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The Power of Names: Why the .org Registry Matters
By Michael C. Gilbert, Aug. 2002
Online, you don't own your own name.
If the government asks you to change the identification number of your organization, you might anticipate some bureaucratic mixups, but your organization goes on. If your organization loses a lease for an office, you can anticipate some expense, but you know that your mail will get forwarded and your employees will find their way to work. The phone company will forward your calls, if your number has to change.
But as we move more and more of our communication online, it becomes clear that whoever controls our domain name service controls our destiny.
That control has a history of abuse. There are an artificially restricted number of top level domains, which makes them much more expensive than they really cost the companies to administer. The domain name business is a pot of gold. The companies use their privileged access to market all kinds of other services to you, artificially linking one service to another, the way other monopolies often do. Finally, the artificial restriction of domains means that there has become a blurred distinction between trademarks and domain names. And more often then not, nonprofits do not control the trademarks on their names.
All of this is about to become even more important for nonprofit organizations. The scandal ridden Internet Council for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is about to hand over control of the registry for all domains ending in .org to a new entity.
And almost no nonprofits are paying the least bit of attention.
Here is what is happening:
One of eleven organizations that have applied to be the new .org registry will be awarded a very juicy monopoly. Millions of dollars of annual revenue, in the form of fees paid to the registry through registrars, which are the entities that take your money when you register your domain name as a nonprofit. Those fees are, in a sense, a tax on your address in cyberspace. This is not in itself a bad thing. But it's a very important thing. Also, in addition to a guaranteed cash cow, this new entity is guaranteed $5 million from the previous monopolist, Verisign, as startup money.
Originally, ICANN said that this new entity had to be a nonprofit itself, which is at least a nod in the direction of the values of the sector. But at the last minute, even this restriction has been lifted. It is now possible that one for profit monopolist will be traded for another. But of even greater concern to me is the possibility that a nonprofit with overly cozy ties to other for profits will be anointed.
The eleven bids can be found in their entirety online. But I want to summarize them and tell you, without any dainty politicking, which ones I prefer. Then I want to ask you to make your voice heard on this issue, today if at all possible. Time is very short. Public input is being tallied this week.
ICANN's criteria and mine are slightly different. Furthermore, ICANN, which is itself a nonprofit, has been fraught with accusations of profound unaccountability. For example, they routinely hold policy meetings that are closed to the membership and they have even gone so far as to prevent access by a freely elected board member to the accounting records of the organization for who he has fiduciary responsibility.
My own criteria boil down to this: Will the registrar be good for the nonprofit sector whose domains they will, in effect, control? And for me, in the long run, this has everything to do with accountability.
Four of the bids appear to be by straightforward for-profit proposals:
Although there are a few good ideas in some of these proposals (particularly the Unity registry cooperative model) I don't see any reason why a for-profit entity should run the domain. That, after all, is the status quo. Although I do indeed believe that it's possible for a for-profit to be more accountable than certain nonprofits, I reject these as incompatible with the spirit of this entire transfer.
There are a number of bids that look to me like for-profit ventures, hiding behind a nonprofit shell or partnership. These include:
Although the UIA looks like an excellent organization, their bid will put the .org registry back in the hands of the very company from which it is now being taken. There is some extraordinary bravado at work here! The Global Name registry bid is trading off of a connection with the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, but is in fact brought to us by the same people who are responsible for spamming millions of people trying to promote the .name domains! That's all we need. Finally, the DotOrg Foundation (not to be confused with the .Org Foundation) is a bid that particularly disturbs me. It's another Register.com bid, for one thing. But more importantly, it reads to me as though its primary purpose is to help the aggressive Kintera Corporation sell more services to nonprofits.
For me, there are four bids that are worth considering:
- The Swiss Academic and Research Network is a preexisting foundation that has its roots in the supercomputing network that incubated the World Wide Web.
- The Internet Society has been a nonprofit player in the Internet for a long time.
- The .Org Foundation (not to be confused with the DotOrg Foundation) is a new entity, but is trying hard to think critically about accountability.
- The IMS/ISC bid is a joint proposal of two technically savvy nonprofits , the Internet Multicasting Service and Internet Software Consortium.
While all of these bids meet my minimum standards of accountability to the nonprofit sector, there are some things which distinguish them. SWITCH looks very academic and removed from the real world issues and concerns of nonprofit organizations. The Internet Society has itself been mired from time to time in controversies related to accountability and the technical portion of their bid relies on a for-profit company, Affilias.
Although The .Org Foundation has a similarly cozy relationship with some for-profit companies (in this case, eNom and Microsoft), they responded to concerns raised about accountability (by myself and others) by setting up the direct election of a majority of board members by the at large community of noncommercial users. I was impressed.
The joint bid of the Internet Multicasting Service and the Internet Software Consortium has an entirely different model of accountability. This bid is the brainchild of Carl Malamud, the man who helped force the U.S. government to make the publicly owned Securities and Exchange Commission data truly accessible to the public. This partnership already operates the domain name service for the 22 top level domains and produces BIND, the actual open source software that runs most domain name servers. Their accountability will come from traditional Internet approaches to transparency. For example, all their software will be freely available with no restrictions in source and binary form. It's a high form of accountability that also has the potential to drive down costs.
I will be offering my public comment to the ICANN decision in the next few days. I encourage you to consider my thoughts on what appears to some as a highly technical issue.
I strongly believe that whoever is chosen to control the domain names of nonprofit organizations will need to be a genuine public trust. Most of these bids are not. They are land grabs.
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