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...."
"...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..."
O.K. IOD is mentioned, too:
"...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..."