A free-for-all of geeks, lawyers, capitalists, and bureaucrats fight over the Net's holy temple – the root server.
It didn't take more than a couple of days. Eugene Kashpureff marched down to the basement of his rented home on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula last July and punched some keys on a Toshiba Pentium laptop he'd named kissmyass.com. As hacks go it wasn't among the most complicated of maneuvers; theories abounded throughout the Net about how he hijacked electronic traffic bound for Network Solutions Inc., the company charged with registering domain names, to his fledgling alternative registry.
But as a political act it was brilliant. In no more than a few days the bearded former repo man showed the planet just how fragile the Internet is, how powerful its guardians have become, and how explosive the issue of Internet governance is. With his simple act, the hotshot whose previous crowning achievement was computerizing Seattle's towing industry had forced the Internet to look squarely into the future.
For Kashpureff, a father of four young boys, it may have been the dumbest move of his life. First, there was undoubtedly embarrassment and humiliation: he didn't get much online support from either the Internet establishment or Net radicals, many of whom were – and remain – unconvinced that his ends justified the means.
"I don't believe people should break security to prove there's a bug," says Andy Oram, cyber rights moderator for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Recalls Karl Denninger, founder of Chicago-based Internet service provider MCSNet, "At the time he did this he was told by a large number of people, myself included, that there was a very serious chance of being brought up on wire-fraud charges and that he should get the hell out of the country." Later, after settling a civil case and relocating to Canada, Kashpureff was extradited to the US. Today he awaits indictment.
For the Internet, on the other hand, his hack couldn't have been a more powerful catalyst. The domain-name system (DNS) connects an Internet address like ibm.com with the numerical IP address that identifies its host server. Until 1993 the number of domain-name registrants was a mere 200 to 300 per month. Today that volume has exploded to an average of more than 3,000 per day. And as the mainstream has discovered the Internet, it has seen the inevitable fallout of the virtual world colliding with the real world, of board-game manufacturer Hasbro, for instance, learning that a porn purveyor holds the domain name candyland.com. To a large extent, whoever controls the DNS – and the root server, the holy temple in which all names are housed – also controls the Internet.
According to Eugene Kashpureff, this is the tyranny he wanted to expose, and Network Solutions is the sitting despot. In a certain metaphorical sense, for five to six days in July the Internet had been "repossessed" as users everywhere, heading for NSI's InterNIC domain-name registry, ended up at Kashpureff's AlterNIC instead.
NSI, a tiny consulting company founded in 1979 by a group of engineers with TCP/IP expertise, had bid for the deal to manage the Net's naming system back in 1992. That year, the National Science Foundation granted InterNIC exclusive right to the top-level domains (TLDs) .com, .org, .net, and .edu. This was minor-league stuff then. The Net was still largely used for academic and defense research, and NSI was compensated on a cost-plus basis. Name registration was underwritten by the NSF.
All that changed in 1995 when the Internet made its way into the hearts of everyday people. That's when Science Applications International Corporation, a US$4 billion technology conglomerate based in San Diego, acquired NSI. It's also when the NSF realized it lacked the ability to fund the Internet's explosive growth and worked out an arrangement whereby NSI could charge $100 to register and maintain each domain name for two years and was authorized to collect an annual $50 fee. (Thirty percent of the fees gathered by NSI were to be contributed to a fund to preserve and enhance the Internet – the Internet Intellectual Infrastructure Fund. As of January that fund totaled $46 million, half of which has been appropriated by Congress for the administration's Next-Generation Internet Initiative.)
By the time Kashpureff had begun to create a reputation for himself as a domain-name radical who opposed the NSI stranglehold and the US government's role in running the Internet, Network Solutions had registered more than a million names, was expanding at a staggering 20 percent a month, and was poised to launch a public offering.
Yet it was also in the last year of its cooperative agreement with the NSF. Now that the Internet had exploded into a massive commercial communications medium, the NSF was willing to hand over its ultimate authority. Even NSI could predict that its dominance in the domain-name game wouldn't last forever.
