Comment Articles

Who owns the Internet?

Guy Kewney AnchorDesk

Published: 16 Dec 1999 14:33 GMT

Name.Space describes itself as "the leading pioneer and advocate of New Generic Toplevel Domains (TLDs)" and indeed, will sell you one. The trouble is, while you can register these new toplevel domains, nobody on the Internet can see them yet - not unless you switch to Name.Space name servers. And there are legal controversies in the US which mean that these domains are unlikely to be released for general visibility for some time; months, if not years.

But why does the rest of the world sit by, watching two American corporations grandly lay claim to the right to administer the Internet?

Why are we all satisfied, it would seem, to see registration governed by the "federal legal structure" of the United States? How is it that the heads of the European Community can stand by to see the dispute between Name.Space and Network Solutions resolved by the United States Appeal Court, based on the First Amendment to the American Constitution?

It could be, I suppose, that our (non-American) Governments -- all of us around the world - are being very clever here, and anticipating a time when such arguments are irrelevant. After all, how important is a name?

According to some pundits, it's very, very important indeed. It's not yet true to say, as some observers have said, that "all the best domain names are registered." A high proportion of the words of the English language are registered, of course! you can try the experiment of taking a paragraph from a book or newspaper, and putting dot-com after each word, and typing that into a browser, and you'll be amazed how many are taken. You'll probably be even more amazed how many are not just registered by "parking" corporations who hope to sell them at a fine profit to people whose businesses need them, but are actually in use.

But is this really crucial?