By Nick Patience
Back at the end of January we wrote about the impending changes in the internet’s domain name system and why they are important. Well, the summer is all but over and a lot as changed so we felt it best to provide a quick guide to the DNS wars; their origins in the 1970s and 1980s, skirmishes in the early to mid-1990s and the endgame politics that are currently being played out each day. The next, and most significant date is September 30, which is the day by which the US government hopes to start its transition out of the funding process of the DNS and to hand it over to a private consortium formed out of the internet community and based upon a consensus. That attempt to build the consensus will be parts two and three of this brief historical roundup, but first, how we got where we are today. In 1983 Jon Postel, Paul Mockapetris at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California’s school of engineering, together with an engineer called Craig partridge from BBN Corp (now part of GTE Corp) spent a few months developing a hierarchical, tree-like structure for organizing the computers on the internet’s predecessor, the Arpanet, that enables the enables the addressing system to be distributed rather than maintained on a single computer, as was the case in the very early days. After about a year of arguments (sound familiar?) a group of engineers agreed upon seven so-called top-level domains reflecting their use: .com, .net, .org, .mil, .edu and .int. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which funded development of the Arpanet started encouraging use of the DNS in early 1985. The first domain registered was symbolics.com on March 15 that year, and it use has ballooned since then. The Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) started in December 1988 with Postel as its director to allocate blocks of IP addresses and other duties and the National Science Foundation (NSF) later took over the funding of what by then was the internet: a group of linked networks using the TCP/IP protocol. In 1991 the NSF awarded a contract to run the Network Information Center (NIC) to Government Systems Inc, taking it away from IANA. In 1993 the NSF put out a request for proposals to run the .com, .net,.org, .edu and .gov DNS services, known as the InterNic and that was awarded to Network Solutions Inc (NSI). NSI was acquired by Science Applications International Corp (SAIC) in March 1995 and in September that year announced that it would charge for registering domain names. However, in May 1996 IANA’s Postel presented a proposal to the Internet Society (ISOC) suggesting that up to 150 new generic top-level domains should be added to the internet root spread across 50 registries, each administering three of the gTLDs, as they are known. And that’s when things started to get interesting. The second part of this mini-series will appear in our issue on Wednesday, September 9.
