Domain Names
Part I: History of the System and ICANN
3/23/1999
by Edward Piou
Last year, Network Solutions, Incorporated's (NSI's) contract with the U.S. Government to handle domain name registration and the database of Internet domain names expired. As the expiration date approached, the U.S. declared its desire to see the Internet community maintain the domain name registration system - the process whereby organizations and individuals receive domain names - itself.
This first in a series of two articles will talk about the history of the domain name system, the move to privatize it, and how a new organization - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) - hopes to take the lead in privatization. The second article in the series will deal with how DNS works from a more technical perspective, and examine how some organizations, such as RealNames, Domain Host Services, and Netscape (through its "Internet Keywords" feature) are bypassing domain names or diminishing their importance.
(More so than other articles on ahref.com, this article contains numerous links to outside resources - agreements between organizations, press releases, and news stories. The outside resources are not crucial to understanding this article, but provide much more detail on the topics covered here.)
History of the Domain Name System
The purpose of the domain name system is to allow any computer on the Internet to figure out what IP address (for example, 216.112.23.10) corresponds with a particular computer hostname (for example, "www.ahref.com"), and also what hostname, if any, corresponds with an IP address. Your computer needs to know remote computers' IP addresses to figure out how and where to send things like email messages and requests for web pages.
How It Used to Work
The domain name system started out as just a single file, "hosts.txt." The late Dr. Jon Postel, then at UCLA, was the first person to maintain this file, under a contract with the Department of Defense; the list was published by SRI International, via an FTP server. The file contained information on all the host computers connected to the ARPANET, and later its successor, the Internet. This information included the hostname and IP address of each host. As the number of hosts on the Internet increased, and Dr. Postel moved on to other duties, SRI took on the responsibility of maintaining the file, in addition to making it publicly available.
Administrators who wanted to change information about their hosts would email the changes to SRI. SRI would change the hosts.txt file every few days, and administrators would periodically FTP that file from SRI's server. This system worked for many years, but did not scale well - the load on SRI's server from the constant FTP requests, and the administrative load of dealing with changes, became too high to deal with, once the number of hosts increased to more than just a few hundred.
In 1984, the System Changed
In 1984, Paul Mockapetris (then at USC's Information Sciences Institute) designed the architecture of the new Domain Name System, describing, in RFCs 882 and 883, the system which we still use today for mapping hosts and domains to IP addresses and actual machines. (These RFCs - Requests For Comments - were later superseded by RFCs 1034 and 1035).Under this system, DNS information is spread across the Internet; there is no one machine that maintains information on all hostnames. Each domain owner maintains information on their own hosts. A central authority keeps records on where each domain owner keeps their information.
The maintenance of the Internet and the Domain Name System continued under contract to the Department of Defense, and DOD agencies, for many years. Then, in 1991, the National Science Foundation (NSF) assumed responsibility for the non-military portion of the Internet. In 1992, the NSF awarded NSI a contract for managing the registration of domain names and maintenance of domain name information. Since then, NSI has had a government-sponsored monopoly on the registration of second-level domains (for example, ahref.com and linux.org) under the generic top-level domains (gTLDs): .com, .org, .net, and .edu. The Internet Assigned Names Authority (IANA), among other responsibilities, continued to manage the allocation of IP addresses, and continues to do so, pending the transfer of these responsibilities to ICANN.
(A note on other top-level domains: The military and government, respectively, administer the .mil and .gov hierarchies. There are also more than 200 national or country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs), each maintained by their corresponding governments or authorized agents of those governments. IANA maintains a list of the ccTLDs, and contact informaton for their administrators, on their website. The .us ccTLD is administered by The US Domain Registry at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, and is currently being eyed by the US Postal Service.)
NSI's Contract Runs Out
NSI's contract to administer the main top-level domains expired on September 30, 1998. On September 29, the government awarded a 7-day extension to the contract. On October 8, the U.S. government granted a longer and more detailed extension, under which NSI's responsibilities for domain name registration could theoretically continue through September 30, 2000, but which also includes provisions for NSI's responsibilities to be gradually transferred to a new organization (referred to as "NewCo" in the amendment document).
That new organization, charged with taking over and revamping the domain name system, as well as other Internet infrastructure responsibilities, is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
ICANN
How and Why ICANN Formed
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a not-for-profit corporation that aims to manage the domain name system, manage the root servers that help implement the domain name system, allocate IP address blocks, and manage protocol parameter assignment. ICANN's articles of incorporation and bylaws were drafted by the Internet Assigned Names Authority (IANA) and Network Solutions, Incorporated (NSI). The corporation was formed in reaction to two policy papers released by the U.S. Government regarding the transfer of administration of the Internet to the private sector.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released the Green Paper on January 30, 1998. This "discussion draft" described plans to "privatize, increase competition in, and promote international participation in the domain name system." This first draft came under immediate criticism from a number of quarters. The Internet Council of Registrars (CORE), a group formed during discussions involving the IANA and the Internet Society (ISOC), gave a particularly detailed criticism of the paper, pointing out the problems that they (CORE) felt their own recommendations would take care of.
