Analysis: Some say ICANN too heavy-handed

WASHINGTON, April 18 (UPI) -- The designation of two new top-level domains, .travel and .jobs, earlier this month by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has renewed some previous criticism about the organization's domain-approval procedure.

ICANN, which took over responsibility for the Internet from the U.S. organization Internet Assigned Numbers Authority in 1998, has drawn fire for its domain-approval process, which some critics have called too arbitrary and too slow.

"The concern was not to have ICANN become a regulatory agency or have authority to pre-approve some of these services that companies want to offer," Tom Lenard, vice president of research at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, told United Press International.

The foundation is a non-profit think tank that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public policy, and supports limited government and free markets.

Last year, Lenard said, several companies that wanted to establish domains were "running into some roadblocks," because ICANN has not established clear procedural rules for how it approves or rejects such domain applications.

"If there are companies that want to run those domains and they meet some sort of minimal qualifications, these things should be approved as a matter of course," Lenard said.

The PFF last year called on ICANN to be "reined in" after VeriSign sued the organization for preventing VeriSign from redirecting those who entered invalid Internet addresses to a Web page that features advertising for paid VeriSign services.

On the other hand, approving new domains too quickly could compromise the security and operations of the Internet network, according to ICANN, as well as the National Research Council in a report published earlier this month.

Domain approval has been an issue since at least 2002. Of the 191 domain names proposed that year -- when .com, .org and .net had been the only domain suffixes on the block -- ICANN approved a mere seven, rejecting bids for .mobile by Nokia, .health by the World Health Organization, .travel by the International Air Transport Association, and .xxx and .kids by groups who wanted to differentiate between adult and children-oriented Web sites. It was the second rejection for Nokia, the IATA, and the WHO, which had also applied in 2000.

An article in PC World described how during a public forum held by ICANN in 2002, those in the audience "reminded ICANN that it is a technical coordinator and that it should not go down the path of semantic authentication of domain requests."

With both ICANN's and the National Research Council's reports released earlier this month noting that adding new generic domains too quickly could overload root servers, it is not a stretch to assume the same capacity issues will come up when new sponsored domains are proposed.

Karl Manheim, a communications law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, dismissed such concerns in an e-mail to ICANN in March 2003, regarding ICANN's domain authorization criteria.

"There continues to be a concern among some parties that root expansion is a perilous process that needs to proceed slowly and with painstaking evaluation," Manheim wrote. "Others, including the engineering community, feel that the pace of expansion could pick up substantially without jeopardizing the root or DNS."

Still, in light of the proliferation of phishing and pharming scams on the Internet, ICANN Chairman Vint Cerf told Computer Business Review last week, "It seems to me overly differentiating among various types of (domains) may not necessarily be a good thing."

The research council's report raised additional concerns, including the possibility the Internet domain name system is too vulnerable to hackers and needs to be strengthened by establishing more root, or main, servers in more secure locations.

An ICANN spokesman declined UPI's request for comment, instead suggesting background information on its Web site about the domain-approval procedure.

The ICANN board approved the two new industry-specific and industry-funded domains April 8 at the 22nd ICANN International conference in Mar del Plata, Argentina. The organization awarded Employ Media LLC of Cleveland the rights to operate the .jobs registry, which will serve the human resources industry. Tralliance Corp. of New York City will operate .travel, which will serve cruise lines, travel agencies, hotels, resorts and destinations.

ICANN has given preliminary approval and already is in commercial and technical negotiations for three additional sponsored domains, including .cat for the Catalan language, .post for the postal service, and .mobi for mobile applications. The organization is considering granting domain status to .asia, .mail, .tel, and .xxx.

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