managers

This page looks at administration of gTLDs and ccTLDs, highlighting emerging trends such as 'patriation' of national domains and variation in rulemaking across the world.

It covers -

• administration of the gTLDs
• national spaces
• patriation
• ICANN and the future
• studies
• commodification
• restrictions
• advocacy and other bodies
• public good

     gTLDs

As we've suggested in the detailed profile on ICANN, that body has primary responsibility for the global/generic top level domains, developing policy and oversighting administration by the operators of the gTLDs.

Those operators include commercial entities (eg VeriSign) and nonprofits such as the Internet Society (ISOC, discussed here).

From initial deployment of the DNS until the end of 1992 the gTLDs were managed by SRI International's Network Information Center (SRI-NIC). In 1993 the gTLD registration function was assumed by Network Solutions (NSI), under a Cooperative Agreement (NCR 92-18742) with the US National Science Foundation.

The agreement was scheduled to conclude on 30 September 1998 but in June of that year the US Department of Commerce (which had replaced the NSF as the responsible US government agency) issued a Statement of Policy on Management of Internet Names and Addresses - the White Paper - foreshadowing that management of the domain name space would be handed to an independent nonprofit corporation.

Establishment of that body - ICANN - was somewhat slower than expected and in October 1998 the NSI-US Government agreement was extended until 30 September 2000. An agreement in 1999 between ICANN and NSI, endorsed by the Department of Commerce, extended NSI's dot-com, dot-net and dot-org responsibilities to November 2003 (under some circumstances to November 2007).

In May 2001 the ICANN-NSI registry agreement was replaced with discrete registry agreements for the three gTLDs. The dot-org registry agreement provided that VeriSign (which had acquired NSI) would give up the dot-org registry on 31 December 2002, with responsibility being assumed by an operator designated by ICANN.

     national spaces

There is similar variation in responsibility for policy and day to day administration regarding the ccTLDs highlighted earlier in this profile.

There is no single model for ccTLD administration. Instead, across the globe national domains are the responsibility of -

• individuals
• academic institutions
• government agencies
• specialist NGOs
• commercial entities (some of which do not have a close association with the particular nation or territory and, as in the case of The Gambia, may involve a single person)

Some ccTLDs are managed by for-profit companies. Most are managed by non-profit organizations with various degrees of direct or indirect accountability to the national government.

UK registry operator Nominet for example claims that "Nominet derives its authority from the UK Internet community" and "is acknowledged by the UK Government as the manager of the .uk country code". In Switzerland the Federal Office for Communications is responsible for the DNS - "domain names are addressing elements, which fall under federal law", and under the 1997 Verordnung über die Adressierungselemente im Fernmeldebereich formally delegated management to the Swiss Education & Research Network (SWITCH) NGO.

Dot-nu - the ccTLD for the Pacific nation of Niue (population c2,500) - is administered by IUS-N, a private US-based tax-exempt foundation and on a day to day basis is managed by .NU Domain Ltd, a US-based private corporation that "offers the only competitive alternative to Network Solutions Inc.'s .com domain name" and has marketed successfully to registrants across the globe as a competitor for open gTLDs such as dot-com or dot-net.

We have discussed dot-nu and similar developments in a 2002 paper; another perspective is provided in the 2003 paper by Philip Steinberg & Stephen McDowell on Mutiny on the bandwidth: the semiotics of statehood in the internet domain name registries of Pitcairn Island and Niue.

Some administrators have formal contracts with the government; others operate with the tacit or formal acknowledgement or endorsement of the government. A few ccTLDs are managed directly by government agencies.

An indication of the variation is provided in a note here.

     patriation

Do individual countries own or have responsibility for their ccTLD?

Opinion has been divided, with some national governments proving indifferent or simply indicating that administration of the ccTLD is a matter for another entity. Others, such as Australia, have sought to locate administration of the country space within a national regulatory regime that often involves nongovernment bodies underpinned by national telecomunications or other legislation.

Initial allocation of responsibility for administration of ccTLDs was ad hoc, reflecting lack of interest by governments and business in what was perceived - if recognised at all - as primarily an academic interest.

One administrator sniffed that IANA (ie Jon Postel) under RFC 1591 essentially delegated responsibility to anyone who asked, 'anyone' of course being a member of the 'UberGeek Club'. Delegation was often made to individuals - as trustees - rather than to institutions or net-specific bodies.

The expectation was that the ccTLDs would be managed in the public interest:

The designated manager is the trustee of the top-level domain for both the nation, in the case of a country code, and the global Internet community. Concerns about "rights" and "ownership" of domains are inappropriate. It is appropriate to be concerned about "responsibilities" and "service."

