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Pratap Ravindran

PUNE, Dec. 17

THE board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organisation that manages the Internet's domain name space, has unanimously approved a plan to add "a limited number" of sponsored top-level domain (TLD) names to the seven new domains selected as "proof of concept" two years ago.

However, the board has not specified the number of TLD names that will be added nor the time frame involved. Sponsored domains are created for specific community groups — unlike generic domains such as .com — and run, by way of illustration, to .museum and .coop for museums and cooperatives respectively.

Available reports indicate that Ms Marina del Rey of ICANN, California, had proposed at the body's Sunday annual meeting in Amsterdam that three more sponsored TLDs be allowed — but that number had been abandoned in the face of protest from interested parties present at the meeting.

TLDs, inevitably, are hotly disputed. Two years ago, ICANN had cleared only seven of the 191 proposed names proposed in 2000. This had left a lot of outfits miffed: The International Air Transport Association (IATA), for instance, which wants .travel, the World Health Organization (WHO) which is lobbying for .health, and Nokia Corporation which is gunning for .mobile.

According to Mr Cary Karp, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Museum Domain Management Association, ICANN has ``opened the barn doors'' with domains like .museum.

Mr Stuart Lynn, ICANN President and Chief Executive Officer, told the meeting that he would draft a document setting out the qualities ICANN will look for when considering applications from organisations that want to sponsor a TLD. Future domain name owners, he added, should be confident that the TLD is run by a solid organisation.

But some audience members reminded ICANN that it is basically a technical coordinator and that it should not get into the semantic authentication of domain requests.

The significance of this exchange must be understood in the context of the fact that many large corporations oppose additions to TLDS, fearing more intellectual property cases over domain names.

The non-profit outfit, in the course of the general meeting, also approved a plan to go in for a makeover. It may be recalled in this context that ICANN, in recent months, has been plagued by bitter fights among the various interests affected by its pronouncements, including registrars, corporations, academic institutions and even countries.

The charges against the body range from the one that the group's officials fritter away money on business-class plane tickets to accusations that the organisation is not accountable enough.

The technology seer, Mr John Perry Barlow, had gone to the extent of stating that ICANN lacks the ``moral authority'' to control ``a social space that cannot easily be coerced into submission.''

Be that as it may, supporters of ICANN say that internecine disputes have turned the group into a political punching bag and undermined its primary mission of ensuring that Web addresses are assigned in an orderly fashion. Further, they argue, domain name squabbles are of peripheral significance at a point of time when the group is trying to define its mission in the face of technical challenges — including grappling with increased security risks and a potential shortage of IP (Internet Protocol) numbers that identify individual computers on the Web as more devices need their own address.

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