Two Schools of Thought at Work in Effort to Expand Domain Names

Network Solutions Inc. boasts that it has registered 5 million Internet domain names ending with .com, .net and .org. With so many names already locked up, a growing segment of the Internet community is lobbying for the addition of new suffixes, such as .store, .web and even .sex.

That idea was originally proposed in 1997, when Internet leaders from around the world began suggesting ways of ending Network Solutions’ monopoly in the domain name registration business. But after the Clinton administration joined the effort, priority was given to prying open .com and other popular existing suffixes because they were believed to have the most commercial value.

The Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, has worked for nearly a year to carry out that mission. After a testing period, scheduled to end on Friday, more than 55 companies are set to go head-to-head against Network Solutions.

But some experts think the Internet leaders had it right the first time. Adding new top-level domains--the technical name for the suffixes--would greatly increase the availability of new domain names. And it might also have provided a faster route to the post-monopoly era, with less government oversight.

“The government stressed competition within .com because of the view that a .com registration is hugely more valuable,” said Wayne State University law professor Jonathan Weinberg, who helped formulate the Clinton administration’s Internet policy during a stint at the Federal Communications Commission. “In retrospect, the government would have done better to emphasize the creation of new domain names.”

The advantage of that approach, according to a loose coalition of would-be name registrars, computer scientists and economists, is that all companies that want to register domain names with the new endings would be on equal footing. By contrast, Herndon, Va.-based Network Solutions has the advantage of incumbency when it comes to .com, .net and .org.

Adding new top-level domains would not be technically difficult, network engineers say. The administrators who operate the Internet’s 13 so-called root servers, which make it possible for Internet users to find specific addresses, would simply have to enter the new suffixes into the computers.

The bigger obstacles involve business strategy. For the new suffixes to be ubiquitous, all 13 root-server administrators would have to agree to enter them into the root. But the primary server is run by Network Solutions, while others are at universities and research institutions funded by one of NSI’s chief adversaries--the federal government.

Another obstacle is overcoming objections from companies that fear their trademarks would be hard to enforce under such a system, where the universe of possible domain names is larger, said Internet Society President Don Heath.

Joe Sims, a Washington attorney who represents Los Angeles-based ICANN, said the group focused on opening .com because that’s what the U.S. government instructed it to do. But ICANN is also looking into the best way to add new top-level domains.

Sims doubts, however, that adding new domain suffixes would give competition a quick boost.

The .com suffix “has a heck of a lot of time and effort put into it to build up its brand identification,” he said. “Think about how long it would take for .shop, .store and .firm to become as useful and as attractive to businesses as .com.”

Not very long, according to many observers. Some even argue that individual companies should be allowed to create their own top-level domains that they wouldn’t have to share with any other firms.

For example, a San Luis Obispo concern called Image Online Design laid claim to domain names ending in .web more than two years ago (although it is not clear it will prevail). And Atlanta-based Iperdome wants to be able to register domain names ending in .per (for “personal”).

Iperdome President Jay Fenello said his company has received thousands of orders for domain names so far. Iperdome plans to charge $10 a year--well below Network Solutions’ $35 annual fee.

“True competition is to let .per get in there and compete against NSI,” Fenello said. “We’ll drive that price down.”

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Times staff writer Karen Kaplan can be reached at karen.kaplan@latimes.com.