Dissatisfaction with the informal basis of delegation and the performance of some of the wizards (eg unresponsiveness to queries, slow turnaround time in processing registration requests, inconsistent rulemaking), accelerating growth in the number of registrations and perceptions that ccTLD administration impinged on national interests resulted in Principles for the Delegation & Administration of Country Code Top Level Domains (PDF) by ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC).

That document stated that -

the role of the relevant government or public authority is to ensure that the ccTLD is being administered in the public interest, whilst taking into consideration issues of public policy and relevant law and regulation. ...

The delegee of a ccTLD is a trustee for the delegated domain, and has a duty to serve the residents of the relevant country or territory.

The delegee of a ccTLD is a trustee for the delegated domain, and has a duty to serve the residents of the relevant country or territory ... Its policy role should be distinguished from the management, administration and marketing of the ccTLD. These functions may be performed by the same or different entities. However the delegation itself cannot be sub-contracted, sub-licensed or otherwise traded without the agreement of the relevant government or public authority and ICANN. ...

The statement and what some ideallists have decried as bureaucratisation or politicisation of the net echoes developments in the 1850s with postal networks, 1870s with telegraphic networks and the 1920s and 1950s with radio and television broadcasting.

The statement commented that

The relevant government or public authority ultimately represents the interests of the people of the country or territory for which the ccTLD has been delegated. Accordingly, the role of the relevant government or public authority is to ensure that the ccTLD is being administered in the public interest, whilst taking into consideration issues of public policy and relevant law and regulation.

Governments or public authorities have responsibility for public policy objectives such as: transparency and non-discriminatory practices; greater choice, lower prices and better services for all categories of users; respect for personal privacy; and consumer protection issues. Considering their responsibility to protect these interests, governments or public authorities maintain ultimate policy authority over their respective ccTLDs and should ensure that they are operated in conformity with domestic public policy objectives, laws and regulations, and international law and applicable international conventions.

Perceptions of claims for greater government involvement vary considerably, seen by some as an inevitable attribute of the net's maturity and by others as an inappropriate anexation of a sphere that transcends the state or business interests. Major ccTLD/gTLD registrars (commercial interests or often controlled by organisations with a narrow membership base) and regional NICs have often been critical of patriation. We've noted the New Zealand comment in 2002 that

There is no law in New Zealand, partly because we have explained that control of the .nz entry is outside their control, and in the hands of the US Government.

In November 2002 dot-uk registry Nominet claimed that "the ccTLDs" were

disappointed that ICANN has attempted to withhold performing essential services such as management of changes to addresses, name servers etc in an attempt to enforce the party concerned into a contractual relationship which is unacceptable to almost all ccTLDs.

It went on to criticise

ICANN's method of handling of re-delegation requests, which the country code operators believe should be decided by the Local Internet Community in consultation with local governments, not by ICANN.

The International Association of Top Level Domains (comprising the Cocos & Keeling Islands, Dominican Republic, Guernsey, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Mexico, Northern Mariana Islands, Mauritius, Niue, Tajikistan, Trinidad & Tobago and British Virgin Islands) warned in 1998 that

A radical change, such as implementing arbitrary national authority over private businesses and organizations, could put the whole Internet in jeopardy. You'd have to be concerned about the Internet's stability, continuity and basically the ability to maintain the current Internet system and policies.

It however appears to be the wave of the future, with seven redelegations in 2005 (.fk, .hk, .iq, .kz, .gs, .tl and .tk).

Kieren McCarthy fretted in 2005 that ICANN has

provided governments with instant, unassailable control over what happens under their designated area of the internet. If a company running a country code top-level domain refuses to agree to hand over any information or data held by it to the government, either legally, illegally or extra-legally, secretly or not, the government can simply replace the company with a government-run agency. If it refuses to shut down a website, or to redirect it elsewhere, the government can simply replace it with a government-run agency.

Government involvement in electronic communications (telephony, radio, television) is however taken as a given and claims for internet exceptionalism are problematical.

     ICANN and the future

Only a handful of ccTLD administrators have formal agreements with ICANN. It appears keen to extend that coverage, both to reinforce its legitimacy and more broadly to encourage good practice.

Since May 1999 IANA (ie ICANN) has approved requests for redelegation of ccTLDs for Australia, Canada, Japan, Laos and the Pitcairn Islands. It has concluded agreements with Sudan, Kenya, and Afghanistan.

ICANN has implicitly presented auDA as the model for a nonprofit ccTLD administrator that's endorsed by government (and underpinned by national legislation), is broadly representative, serves national and international community interests and is located within the country.

The organisation has tended not to favour redelegations from the wizards to government agencies, instead preferring delegations to representative nonprofit entities.

Given its emphasis on consensus it has also proven reluctant to choose between competing relegation requests, although noting that "the desires of the government of a country with regard to delegation of a ccTLD are taken very seriously".

