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THURSDAY, JULY 21, 2005 WASHINGTON INTERNET DAILY:
ICANN's
domain name system (DNS) is an 8-track
tape player about to be overtaken
by MP3, the developer of a new alternate
root told Washington
Internet Daily Wed. Unlike ICANN's
cumbersome -- and controversial --
TLD-approval process, Public-Root
(P-R), an international, nonprofit
federation of independent root operators,
is building an addressing regime in
which TLDs will be available quickly
and inexpensively, said Marty van
Veluw, managing dir. of Unified Identity
Technology UNIDT,
the Dutch company that will develop
and market the new TLDs. Far from
being a threat to ICANN, he said,
the new system exists alongside it,
resolving all ICANN and country-code
TLDs as well as those of other alternate
roots such as New.net. P-R arose because of the tremendous demand for TLDs, said van Veluw. The new TLDs -- which van Veluw said would never duplicate existing ones -- will be corporate (.saab, .coke) and public (.movies, .voip, and the like). Whoever purchases a particular TLD will decide what 2nd level domain names (car.forsale, for instance) will be available at what price. Applying for a new TLD is simple, and, compared with ICANN's $50,000 fee, inexpensive at $1,000. Trademark owners must prove ownership before securing their mark. P-R's architecture permits more-accurate navigation, van Veluw said. Searches are still routed from an Internet Protocol address to a particular domain name, but clearly denominated company and public-portal TLDs make location easier and more standardized. Someone searching for contact information for a particular company can go straight to that web page (mail.unidt) instead of having to first locate the corporate site and then click on the "contact" link, he said: "We're going to burn [domain names] into everyone's brains" to streamline searches. The targeted addressing regime could prove a boon to mobile companies and users as well, van Veluw said. It will take less time to reach websites, cutting call charges. And because it resolves all TLDs in all public roots, PR is, in effect, a bigger phone book. P-R operates a root-server system with 13 master servers strategically located around the world, and its design complies with all Internet Engineering Task Force specifications, officials said. It's already compatible with Internet2 and IPv6, and could offer e-mail with spam filters and internationalized domain names as early as the end of this year, van Veluw said. P-R is keen to roll out multilingual domains because that's what industry wants, he said -- of the 500 million people online every day, only 100 million are English speakers. The new operation will be overseen by the Internet Names Authorization & Information Center INAIC), which describes itself as "an international public service agency organized and dedicated to the maintenance of public information resources that facilitate the coordination and resolution of global Top-Level Domains (TLDs) through the Public-Root server system." There, a 7-member board will approve, create and delegate new TLDs and ensure that all TLDs in the DNS and P-R resolve. Neither INAIC nor P-R intends to "govern" anything, van Veluw said. P-R adheres to ICANN's goals of DNS stability, competition, private bottom-up coordination and representation but adds new core principles of decentralization and user control, he said. INAIC also runs the Global TLD Whois directory service. Van Veluw came to UNIDT from the airline communications arena. His interest in P-R arose out of frustration over the lack of success of .aero, the ICANN-approved TLD of the Societe Internationale de Telecom Aeronautiques. When P-R approached him, he agreed to invest in updating its systems and crafting a marketing and sales plan for new TLDs. UNIDT's hq is in Amsterdam; there's a satellite office in Istanbul and talks are underway for others in Singapore and in the Americas. P-R isn't the first alternate root initiative, but it's the first to sell TLDs rather than domain names, van Veluw said. Its success depends on whether ISPs agree to point to P-R TLDs and mobile operators have internal domain name systems capable of resolving them, he said. The plan was to introduce the new regime to Dutch and Turkish ISPs at the same time, but Turkey, faced with "explosive" interest in the new TLDs, was forced to jump the gun. This month, the Turkish Informatics Society and UNIDT announced an alliance for the sale of the new domains, and van Veluw said he's now in talks with 20 countries' ISPs and other service providers to do the same. Tues. (July 26), a major European ISP is expected to announce it will begin resolving P-R domains in the Netherlands, he said. The announcement that Turkish ISPs would resolve P-R domains prompted a breathless headline July 3 on ICANN Watch: "Turkey Abandons ICANN." That couldn't be further from the truth, van Veluw said. This isn't about ICANN, he said -- it's about the market. -- Dugie Standeford
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