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A plan to tame the speculative feeding frenzy that surrounds expiring "dot-com" Internet addresses came under fire today from two lawmakers who said the proposal could create a monopoly for Internet addressing giant VeriSign Inc.
The Fair, Transparent and Competitive Internet Naming Act, introduced today by Reps. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) and Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), would keep the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from enacting the proposal until the U.S. General Accounting Office reviews it and the process that created it.
Based in Marina del Rey, Calif., ICANN manages the Domain Name System (DNS) that lies at the heart of global Internet traffic.
"Concern and dissatisfaction with responsiveness from ICANN is widespread throughout the industry," Baird said in an interview. "[Insofar] as ICANN acts as a quasi-governmental agency, it's reasonable for Congress to have some oversight over them."
Dot-com addresses are leased out for one- to 10-year intervals. Every year, tens of thousands of Internet addresses lapse as buyers opt not to renew their contracts, prompting a speculative rush by domain retailers, known as registrars, to snap up the most attractive names on behalf of their customers. That scramble can tax the dot-com wholesaler, or registry, which gets swamped in a deluge of requests whenever a desirable name goes up for grabs.
Earlier this year, ICANN approved a waiting-list proposal put forward by VeriSign. VeriSign operates the dot-com registry under a contract with ICANN. Under the plan, registrars would pay VeriSign a per-name fee to be placed on a waiting list for particular addresses. When a contract expires on a specific domain, it would go to the registrar wait-listed for that name.
ICANN is negotiating with VeriSign to hammer out the details of the service, including the fee, which VeriSign said would be no higher than $24.
Many registrars complained that the waiting list would gouge their profits, giving VeriSign a virtual monopoly over the lucrative reselling business, leaving them to scratch out whatever margins they can by tacking charges onto VeriSign's wholesale fee.
"They're taking competitive industry and now they're going to turn it back into a monopoly," said Clint Page, president of Vacouver, Wash.-based Dotster Inc. Page is the spokesman for the Domain Justice Coalition, a group of registrars opposed to the proposal.
Network Solutions, which was later purchased by VeriSign, enjoyed a government-sanctioned monopoly over domain-name sales until 1999, when ICANN introduced competition to the market.
ICANN spokeswoman Mary Hewitt said the proposal has been public for almost a year and was discussed in electronic and public forums before the ICANN board voted 11-2 to approve it at a teleconference last August.
She said the service would bring order to a chaotic system, and give registrars an opportunity to compete on equal footing in the resale market.
A VeriSign spokesman said the company had not yet seen a copy of the legislation and could not immediately comment until it did.
The Fair, Transparent and Competitive Internet Naming Act, introduced today by Reps. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) and Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), would keep the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from enacting the proposal until the U.S. General Accounting Office reviews it and the process that created it.
Based in Marina del Rey, Calif., ICANN manages the Domain Name System (DNS) that lies at the heart of global Internet traffic.
"Concern and dissatisfaction with responsiveness from ICANN is widespread throughout the industry," Baird said in an interview. "[Insofar] as ICANN acts as a quasi-governmental agency, it's reasonable for Congress to have some oversight over them."
Dot-com addresses are leased out for one- to 10-year intervals. Every year, tens of thousands of Internet addresses lapse as buyers opt not to renew their contracts, prompting a speculative rush by domain retailers, known as registrars, to snap up the most attractive names on behalf of their customers. That scramble can tax the dot-com wholesaler, or registry, which gets swamped in a deluge of requests whenever a desirable name goes up for grabs.
Earlier this year, ICANN approved a waiting-list proposal put forward by VeriSign. VeriSign operates the dot-com registry under a contract with ICANN. Under the plan, registrars would pay VeriSign a per-name fee to be placed on a waiting list for particular addresses. When a contract expires on a specific domain, it would go to the registrar wait-listed for that name.
ICANN is negotiating with VeriSign to hammer out the details of the service, including the fee, which VeriSign said would be no higher than $24.
Many registrars complained that the waiting list would gouge their profits, giving VeriSign a virtual monopoly over the lucrative reselling business, leaving them to scratch out whatever margins they can by tacking charges onto VeriSign's wholesale fee.
"They're taking competitive industry and now they're going to turn it back into a monopoly," said Clint Page, president of Vacouver, Wash.-based Dotster Inc. Page is the spokesman for the Domain Justice Coalition, a group of registrars opposed to the proposal.
Network Solutions, which was later purchased by VeriSign, enjoyed a government-sanctioned monopoly over domain-name sales until 1999, when ICANN introduced competition to the market.
ICANN spokeswoman Mary Hewitt said the proposal has been public for almost a year and was discussed in electronic and public forums before the ICANN board voted 11-2 to approve it at a teleconference last August.
She said the service would bring order to a chaotic system, and give registrars an opportunity to compete on equal footing in the resale market.
A VeriSign spokesman said the company had not yet seen a copy of the legislation and could not immediately comment until it did.