The 'model' ccTLD administrative organisation will

• be inclusive of and accountable to all members of the country's online community
• be led by the private sector and include representatives of the user, business, academic and NGO sectors
• operate as a fully self-funding and not-for-profit organisation
• administer the ccTLD to foster development of the national and global internet community
• employ open, transparent and consultative processes
• not acquire any property rights in the ccTLD, in line with the emphasis on trusteeship
• enhance benefits to internet users by promoting competition, fair trading, and consumer protection and providing access to technical support
• establish dispute resolution mechanisms that take into account intellectual property, consumer protection and other internationally accepted laws
• abide by ICANN's policies (a major sticking point for some entities such as InternetNZ and Nominet)
• endorsed by but operate independently of the government.

Although there is a clear drift to patriation, it will continue to prove contentious and disputes about control of particular territory ccTLDs (some of which are administered by commercial interests on a problematical basis) are likely to involve ICANN.

ICANN's procedures for creating new gTLDs and reassigning existing gTLDs were criticised in a 2004 OECD report on Generic Top Level Domains: Market Development & Allocation Issues (PDF). Kieren McCarthy commented in 2005 that ICANN, as part of manouevering about the WSIS, had adjusted wording in the ccTLD redelegation process to "address concerns", with agreement between a ccTLD operator and ICANN becoming "desirable but not necessary to finalise a redelegation".

Combining this loosening of existing operators' powers with the US principle that strengthened government oversight, ICANN switched control of the internet in one fell swoop to governments. And, of course, it puts itself in the role of judge. This is the phrase that has since appeared in every redelegation following the July [2005] meeting: "ICANN has reviewed the request, and has determined that the proposed redelegation would be in the best interests of the local and global Internet communities."

It is with this loose and ambiguous justification - arrived at, you should note, without any publicly available information or debate whatsoever - that ICANN has set itself up as the internet's Supreme Court. And given governments effective control of the internet ICANN's efforts to turn itself into the Internet's government in this area stretch the phrase "redelegation" itself. Despite repeated requests by ccTLD owners themselves, it is ICANN that insists on calling the process of changing the name of the administrative or technical owners of a particular ccTLD "delegation".

The operators themselves prefer the terms "change of manager", "change of technical contact" and, in the case of more technical changes "change of name servers". The advantage of the term "delegation" is that it has legal connotations. If you are delegating something, it automatically implies that the delegator has some form of legal authority over the delegee. This is something that most country code managers would strongly disagree with in the case of ICANN.

     studies

Publicly-accessible research is thin. That reflects the newness of the issues. It also reflects the shape of policymaking, with much work being handled by a small number of committees and what has been characterised as the DNS cosmocrats - the few thousand people across the globe who are familiar with DNS language and policy mechanisms.

A comparison of regimes in 45 nations is provided by Michael Geist's ccTLD Goverance Project site.

For Canada see in particular TM Denton's 2000 Canadian Domain Name Governance: The Twice-Delegated CIRA (PDF) and the 2002 paper by Kim von Arx & Gregory Hagen on Sovereign Domains: A Declaration of Independence of ccTLDs from Foreign Control or their 2002 Patriation of the .ca. For the UK see Daniel Pare's Internet Governance in Transition: Who is the Master of this domain? (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2003).

Liz Williams' 2002 The Domain Name System: ICANN and its Relevance to Pacific Island Nations (PDF) and Milton Mueller's quirky but insightful Ruling the Root (Cambridge: MIT Press 2002) are of broader relevance. Insights are offered by the somewhat uneven and often anecdotal Addressing the World: National Identity and Internet Country Code Domains (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 2003) edited by Erica Wass.

The 2002 Global Internet Policy Initiative note (PDF) on Management of ccTLDs by members of the European Union and 2002 paper by Max Mosing & Gerald Otto on Internet Administration in Austria: ICANN, NIC.AT or the Government? offers perspectives on developments in Europe.

     commodification

An unexpected outcome of the ISO naming process was that some nations found that they had 'meaningful' cc codes - letter combinations that could be read as acronyms or as words in their own right.

Examples include -

• Tuvalu - dot-tv (being marketed to television stations in particular), with a reported 473,168 registrations as of February 2003
• Armenia - dot-am (radio stations), with around 2,660 registrations as of February 2003
• Federated States of Micronesia - dot-fm (radio stations), with around 6,790 registrations as of February 2003
• Niue - dot-nu (eg www.something.nu)
• Moldova - dot-md (doctors).

Other nations have sought to establish a meaning, with Colombia for example at one stage planning to market dot-co as "the other com" for companies (in competition with dot-biz), Mauritius marketing dot-mu as "the music domain" and Palau announcing in early 2004 that its ccTLD would henceforth be marketed as a global 'social networks' and 'personal identity' space.

