June 19, 2001
Welcome to As the CaveBear Growls.
This publication is an occasional newsletter covering topics of interest to the author, generally related to the Internet to a greater or lesser degree.
Over to the left of the screen is the catalog of issues, past and present.
For the first 30 years of its existence the Internet thrived on innovation, enterprise, and entrepreneurship. This issue of As the CaveBear Growls asks the question: Have those days ended? In particular, has ICANN has become a force retarding Internet innovation, damping Internet enterprise, and hindering Internet entrepreneurship.
Although the future is always cloudy, the evidence, unfortunately, indicates that ICANN is becoming a regulatory body of the worst sort - one that will tend to use its powers to turn the Internet into a bland, uninventive realm not much different than "The Telephone Company" of the 1950's before the Hush-a-Phone[1] case.
It is said that a rising tide lifts all boats equally. Unfortunately one can not say the same about net technologies - there are always some people who, whether by choice or circumstance, are left behind for a while.
Take a look at your telephone - unless it is an antique, it sports a keypad with at least the ten digits plus '*' and '#'. And it generates touch tones.
But 30 years ago touch tone phones were a rarity - in those days telephones had ten number rotary dials that generated pulses.
Thirty years ago a decision could have been made that blocked the deployment of touch-tone phones. Such a decision could have been made on the basis that the universal connectivity of the telephone network would be "destabilized" if people with existing rotary dial phones could not access services that required touch tone phones.
Had that decision been made, we probably would not have voice mail, call response systems, call forwarding, or other services that have become daily fare in the year 2000. Sure, such services could have been done using rotary dial systems, but they would have been so clumsy as to have been unmarketable.
Based on nothing more than a bald and unsupported assertion that it would destabilize the Internet[2], ICANN recently decided to outlaw domain names that have trailing hyphen characters.[3]
In that same week, the .nu[4] top level domain began registering names that contain characters that, like trailing hyphens, are arguably beyond the strict reading of the relevant Internet Standards that define what host names should look like.[5] By virtue of this innovation, the .nu registry can support names using characters from many languages, not just English. The .nu registry is starting with Swedish, German, French, and Spanish names, thus allowing links like: http://SödraKärr.se.nu, http://Wörterbuch.de.nu/, http://España.eu.nu/ (These may not work for you. [6].)
But think back to the rotary versus touch-tone telephone situation. Think of the limited form of domain names as the rotary phone, think of the extended forms as a touch tone telephone. Do extended domain names destabilize the Internet any more than the introduction of the touch-tone telephone destabilized the voice telephone system?
Will ICANN step in and say that the .nu registry is destabilizing the Internet?
One might consider all of this a tempest in a teapot, who really cares whether domain names can end in hypens?
The Internet has been an economic miracle for the United States. One might consider ICANN's decision to be no more an obstacle than a penny placed on the tracks. However, this writer believes that the risk is much greater, that ICANN is unwittingly building what will become a mountain of regulatory concrete, stone, and steel laying squarely across the growth tracks of the Internet, derailing innovation and sending many entrepreneurial investments into the ditch.
But one should not forget that there is no indication that ICANN will stop with this decision.[7]
Indeed, there is great reason to expect that ICANN will expand its attempts to say what shall and what shall not be on the Internet. For instance, one of ICANN's board members late last year decided that it would be fun for ICANN to vastly expand its scope and stick ICANN's regulatory foot directly into the worlds of IP routing, IP telephony, personal digital assistants, etc. Even one who has not paid a great deal of attention to Internet technology ought to recognize these as areas or intense innovation and entrepreneurship.
Out of the blue this board member announced the creation of an "ad hoc group". This move was almost lost among ICANN's Byzantine announcements and web pages, but at least it was noticed by Cisco Systems, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the three IP address registries - APNIC, ARIN and RIPE NCC - all of whom issued strong negative comments.
NOTES:
[1] In the Matter of Hush-a-Phone Corporation, et.al., 20 FCC 391(1955), 238 F. 2d 266 (D. C. Cir. 1956)
The Hush-a-Phone was a non-electronic plastic cup that a user would place over the microphone part of the telephone handset - much like one might cup ones hands over the microphone - in order to keep bystanders from overhearing the conversation. The telephone company blocked the product on the grounds that it could harm the telephone system and the FCC agreed. The US Federal District court disagreed, i.e. it said that the plastic cup was OK.
In that case, the court determined that the telephone company's rules "are in unwarranted interference with the telephone subscriber's right reasonably to use his telephone in ways which are privately beneficial without being publicly detrimental." (emphasis added.)
It seems silly to us today that anyone could seriously believe that a mere plastic cup on a telephone could harm anything. But in those days, people were willing to believe anything from the telephone company. We are in a similar situation today in which most people are willing to accept even the most outrageous of claims about the Internet if those claims are clothed with even the faintest hint of technical jargon.
[2] Actually there was another reason given by ICANN. Apparently trailing hyphens confuse ICANN's temporary CEO. One must ask why he finds names such as "ip-.com" confusing and yet sees no confusion in names such as "dot-hyphendot.hyphenhyphen.com".
[3] See http://www.icann.org/nsi/trailing-hyphens.htm in which ICANN asserts that trailing hyphens have caused "malfunctions". What ICANN failed to report is that such "malfunctions" had exactly the same characteristics as if someone had entered in invalid URL or had tried to reach a site unreachable because it is located beyond a firewall.
[4] .nu is country code top-level domain, ccTLD, of the island nation of Niue in the South Pacific.
[5] The issue of what are "official" Internet Standard limitations on DNS names is somewhat cloudy. The domain name system itself, as defined by the various standards, is capable of using any 8-bit characters. However, various implementations of DNS software and interpretations of a subset of domain names knows as "host names" have created a reasonably strong de-facto, if not de-jure, standard that domain names, when used to express host names, may be composed only of alphanumeric characters (A-Z and 0 through 9) plus the hyphen character, and the hyphen, for some undocumented reason, is not permitted as either the leading or trailing character of the name.
The actual Internet protocols used to carry domain name queries, responses, and updates are completely blind to the characters that are used and can indeed accommodate any of the 256 possible 8-bit characters. However, the most common DNS software, BIND, by default imposes the limitations described in the previous paragraph, as do some software libraries on some host platforms.
[6] (Depending on your system's settings you may or may not be able to use these URLs. Go to http://www.nu/ISO-8859-test.htm for more information..)
[7] Like virtually all of ICANN's decisions, this one was made in total secrecy, both before and after the fact. ICANN's policy organ for matters concerning the Domain Name System, the DNSO, was not involved in the decision. Nor from all indications, was ICANN's Board of Directors involved either. It appears to have been a decision made by some unknown ICANN employee and made in complete contravention to ICANN's Articles of Incorporation and By-Laws.
Updated June 19, 2001 11:48:59 PM -0700