[WSIS CS-Plenary] The PublicRoot rises again - Dutch tech firm wants to rid the Web of the .com

[Joe Baptista]

UnifedRoot rises from the ashes of the Public-Root - court action pending.

An interesting observation from me is as follows - as private root use
their commercial leverage to increase the size of the root database - how
relevant will the WSIS process be in 5 years time?  Or should I be saying
how irrelevant will it be then?

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=internetNews&storyID=2005-11-25T161438Z_01_MCC558424_RTRUKOC_0_US-INTERNET-DOMAINS-NODOTCOM.xml

Dutch tech firm wants to rid the Web of the .com
Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:14 AM ET

By Lucas van Grinsven, European Technology Correspondent

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Dutch technology company has breathed life into a
project to rid the Internet of suffixes such as .com, and instead offer
single names which can be countries, company names or fantasy words.

Such a system, which enables countries, individuals and firms to have a
Web address which consists of a single name, offers flexibility and is
language and character independent.

"The plan is to offer names in any character set," said Erik Seeboldt,
managing director of Amsterdam-based UnifiedRoot.

UnifiedRoot offers practically unlimited numbers of suffixes, unlike the
short list of suffixes currently in use. Its offer is different from other
"alternative root" providers such as New.net which offers to register
names in front of a small range of new suffixes, such as .club and .law.

"We've already had thousands of registrations in a single day," said
Seeboldt after the official opening of his 100-strong company which has
installed 13 Internet domain name system (DNS) root servers on four
continents.

Dutch airport Schiphol is one of the early customers. Registering a name
costs $1,000 plus an annual fee of $240. Companies can then invent
additional Web site addresses in front of their top-level domain (TLD)
name, such as flights.schiphol or parking.schiphol.

Critics argue alternative root companies such as UnifiedRoot introduce
ambiguity because they bring a new set of traffic rules to the Web which
are, certainly in the beginning, only recognized by a limited number of
computers around the world.

"Those who claim to be able to add new 'suffixes' or 'TLDs' are generally
pirates or con-men with something to sell," said Paul Vixie, who sits in
several committees of the California-based Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) with day-to-day control of the Web, on
his CircleID blog.

WELCOME

Others are more welcoming.

"The existence of alternate roots, and the possibility of new ones,
provides a useful competitive check on ICANN," said Jon Weinberg, a member
of ICANNwatch which keeps a critical eye on ICANN.

ICANN is overseen by the U.S. Department of Commerce and operates the root
servers of the Internet which guide all Web traffic. The organization also
determines which top-level domains are recognized by those root servers.

At the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society earlier this
month, many countries said they wanted to take part in the governance of
ICANN. But the United States would not give up control.

UnifiedRoot plans to take advantage of unhappiness about ICANN by offering
geographic locations for free to countries, regions and cities.

If alternative root companies want their TLDs recognized by computers
around the world, they need to circumvent ICANN by pointing every single
Internet computer around the world to their own root servers -- which
contain a copy of ICANN's root server plus the addition of own-made TLDs.

A quicker way to change the settings in individual computers is by closing
deals with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which can change the settings
for all their subscribers.

UnifiedRoot has already clinched deals with most ISPs in Turkey. ISP
Tiscali is also a UnifiedRoot client.

To avoid conflicts between TLDs from UnifiedRoot and ICANN, the Dutch
company will not register existing ICANN TLDs.

UnifiedRoot took over from a Dutch company called UNIDT which launched the
initial plan for TLDs last year, but which relied on a network of root
servers controlled by individuals. This made the network vulnerable to
manipulation or even criminal attack directing Internet surfers to fake
Web sites.

"The network has not been abused, but this was a mistake," said Marty van
Veluw, the founder and manager of UNIDT who sold his client base and some
other assets to UnifiedRoot.

"UnifiedRoot has understood that the network needs to be 100 percent
reliable, and they put a new one in place," he said.

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