By Nick Patience
One of the longest running battles in the internet domain name system looks like coming to a head fairly quickly with the news that Image Online Design Inc, a small California company that claims the rights to run the registry for names ending in the .web extension has sent letters to two other companies that claim to do something similar, asking them to stop doing it. Domain names with that extension cannot be accessed on the internet as it stands because the bodies that control the database of names have not authorized names with that extension to be included.
IOD sent letters Friday to two other prospective registries asking them to stop using all instances of .web, although it should be noted that IOD has not in fact filed a trademark or service mark application for .web. It intends to do so soon, says Wes Monroe, an attorney with Christie Parker & Hale LLP, who is representing IOD, but he says use of the mark in commerce is more important at this stage that a filed application. IOD began operating its .web registry in July 1996.
The two companies, the Council of Registrars (CORE) and PGMedia, which trades under the name of Name.Space, either plan to offer names ending in .web at some point in the future or do already, although like IOD, make it clear that those names will not be entered into the root just yet.
CORE recently raised the ire of IOD by filing a trademark application for .web itself, along with five other potential news generic top-level domains (gTLDs). However, Paul Garrin, president of Name.Space, who had not received the IOD letter when we spoke yesterday afternoon, says his company has claimed no proprietary interest in the web TLD, and it is settled that the function of domain registration does not constitute trademark infringement. Garrin says he is against any company having a trademark on a TLD; he says they should be an open public resource. He also says he has attempted outreach to IOD on a number of occasions only to get no response.
Ambler points out that CORE was not formed until about 18 months after his .web registry went live, so its claim on .web must be tenuous to say the least. We understand that IOD made an application for .web earlier this year and before CORE, but sources tell us the application was mishandled and rejected due to an administrative error. The letter to CORE not only asks that it requests that it refers all inquiries for a .web name to IOD and tell customers that have already registered that it will not be providing them with the service (as does the PGMedia letter), but that it withdraw its service mark application.
Since IOD started taking registrations in 1996, it has always made it clear to those registering that the names would not be entered into the net’s root server network until the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) gave the OK, and therefore would only work if ISPs agreed to point their name servers at IOD’s server.
IOD co-founder Chris Ambler claims he got permission from IANA director Jon Postel to run a .web registry in late summer 1996 and then Postel denied having given such permission (01/11/99). Postel died in October 1998 and the functions of the IANA have been more or less subsumed into the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Others dispute the sequence of events between Ambler and IANA, but .web is still not competing with .com, .net and .org as a gTLD registry and that is what really matters.
The introduction of new gTLDs to go alongside the increasingly- crowded .com, .net and org will be the decision of ICANN and is not likely to happen until some time next year, but as soon as the issue of who control .web crops up, the fur is sure to fly.
