<nettime> Village Voice on Paul Garrin and Name.Space

["nettime's roving reporter" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0114/ferguson.shtml
	  
Week of April 4 - 10, 2001
Paul Garrin Says Monopolies Choke the Web. Now Congress Is Starting to Listen.
Casting a Wider Net
by Sarah Ferguson

Media activist Paul Garrin is obsessed with borders. Step into his East
4th Street loft and you're met by eight large TV monitors mounted in a
wall of thick corrugated steel, and four video cameras that hop and pivot
wildly as they track your every move. The setup's from an art installation
Garrin devised called Border Patrol. When the screens are working, the
cameras project a red target on your image-an unsettling metaphor for the
way technology has rendered us all sitting ducks.

Right now, the artwork is busted, but Garrin's too busy to fix it. He's
engaged in a far more real border war. For the past five years, he and his
company, Name.Space, have been seeking to overthrow the U.S.-sanctioned
monopolies that govern the Web.

A self-styled outsider, Garrin has recently heard his complaints echoed in
the halls of power. The European Parliament has begun clamoring for more
international control, and just last month, Montana senator Conrad Burns
warned the Department of Commerce that the stability of the Net "could be
threatened by a policy-making process moving forward under a legal cloud."

That cloud, for Garrin, hovers darkest over the issue of access to the
"root zone," the master file listing the so-called top-level domains-.com,
.org, .net, .gov, .edu, .mil-and some 244 country-code domains. The root
zone is the place that tells your computer where to locate any one of the
33 million existing Web addresses. Computer scientists call it "the
truth."

>From the moment the U.S. government moved to privatize the Net back in
1995, handing Network Solutions a lucrative contract to administer the
.com, .org, and .net domains, critics have questioned why this "truth" has
to be so narrow. Why should one company have the right to charge people
premium rates-at that time $100-to sign up for Web suffixes devised when
the Net was still a Cold War military and education project? Why should an
aspiring artist have to scrap to be www.sculptor.com when she could just
as easily be www.erotic.sculptor or www.heavenly.form?

Even now that the government has licensed competing companies to register
Web sites under .com, .net, and .org, Network Solution's parent, VeriSign,
still operates the central registry and gets a $6 cut for every new site.
It's such a sweetheart deal that last week, four ranking members of
Congress, led by Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, called for the Department of
Commerce to "analyze the competitive issues" stemming from a plan
(approved Monday) to extend VeriSign's dominance over the .com market. The
artificial scarcity of commercial domains has led to wild speculation and
cybersquatting; Business.com sold for a record $7 million two years ago,
and even in today's dotbomb fallout, name inflation runs rampant.

Enter Garrin's Name.Space. While other so-called alternative root servers
began offering a limited number of unsanctioned addresses like .biz and
.med in the mid '90s, Garrin had a much more radical idea. Working with
former hackers like Phiber Optik and system administrators he'd met
through media-art conferences abroad, he set up his own network of servers
in the U.S. and Europe that allows users to register for just about
dot-anything. "We started slowly, because back then everyone was operating
under the assumption that if you added more names, it would break the
Net," Garrin recalls. In August 1996, Name.Space lit up an initial list of
30 new domains-things like .art, .video, .museum, .cam-then invited users
to come up with their own choices.

"The idea," says Garrin, "was to shift the naming paradigm from one based
on commercialism and branding-you know, ibm.com-to one based on content. I
mean, look at all the interesting and expressive sites we publish now."
His Web site, we.reclaimthe.net, now offers more than 540 extensions, from
abc.news and balkan.monitor to queer.punk and sadistic.fun.

To access these, you have to tweak your computer's settings-a simple
cut-and-paste maneuver. Then you can view everything Name.Space publishes,
along with the entire contents of the root zone.

For Garrin, who won international acclaim as an artist working with video
pioneer Nam June Paik, Name.Space is itself a work of art-a challenge to
the artificial barriers to access and expression on the Net. Inside his
company's dark, spacious loft, real-time displays from Name.Space's server
are projected on the walls. "There's a new registration right now,
VP.mad," he says, pointing to a blinking green light scrolling down the
wall. "Brits like .mad because it means you're wild or something, like
soccer.mad."

In listserv groups, Garrin promoted Name.Space as the "ultimate shareware
project." He and his partners signed a charter laying out principles for a
new, more democratic naming system in which domains like .music and .food
could be shared among cooperating registries. And Name.Space would offer
free software to enable nonprofits and community groups to act as
registrars for their own domains.

"We're de-territorializing the Net," Garrin boasted, "bringing it back to
its original ideal of virtual space without borders or hierarchies."

But having a uniquely expressive domain name doesn't mean much if the rest
of the world can't find it. In March 1997, Name.Space petitioned Network
Solutions to enter its new top-level domains into the root zone. When the
company refused, Garrin sued, charging that its policies violated
antitrust laws and the right to free speech. It was a bold and
controversial move: Here was Garrin, a New Yorker better known in activist
circles for videotaping the 1988 Tompkins Square riot, taking on a
multibillion-dollar behemoth with deep ties to the Pentagon. After three
years of legal wrangling, the courts ruled in January 2000 that Network
Solutions had immunity from antitrust claims because it operated the root
zone under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. government.

By that time, the battlefront had shifted to the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit authorized by the
Clinton administration to oversee expansion of the Net's addressing
system. Last November, ICANN agreed to add seven new domains: .biz, .info,
.name, .pro, .coop, .museum, and .aero, which are slated to go live this
summer. Far from appeasing critics, ICANN's meager and rather lackluster
selections have only provoked further controversy, to the point where
ICANN's own board members have complained that the approval process was
arbitrary and biased toward inside players.

