Internet domain name game stretches

Associated Press

NEW YORK — As the Internet expands, plans to add new features and languages to Web site addresses are stretching the domain name system beyond its original capabilities.

Over the next few months, seven new Internet suffixes, with names like ".info" and ".pro," will be added to the roster that already includes ".com" and ".org."

The companies distributing the names are touting new capabilities, such as using ".name" to permit everyone to have a personalized Internet gateway that a mobile device can access.

But domain names are going beyond their original intention as mere mnemonics for numbers. They're now being used to promote brands and products, as cultural and political labels. Though the trend began years ago, when businesses joined the Net, the new suffixes propel the evolution.

At the same time, engineers are trying to graft other languages onto the Internet domain name system, which recognizes only English, in an effort to make names more meaningful outside the United States.

All this has prompted fears of technical glitches and more legal battles as the system performs functions it was never designed to handle.

"The DNS (domain name system) was not originally established as a directory system, but it has taken on a de facto role," said Stuart Lynn, chief executive of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees addressing policies.

John Klensin, a leading Internet engineer, warned recently of "many signs that, as new uses evolve and original assumptions are abused, the system is being stretched to, or beyond, its practical limits."

Current fixes, he said, largely focus on work-arounds, such as building larger servers. He said they work for now, but may not be foolproof.

"We never really know where the stress points are," ICANN board member Karl Auerbach added. "The DNS is good at mapping structured names into records, when it doesn't have other capabilities built into it."

Non-English domains alone, engineers say, create potential for conflict. For instance, some characters that look identical use different computer codes because they mean different things in Chinese and Japanese.

Steve Lorenc, a business manager with domain-name seller VeriSign Inc., said Internet users clearly want names to mean something, even if engineers don't.

He cites the growing popularity of individuals who use e-mail addresses containing their surnames followed by ".com."

All computers on the Internet are known by a string of numbers, and domain names were created so that people won't have to remember them. Typing "apple.com" into a Web browser is the same as typing "17.254.0.91."

Meaning was supposed to be left exclusively to the content — an e-mail service, a Web page — that the names pointed to. In theory, it wouldn't matter if General Motors runs a site at Ford.com.

Linguistics, however, got in the way.

Even if computers don't care about the meaning of domain names, people do. Businesses care even more, equating naming with branding. Excessive demand has led to overcrowding and legal disputes for popular names.

Hence the new domain name suffixes. The first, ".info," debuts next month, followed by ".biz" in October and ".name" in November. Also upcoming are ".pro," ".museum," ".aero" and ".coop."

Why only seven? ICANN's Lynn said too many could stress, rather than relieve, the system.

The system was designed to distribute load on the name servers that match names to numbers. But the popularity of having names followed by ".com" — more than 24 million have been registered — means the central server for ".com" gets more traffic than it should.

The imbalance could continue, even grow, as new domain names place even greater emphasis on the suffix and businesses simply duplicate names they already have under ".com."

Although some engineers believe the system can handle thousands, even millions, of suffixes, Lynn said the risk is too great "to rush into uncharted waters."

Critics of that conservative approach complain that legal battles will continue unless more suffixes are added. Already, there have been complaints about entrepreneurs bypassing procedures to get good ".info" names.

For some, the only effective solution is to build a new directory mechanism on top of the domain name system that would effectively render domain names invisible — and thus meaningless.

Search results — in English or another language — could point to underlying domain names, which in turn would point to numeric addresses as they do now.

"Maybe moving on to the new generation of technology could leave the entire domain name system as a troubling chapter," said Hans Klein, chairman of Computer Professionals for Social Research.

RealNames Corp. attempts such an approach, but its closed system requires software or search sites that recognize its keywords.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is exploring systems that are more open. A committee of the National Academy of Sciences has been holding hearings around the country for a report due next year.

Though the domain name system still works, academy study director Alan Inouye said, "we are obviously concerned whether that is going to continue ... given the continuing growth that's expected."