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</center>01:53 PM ET 06/04/98
U.S. to release revised Internet names plan Friday
By Aaron Pressman
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Clinton administration will
release its final plan to overhaul the Internet's naming system
Friday, but some of the most difficult decisions will be
deferred to a newly created non-profit group, people familiar
with the report said.
The eagerly awaited final plan, overseen by senior Clinton
adviser Ira Magaziner, seeks to resolve the controversy over
management of some of the Internet's most basic functions,
including the assignment and registration of names for World
Wide Web sites.
The administration still plans to phase out government
involvement in the naming system, as an initial draft of the
report released in January suggested. But specific proposals to
extend the system or dictate how it should function in the
future have been scaled back.
The January plan sparked complaints from Internet groups,
which said the government was making too many critical choices
that should be left to the parties involved. Companies with
strong brand names protested the creation of new domain names
that they have to monitor for possible trademark violations.
In Europe, many complained the initial plan left too much
power in the hands of U.S. organizations.
Under the current system, Network Solutions, of Herndon,
Va., manages the naming system in the Internet's popular generic
domains ``.com'', ``.org'' and ``.net'' under an exclusive
government contract that expires in September. The so-called
top-level domains are the two- or three-letter suffixes at the
end of every address on the Internet, as in the ``.gov'' at the
end of ``www.whitehouse.gov''.
Network Solutions would have faced two new forms of
competition under the January plan, although it would have
continued to manage the massive database containing all of the
registrations in ``.com'', ``.net'' and ``.org''.
The company would have been required to allow other firms to
register addresses and put them in the company's database. Also,
five new top-level domains would have been created, each with
its own registry manager.
But the revised, final plan leaves all of those decisions up
to a new non-profit group headed by 15 people selected from
private-sector, Internet and consumer groups, people familiar
with the plan said.
The Commerce Department said Thursday it will release the
final plan at a news conference Friday at 10 a.m..
The debate over the Internet's name and address system has
been raging for several years since one of the fathers of the
Net, Jon Postel, announced his own plan to add more addresses.
Postel's plan led to a cascade of revised plans,
highlighting the sometimes murky and ambiguous system for making
major changes to the vast network that arose informally from a
Cold War-era Defense Department project.
^REUTERS@
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