A hotly debated international effort to launch a new system of Internet domain-naming has run into a series of obstacles - including the apparent ire of US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright - on the eve of a signing ceremony intended to make the plan official.
In a cable attributed to Albright and leaked on the Net on Tuesday, she told the US mission in Geneva that there is no US consensus on the plan drafted by the International Ad Hoc Committee. She added that the Clinton administration intends to consult with other governments affected by the plan, as well as with industry and Internet community interests in the United States.
The cable concluded, "At this point, the US should remain neutral to the IAHC proposal."
A senior State Department official in Washington, though declining to confirm the authenticity of the cable, said that a representative from the US mission attended Wednesday's meeting of the IAHC to convey the same message: that the United States will not sign the group's memorandum of understanding and that the Clinton administration is still developing and reviewing positions relative to the proposal.
The European Commission last week raised several objections to parts of the plan and asked for a delay in implementing it.
The ad hoc group's memorandum, to be signed Thursday in Geneva, would establish seven new generic top-level domains to complement those already in place, tackle other addressing and technical issues arising from the Net's rapid growth, and develop new mechanisms to resolve intellectual-property disputes.
The committee's principal members are the International Telecommunications Union, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the Internet Society, and the Internet Assigned Number Authority. Among those who have announced they will sign the agreement are MCI and several of Western Europe's largest telecommunications companies.
The addition of new generic top-level domains - the current .com, .net, .edu, .gov, .org, and .mil would be supplemented by .web, .rec, .arts, .info, store, .firm, and .nom - might be the most visible effect of the committee's proposal, and has gotten the most attention.
But concerns ranging from who will register the new domain names to who will have control over deeper addressing issues to whether the IAHC is a legitimate authority have provoked debate among governments, affected industries, Internet service providers, and other community stakeholders.
Network Solutions Inc., the Virginia-based company that handles registration for the established domains, has been one of the leaders in the opposition. The company, which holds a lucrative monopoly on the registration business, says it is fighting the plan because it believes the market, with judicious government participation, should resolve the addressing and registration issues.
But in a sign of how far unhappiness with the IAHC proposal reaches, Network Solutions is allied with a number of ISPs and fledgling firms that seek to challenge the company's registration monopoly. Many of these firms have banded together under the banner of Enhanced Domain Name Service, or eDNS.
IAHC representatives have defended their plan as the best and quickest solution to a complex set of problems. And despite the widespread questioning of the plan, one IAHC member, Robert Shaw, has been quoted more than once this week as saying, "I don't see what could prevent it from being adopted."
One leader of the opposition - Jay Fenello, the president of Iperdome Inc., which wants to establish the .per top-level domain - sees it differently.
"The IAHC was open to only a small fraction of the Internet community. But now that the IAHC has come to the attention of the US government, big ISPs, and everyone else, they're saying, 'This is not where we want to go.'"