The Paper's main problem was that it outlined policies and principles for future governance of the Internet, despite the U.S.'s stated desire to see the Internet community determine the system's future. Also, as written, it would maintain NSI's monopoly in the top-level domains that it already maintained (.com, .org, and .net), and would create a series of monopolies in additional top-level domains, with each new domain name registrar gaining exclusive control of a top-level domain.
The White Paper, released on June 5, 1998, dealt with these concerns by postponing decisions on the future of the Internet, and placing those decisions in the hands of a not-yet-formed corporation. The Internet community was asked to create the new corporation. In response, IANA and NSI drafted articles of incorporation and bylaws for ICANN, selected the initial (interim) Board of Directors for the organization, and declared ICANN to be that not-for-profit corporation. The proposed articles of incorporation and bylaws for ICANN were published on September 17, 1998. ICANN was actually incorporated on September 30, and and held its first organizational meeting on October 25.
In a Memorandum of Understanding dated November 12, 1998, the Department of Commerce and ICANN agreed to work together to transition management of the Domain Name System to the private sector; specifically, to ICANN. The memorandum allows for the transition to take until September 30, 2000 to complete, keeping the U.S. Government in the process for almost 2 years after the memorandum was signed. But it allows for ICANN to dictate the policies and procedures to be adopted, rather than the government.
What ICANN Has Been Doing
Since forming, ICANN has weathered a great deal of criticism - primarily because its board was appointed, rather than voted on by the Internet community; and because it holds board meetings in private. (As a result of the criticism, ICANN has hired a PR firm.) Its early meetings seemed to consist mainly of fending off attacks on its legitimacy. At a recent meeting in Singapore, though, it made some significant progress in its mission of privatizing the DNS.
At the Singapore meeting, following public comment on a previously-published draft, ICANN adopted a set of policies for accrediting new registrars (organizations authorized to accept registrations for domains) for the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains. Competition among registrars in these top-level domains will be phased in through a two-part process. First, a "testbed program" involving five registrars will run from April 26, 1999 through June 25. Once this testbed program is finished, and technical and administrative problems brought about by competition are dealt with, more registrars will be accredited and allowed to register domain names. The deadline for testbed applicants is March 29, 1999; there is no deadline for other applicants, who will be accredited on a rolling basis.
The requirements each applicant must meet include a small application fee ($2500 for "testbed" applicants, $1000 for others); working capital of at least $70,000; $500,000 of commercial general liability insurance; and the demonstrated ability to handle the administrative and technical tasks associated with handling domain name registration. (All of the above figures are in US dollars.)
Also at their Singapore meeting, the ICANN Board accepted proposals related to the creation of a Domain Name Supporting Organization (DNSO), "a consensus-based policy advisory body within ICANN." The DNSO is supposed to be the voice of Internet stakeholders inside ICANN, charged with presenting the Internet community's advice and desires to the Board.
Following examination of the proposals, and their own private meeting, the Board published draft changes to the ICANN bylaws, to provide for creation of the DNSO. According to the draft, the DNSO will be formed from a number of different constituencies (including registrars, commercial interests, and non-commercial interests), each of which will "self-form." Each constituency will determine for itself who (or what) can be a member. In the event that a constituency excludes a number of people or organizations who feel they belong in it, the Board expects the excluded members to "self-form" into one or more new constituencies.
Any person or organization willing to contribute time and energy to the DNSO is welcome to join.
Wrapup and Resources
Even with growing commercialization, the Internet is a rather anarchic network, in terms of content and control. Because of this, people often say that nobody is in charge of it. Nobody is in charge of the Internet; but there are people in charge of the physical networks that data travels over, and the points where these networks connect. There are also people in charge of the addressing system computers use to communicate with each other.
We've already seen responsibility for the physical networks leave government hands and enter the private sector. It seems almost certain at this point that ICANN will manage the addressing system - IP addresses, domain names, and protocol parameters - for the Internet. It remains to be seen how efficient and fair (to both commercial and non-commercial interests) their management is. Whatever the outcome, they are creating a unique organization - a multinational organization, ostensibly not beholden to any government, controlling a medium that some have said will destroy the notion of governments and nations.
More information on the early history of the Internet is available in our Web Index. You can also find a number of DNS-related resources at the DNS Resources Directory.
In our second article on DNS, we'll look at how DNS actually works, and how some companies are bypassing or sidestepping the domain name system. To be notified when the next article comes out, sign up for our newsletter.
Edward Piou is an ahref.com producer and runs ep Productions, Incorporated, a Washington, D.C.-based development company.
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