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On a tiny island,
catchy Web name sparks a battle
Page 3 of 6
Reflecting the collegial and informal nature of the fledgling
Internet community at the time, Mr. Postel assigned operation of the
domain names to trusted friends or people he knew. They were mostly
like-minded academics and computer engineers who performed the work on
a volunteer basis.
The administrative contacts for each country code had to reside in
the given country and understand they were "performing a public
service on behalf of the Internet community," Mr. Postel wrote in a
1994 memorandum codifying the domain-name structure. Typically, he
decided who would manage country codes for distant nations on a
first-come, first-served basis.
In the early and mid-1990s, this was happening below the radar of
many governments, some of which viewed the Internet as a passing fad.
Still, Mr. Postel understood the political ramifications of
country-code domain names. To avoid having to determine what
constitutes a country and make up domain names for them, he used the
two-letter codes from a list, called ISO 3166, compiled for mail and
other purposes by the Geneva-based International Organization for
Standardization. Any territorial entity on the list would get a domain
name.
Many of those listed weren't countries. Some were homes only to
penguins. The Indian Ocean made the list, dot-io. Specks of land
belonging to other countries were included, such as the United
Kingdom's Pitcairn Island, a South Pacific island whose population
consists of 50 descendants of the mutineers of the HMS Bounty and
their Tahitian wives. (Niue governs itself in "free association" with
New Zealand.)
Mr. Postel, who died in 1998, viewed the domain names as merely an
administrative convenience. But others, such as Mr. Semich, the head
of the company at odds with Niue's government, saw a business
opportunity.
"It never occurred to Postel that the value of the revenue
generated by domain names could be greater than the value of the
Internet service itself," Mr. Semich says.
As an editor for a computer trade magazine in the 1990s, Mr. Semich
followed the Internet's early development closely, taking note of the
skyrocketing demand for new Internet domain names. He also plunged
into the Internet policy debates at the time that included the
creation in 1998 of Icann, which took over the duties handled by Mr.
Postel.
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Source: Post-gazette.com
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