For Garrin, who ponied up the nonrefundable $50,000 application fee,
ICANN's selections were a double-loss. Not only did ICANN reject
Name.Space's plan for 118 new domains, but it gave ones Name.Space was
already operating-.museum, .pro, and .info-to other companies. Fees from
new registrations plummeted, Garrin says, from as much as $3000 a day to
barely $100. "ICANN killed our business," he says.

But Garrin's problem may be simply that he wants too much. Given ICANN's
stated intention of adding a "modest" number of new domains in this "proof
of concept" phase, observers say there's no way he could have ever won
approval for 118. Yet when the board members asked Garrin to select three
from his list, he refused.

This shocked even some of Garrin's sharpest critics and competitors.
"People at the hearings were watching this, saying, 'Come on, Paul, pick
three,' but he wouldn't do that," says Richard Sexton of the Open Root
Server Confederation, a network of alternative root servers. "His
mentality is, it's my way or the highway."

Garrin defends his stance, saying that limiting his application to three
would have meant abandoning customers in all his other domains. "My
business model is based on an economy of scale," he explains. "If I only
pick one or two domains, they may or may not work, but if I have lots of
domains, the profitable ones can subsidize the less commercial ones."

In fact, many of Garrin's proposed domains-like .music, .sex, or
.shop-could easily have enormous commercial potential were they entered
into the root zone. Even the supposedly noncommercial .sucks would have
been a good bet given the penchant for disaffection on the Net. So why not
settle for less now, with the hope of gaining acceptance for more in the
future?

Garrin's refusal to compromise has put him at odds with most in the
alternative root community. There are currently 15 alternative roots,
ranging from adamant free-marketeers to the noncommercial collective
OpenNIC. The scene is rife with strife and ego, as you'd expect from any
collection of geek mavericks. Nevertheless, all but Name.Space have begun
to cooperate by banding together under two shared alternative root
networks: ORSC and PacificRoot.

"All of the other alternate root servers are working toward a single
entity-one alternate root zone," says ORSC's Sexton. "That means we agree
that there can only be one .cam, one .music, etc. Name.Space doesn't care.
They don't care who they collide with, or when. Other people had some of
the same top-level domains that Name.Space has before they started
operating them."

Chris Ambler of Image Online Design, which runs the .Web registry, is even
more emphatic. "The problem with Name.Space is [Garrin] wants something
that no one else has: 500 top-level domains and the ability to create new
ones at will. He's trying to claim everything! He makes lofty claims about
having a shared system, but it requires people to use his system, and he
gets a piece of every new registry! In my book, that's called communism,
or socialism at best."

Garrin counters that while others may have put their stakes on certain
domains, they weren't actually registering people for those sites when
Name.Space placed them online. As for his concept of sharing domains,
Garrin says the idea would be to create a collective server network, with
funds going to upkeep, so that everyone would get equal access and reap
equal rewards. "I'm not looking to build an empire," Garrin insists. "I'm
looking to build an infrastructure that supports the public good. We have
500 top-level domains, but how many other words are there in the English
language? How many other languages are there? If somebody else wants to
set up something, let them invest and do it. There's enough scale that
everybody can make money.

"I've invested five years of my life and savings doing this," Garrin
continues with fervor. "We broke all the models. We listened to people to
give them what they want. We didn't just create all these domains out of
greed or fiat. This is the people's choice."

But with only several thousand customers, Garrin's revolution is losing
steam. In addition to being shut out of the root zone, his company is now
facing far stiffer competition from New.net. A spinoff of Idealab (the
people behind the ill-fated eToys), New.net last month began offering
customers 20 extensions that function as top-level domains-from .chat to
.xxx. Most are already offered by Garrin and other alternative roots. What
gives New.net's scheme added heft is that the company has partnered with
Earthlink, Excite@home, Net.Zero, and MP3.com, creating a market of 16
million customers. And New.net has copied Name.Space's idea of allowing
users to vote on new domains, giving them the potential to monopolize the
alternative market even further.

Until now, ICANN could easily ignore folks running alternate root zones.
Tiny Name.Space and ORSC have never been able to garner enough users to
pose a serious threat to the unified order of the Net. But with marketing
power, New.net could change that. Already, customers on the PacificRoot
servers have complained that their Web addresses are being put up for sale
by New.net, setting a scenario that's ripe for confusion.

The growing rebellion threatens to balkanize the Net. With companies
competing to sell space in the same alternative domains, being able to
view a particular Web site could depend on which Internet service provider
or browser you use. Already, foreign country-code operators are balking at
U.S. control and the hefty fees ICANN has attempted to impose; China
recently bolted the ICANN root and set up its own root system using
Chinese characters; it can be accessed through PacificRoot.

As the debate over how to govern the Net intensifies, Garrin's company is
hanging by a thread. He has cut his staff of programmers, and the computer
stations in his loft off Broadway sit empty. But things may be looking up.
In March, Garrin began negotiating with a group of high-powered investors
who have offered to pump several million dollars into Name.space. While
Garrin won't name the investors, he's optimistic the deal will go through,
and says if it does, his company will have the leverage to gain access to
the root zone. With money for marketing and staff, Garrin believes
Name.Space could earn up to $70 million over the next three years. "We'll
completely change the landscape of the Net," he says.

Of course, the deal could very well collapse. But the fact that such
well-heeled investors are even considering a partnership with a small
innovator like Name.Space is indicative of the pressure to expand the
number of domains.

There again, the fact that Garrin-a guy whose own site, MediaFilter.org,
is filled with avowedly antiauthoritarian and anticorporate content-finds
no contradiction in seeking to become one of those vested interests says
something larger about the market imperatives of the Web. The Internet's
is the first revolution whose pioneers believed they could create a better
world while making themselves rich. So far the Net has made quite a few
people rich. The jury's still out as to whether it has made the world that
much better.








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