A monopoly with an expiration date

You have said that the government relinquishing control of the DNS administration and ending its contract with Network Solutions is good for NSI. Wouldn't it be better if NSI could keep its exclusive contract?
I don't think so. We want other competitors to legitimize the space. When you're the only competitor in this space, people don't take that space seriously. There's no comparison of service; there's no comparison of offering. And furthermore, all the marketing dollars are NSI dollars today because we're the only one trying to build this market segment. So although we expect to lose market share, although we expect to fall, the space is not a zero-sum game. The space is expanding. We believe that this market has a lot of growth potential in it, and NSI therefore feels that, even with a loss of market share, we'll still grow in a very similar way to the way we're growing now.

You say you want competition. But critics say NSI has tried to hold up this privatization process and will still corner the market even when other companies can be primary ".com" registrars.
You know, people say to me, "Why isn't NSI fighting competition?" And I'd like to point out a couple of facts that I think people have failed to think about: First of all, there is competition now, today. There are 241 other registries in the world. Some of those [domains] are really commercial, like ".tv" and ".nu," and those registries are marketing alongside NSI.

Another level of competition that may or may not come, depending upon whether we solve this trademark problem, is the issue of introducing new top-level domain names. The second form of competition is by allowing [companies] to directly register the domains that we think we have made very prestigious, especially ".com."

As part of the arrangement with the Department of Commerce, we will be both a registry--think of that as the wholesale division--[and a registrar that competes with other companies]. Individual customer data will reside at the individual competing registrars and all of those registrars will have the exact same, equal access to the online back office interface so that they'll all compete on equal footing.

Network Solutions consistently has emphasized that opening up its domain name root servers to competitors could send the Net into a tailspin. Is this still a fear?
One of the issues would be if a new registrar went out of business. If a small business came online and didn't have the financial means to make it through a period of time and it collapsed, we need provisions for backing them up so there is a fail-safe for their customer data. One other stability issue is, where is the responsibility for disputes? Well, the ".com" registry is just a back-office automated tool now, so is the registrar company liable? What happens if there's a registrar in one country having a dispute with a registrar in another country?

ICANN's job is to help foster registry competition. How could its decisions hurt your business?
I think they have to be very careful. ICANN is a private company. It doesn't have any God-given authority. It gets its authority from the governed, who basically legitimatize it because they are a part of it. Well, they could do things to harm my business in the sense of outrageous things, but I think it's generally reflected in the public opinion that no one really has authority over the Internet. It operates on a set of sort of mutual agreements with people working together. That's the beauty of it. So I can't foresee any reason that the U.S. government or anybody else would want to harm NSI, because it would be destabilizing. Whether you like us or not, we play a very important role and we have been a tremendous facilitator of growth on the Internet over the last several years.

Will ICANN have a hard time getting legitimized? Many Netizens think the ICANN selection process was secretive.
It was a pretty mysterious activity. And of course you saw the reaction at the first Boston meeting of the board. I was never invited to be on it, and although I submitted a list of really quality people, none of them were selected. I think that the efforts under way are going well. They have to be very careful to make sure that they live by the tenets that the administration's white paper put out--that is, that it would be a consensus-based position, that diversity be involved, that it not become a regulatory body.

The most disturbing trend that I've seen coming out of all of this governance is a trend that mistakes geographical diversity with what could quickly become the United Nations mentality. That is, I think it's important to make sure that not more than a certain number of players come from any one region to assure good cultural and social diversity. If you have a domain name or you use the Internet in any significant way, you probably have a right to have a say on all these issues.

Now let's assume they legitimize ICANN--how does it legally enforce policies? Well, there is no Internet policeman, there's no global policeman who can basically go to a registry and say, "You, you registry in Uganda, you have to do this!" The way ICANN [will] get things done is by signing agreements with the registries based on consensus.

NEXT: Staying ahead of the pack