The identification of "public interest" and "community" has proved contentious. Denton's paper for example highlights perceptions in Canada that the "community" looked very much like the major internet service providers and vendors of domain names. In Australia auDA policy working party meetings in which a Caslon person has participated have featured claims that "community" and national interest is restricted to domain name holders, something that we regard as quite unconvincing.

John Klensin's 2001 RFC 3071 commented that for many domains

the notion of "public service" - expected then to imply being carried out at no or minimal cost to the users, not merely on a non-profit basis - has yielded to profitability calculations. And, in most of the rest, considerations of at least calculating and recovering costs have crept in. While many of us feel some nostalgia for the old system, it is clear that its days are waning if not gone: perhaps the public service notions as understood when RFC 1591 was written just don't scale to rapid internet growth and very large numbers of registrations.

In particular, some ccTLDs have advertised for registrations outside the designated countries (or other entities), while others have made clear decisions to allow registrations by non-nationals. These decisions and others have produced protests from many sides, suggesting, in turn, that a recategorization is in order. For example, we have heard concerns by governments and managers of traditional, "public service", in-country, ccTLDs about excessive ICANN interference and fears of being forced to conform to internationally-set policies for dispute resolution when their domestic ones are considered more appropriate. We have also heard concerns from registrars and operators of externally-marketed ccTLDs about unreasonable government interference and from gTLD registrars and registries about unreasonable competition from aggressively marketed ccTLDs.

Since the 1880s a major contribution to the national revenue of some African and Pacific Island states has come from the sale of stamps. The advent of the web has allowed some of those states to diversify revenue sources, exploiting ccTLDs on the basis that maximising revenue for the treasury serves the public interest.

Some have simply 'transferred' responsibility outright to a commercial body, whether on the basis of a one-off payment or an initial reward plus royalties. Others have acted more strategically (or were merely slower) and have licenced an agent. Such regimes generally place no residence or other restrictions on registration and have implicitly sought to position a 'national' space as a competitor to the gTLDs.

     restrictions

As noted earlier in this profile, there is considerable variation in the policies for registration in different domains. That variation reflects

• the absence of specific requirements from ICANN or other international bodies
• historical circumstance, with formal rules and precedents often reflecting the personalities of individual administrators (often with an overtly anti-commercial and communitarian bias)
• differing national and institutional values and perceptions (eg the 'natural resource' model - like oil something that should be zealously preserved for citizens or that should be handed over an entrepreneur for immediate exploitation)

It has resulted in differences in -

presence requirements - typically a requirement that the registrant be a citizen, be incorporated or have a business presence on the country's soil. Australia and Canada for example require that in order for a dot-au or dot-ca domain the registrants be citizens/residents, incorporated in the country or have a registered trademark. Italy restricts registration in dot-it to EU individuals or organisations (individuals can register one domain; organisations can register multiple domains). Other countries (eg Brazil and Cuba) allow foreign registrants through a local agent.

language/cultural restrictions - many regimes feature categories of names that can't be registered on grounds of offensiveness (eg obscene or blasphemous speech) or otherwise restricted. Australia, for example, restricts use of 'ANZAC' and 'Olympic' in line with intellectual property restrictions

open and closed 2LDs - some regimes restrict registration in particular 2LDs to entities that pass tests of function or incorporation

transferability - restrictions on the 'pre-registration' and on-selling of domain names. Australia prohibits resale of dot-au names

     advocacy and other bodies

We've pointed to a range of DNS management and advocacy bodies in the ICANN profile on this site. Those with a particular interest in ccTLDs include -

ICANN's Domain Name Support Organization (DNSO)

the ccTLD Constituency of the DNSO (WWTLD)

the ICANN Government Advisory Committee (GAC)

and regional ccTLD Associations

Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR)

African TLDs (AFTLD)

African Domain Names (AfriDNS), promoted as "Africa's parallel organization to the DNSO"

Asia-Pacific Top-Level Domain Forum (APTLD)

Latin America & Caribbean TLDs (LACTLD)

North American Top-Level Domain Organisation (NATLD)

International Association of Top-Level Domains (IATLD)

     cash cows and lame ducks?

An area that is likely to be contentious in future is use of registry/registrar revenue for 'public good' initiatives, for example funding education programs or subsidising access by some groups (eg lower fees for nonprofit registrants).

ISOC's share of dot-org revenue from 2003 onwards will for example be used to fund "a big education outreach" to "promote the Internet", arguably something that no longer needs a capital 'i' or promotion.

In Australia the national domain regulator auDA announced in 2002 that some of its revenue from the auction of previously-restricted generic names in the 'com' 2LD would be placed in a trust fund for community good initiatives.

There is information in discussion elsewhere on this site regarding ICANN and auDA.

    next page  (industry)