The backlog of comments that built up at the end of the comment period for the government’s green paper on domain name management continues to build up and here we summarize some of the latest more significant contributions. The European Union and its Commission concentrated on the perceived lack of internationalization, and it points out that the green paper appears to be contrary to a previously agreed joint US-European statement of electronic commerce. It says that no decisions should be taken until an international consensus is reached and that the EU and its member are prepared to get down to forming that consensus as a matter of priority. The EU strongly backs the work of the International Ad-Hoc Committee(IAHC) and all its offshoots (POC, CORE). IBM Corp was broadly supportive of the government’s efforts, but urged that the work over the years of the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) and that of the IAHC, POC and CORE should be recognized and incorporated as much as possible into the plan. IBM adds its voice to the call to make the plan more international and less-US-centric. IBM’s program director-policy and business planning, Roger Cochetti, who penned the company’s response, calls for a series of subsidiary bodies to be created under the non-profit corporation proposed by the paper, in part to get more specialists involved in some areas, and also to relieve pressure to get a seat on a single board. IBM also feels more should be done with the US country-specific TLD. IBM also feels that registries should compete with each other but be monitored very closely, and no registry should administer more domain names than any other. MCI Corp also adds its support to the IAHC/CORE and says much the same as IBM But it also stresses that any DNS systems should take into account intellectual property and trademark issues more than green paper does at present. MCI’s senior VP internet Vint Cerf, who jointly-invented TCP/IP in the 1970s has been a longtime supporter of the IAHC efforts and re-iterates its call for a single non-profit registries overseeing multiple competitive registrars. MCI also feels the government has been shortsighted in not finding a role for the Internet Society and its various arms. It also urges the government to take .com, .net and .org from Network Solutions Inc and moved to a multi-registry system as son as is practical.
