My Fed. Communications Bar Ass'n presentation in Washington DC on Wednesday evening is available at http://www.wia.org/pub/fcba/index.htm It's worth noting, by the way, that these domain related controversies are hardly new. In the OSI world, they began in the early 80s, and revolved essentially around the same issues: overall control of the structure, country TLDs, WIPO related trademark concerns, and then in the late 80s, gTLDs. Like now, it's generally the same institutions and companies who assert that domain control through a heavily regulated scheme is necessary for ECommerce and computer networks to be successful - as amazing as that sounds. This fairly large-scale effort was intended to apply broadly to all "naming resources to identify objects for Open Systems Interconnection and other systems." In the OSI world, gTLDs were referred to as "supra national domains," and were the subject of discussion over some years in CCITT Study Group I. In general, these were strongly resisted, and it's not clear that Supranational domains were ever allowed. At the US National level, ANSI was the registration authority for the US domain, and the Dept of Commerce for States. The two key documents that were developed after numerous meetings of a US Registry Advisory Committee (RAC) during 1992 are "Operating Guidelines for Registrars of MHS Management Domain Names Used within the US," RAC 143, (14 Oct 92) and "Registration Procedures for the United States Joint Registration Authority, RAC N140 (13 Oct 92). These procedures apply to both the ITU F.401 root as well as the all digital objects root under CCITT X.660 Registration Authority Procedures. The one interesting attribute was that the registrations were permanent - which proved to be a less than desirable attribute. After seven years, there have been approximately 100 registrations. --tony
