporate landscape. In general the tendencies
toward both open and closed systems that have shaped the Internet from
its origins remain with us today."
"The degree to which a populist and democratic Internet survives and
flourishes depends on larger social and political contexts."
" The future remains uncertain. But it is clear that any history of the
Internet will have to locate this story within its social, political
and cultural contexts."
"Such a profound and complex devleopment cannot be divorced from
the idosyncratic and personal visions of some scientists and
bureaucrats whose sweat and dedication got the project up and
running, from the social history of the field of computer science,
from the Cold Warriors who provided massive government funding
of computers and networking as tools for fighting nuclear and
conventional war, and from the countercultural radicalism that sought
to redirect technology toward a more decentralized and
non-hierarchical vision of society."
- --------
The essay is helpful as it focuses on the social aspects of the
Internet and this is at a time when there are new plans being made
to turn key aspects of the Internet over to private industry (namely
ICANN), and this is being done with little or no regard for the
social aspects and nature of the Internet. Thus it is helpful to
see a broadening of the public debate on the issue of the nature
of the Internet and the vision for its future that is the vision
we want.
Ronda
ronda@panix.com
Netizens: On the History and Impact
of Usenet and the Internet
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook
also in print edition ISBN 0-8186-7706-6
published by IEEE Computer Society Press
------------------------------
End of Netizens-Digest V1 #283
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