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     addressing

This page looks at addressing: identification of websites and other locations on the network.

It covers -

• introduction
• ICANN, IANA and the DNS
• ENUM
• other resource identification schemes

     Introduction

As Christine Borgman notes in From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access To Information in the Networked World (Cambridge: MIT Press 2000), if you can't find information it - for practical purposes - doesn't exist. While there is been much talk of the web as a global digital library, access to the sites that comprise that library or to people is dependent on agreement about identification of entities on the network. 

Determination of rules for identification, in particular the structure of the Domain Name System (DNS) and the allocation of names, is thus particularly contentious. Globally and in Australia there is debate about the operation of bodies such ICANN and ownership of addresses or the network. Should names be allocated on a 'first come, first served' basis or to those bodies that 'own' the name offline? And how do we resolve disputes?

     ICANN and the DNS

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN) is the non-profit private sector body formed in 1998 to assume responsibility from the US government for four key Internet functions: management of the domain name system, allocation of IP address space, assignment of protocol parameters (the 'http' you see in web addresses is a protocol) and management of the root server system.

Its determination of the global rules for what a web site can be called and how that site can be found has significant ramifications.  As a result it has been described by Dan Schiller - author of Digital Capitalism (Cambridge: MIT Press 2000) - as the "unelected parliament of the Web" and by Karl Auerbach and Milton Mueller as "now essentially an organ of the trademark lobby", setting policies that will significantly affect free expression and privacy by favouring commercial interests.  

ICANN continues to grapple with widespread, although often unfair, criticism. We have explored the 'ICANN Wars' in a more detailed profile.

A separate profile dealing with Top Level Domains (TLDs) is here.

Within Australia there was similar debate about the move to industry self-regulation of the Australian domain space. We have examined that debate later in this guide and there is a more detailed profile on auDA, the Australian domain administrator.

     ENUM

ENUM is the acronym adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) telephone numbering working group to describe use of the DNS to relate E.164 numbers to URLs.  E.164 is the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard identifying telephone number formats.

Potential use of ENUM is wide-ranging. It might, for example allow a single contact identifier for individuals. Digital business cards could comprise a single number rather than a long list of addresses for the owner's email address, mobile phone, home phone, business phone and fax, with services using the net to translate that one number into specific addresses.

ENUM's architecture is simple. Applications first convert phone numbers to their domain name equivalents - taking an international phone number that begins with the country code (for example +44 20 362 8752), reversing the sequence, inserting periods between each digit and adding a .e164.arpa suffix to produce a domain address (eg 2.5.7.8.2.6.3.0.2.4.4.e164.arpa).

That address is queried against a name server, which refers to one or more Naming Authority Pointer (NAPTR) records, each of which features a 'contact resource' (eg an email address) and associated information that enables applications to process the contact. Preferences enable the address 'owner' to specify how contact is handled, with a cascade of messages or allmessages to one box. An NAPTR for example might first direct an ENUM-enabled phone to ring a business phone, then mobile phone, then home phone and then a voice-to-email gateway if the initial calls are unanswered.

ENUM remains contentious at both a technical and political level. 

Discussions in December concluded without the expected agreement and the process of achieving a global standard may be protracted. The ramifications of ENUM are uncertain. Proponents argue that like the web, a range of business models and software applications will evolve once there's agreement on standards.

Privacy advocates such as the US Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) have expressed concern about potential misuse of ENUM as a unique global identifier, accordingly organising a campaign, to "Just Say ENO to ENUM". So far there is no campaign against VeriSign's similar WebNum scheme.

Anthony Rutkowski's September 2000 column ENUM: the Internet's Glueball Infrastructure is a short introduction. There is more detail at the ITU's ENUM page and the Washington Internet Project's page.

The 2001 ENUM proposal by the former Australian Communications Authority to the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity Standardization Program Forum is here.

     other resource identification schemes

RealNames and other keyword schemes, URNs, PURLs and other digital resource locator schemes are discussed in more detail in the metadata and search profiles elsewhere on this site. 



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