So with the expiration of the company's role originally scheduled for March 1998 – now extended to September – and with the Internet growing in ways that were undreamed of even two years ago, Kashpureff knew when he designed his InterNIC hack that the future of the Internet was at stake. "As the Internet is the communications medium of the future, it is most important that we fight for our rights there," he says. And what's wrong with the domain-name system? "Lack of choice," Kashpureff replies. "The fact that the control of domain-name space still lies with the US government. Every other country in the world has to settle for their two-letter International Organization for Standardization code. The US gets to sit on and allocate a whole bunch more than that."
Just whose Internet is it, anyway? This question was being raised long before Kashpureff pulled his stunt. Today a burgeoning array of bureaucrats, geeks, lawyers, capitalists, and other interested parties are frantically addressing it. Should the Net's keeper be the US Defense Department, from whence the creature sprang, and its powerful private-sector spin-offs? Or should it be some new Geneva-based supranational institution controlled by United Nations-chartered entities? Should the guardian be the gentleman-anarchist technocrats who have been so capable at guiding their child through infancy, but who now may be out of their collective parental league? Or an amorphous industry cooperative of the sort that never seems to settle on industry standards?
When it comes to understanding the players in this quickly overheating controversy, it's best to picture Kashpureff as an inhabitant of the left-hand side of the continuum, which includes the handful of alternative domain-name registrars and others who support the forces of free-market competition. They want to open up TLDs to any organizations that can sell the names and technically support their use. They want to share access to the root server.
Some, like Kashpureff, want the US government to relinquish control. Others, like Kathryn Kleiman, general counsel for the Domain Name Rights Coalition, would prefer that the Feds be involved in devising a democratic system of Internet governance. (The DNRC was founded after controversy arose over the use of the domain name peta.org – for People Eating Tasty Animals, a parody organization – because the acronym was used in the noncyber world by the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.)
The political center is populated by the Internet establishment, the folks who have guided the DOD's noble experiment from its origins as a highly decentralized tool for academic and defense-related research. (As amazing as it seems, the Internet is, technically speaking, still an experiment. The NSF could pull the plug on the whole damn thing before September, when the experimental period ends.) The old guard here is the Internet Society, an autonomous nonprofit organization; the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, a US government-chartered and -funded entity that operates out of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California with Jon Postel, aka the Internet God, at its head; and the Internet Engineering Task Force, a voluntary organization that creates standards for emerging online technologies.
The centrist leadership – the International Ad Hoc Committee, which in late 1996 became the Policy Oversight Committee (POC) – brought forth its own solution to Internet domain-name registry and Net governance. It joined such global institutions as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a standards body for telcos, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to wrest control from the US government and NSI. The group's game plan included seven new top-level domains; a network of global domain-name registration organizations called the Council of Registrars, or CORE; and a database headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area that would clear domain names much like airlines release seats on flights. This faction, headed by David Maher, a Chicago patent and trademark attorney who is an outside counsel for McDonald's Corporation, would like to see domain-name registry controlled by the Internet old guard and the international bodies.
The POC came under attack from the left for not representing the shallow-pocketed individuals and small businesses that populate the Internet. Even its attempts to add nine new members to represent those interests was viewed with skepticism. "Nine out of 20 would not be of the cabal that's starting this. You're getting closer," observed Harry Hochheiser, director at large of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Others claim that the POC scheme gave big business too much power in trademark disputes and that the Internet establishment – which has done such a stellar job of shepherding the great experiment through its infancy but is overwhelmed by its adolescence – is, through sleight of hand, relinquishing power to the ITU and WIPO.
But the fate of the POC, and that of Internet governance itself, is on hold with the release in late January of the Green Paper report, a collection of recommendations by the Commerce Department on what President Clinton should do with the Internet.
The report calls for a two-year transition away from US government authority, with a new nonprofit corporation to be formed to take over responsibilities now shared by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and NSI. It also recommends opening both registrar and registry functions to competition and adding five new registries, each limited to one TLD.
"It's too much government intervention for too long," trademark attorney David Maher stated in response to the report. "And why do you have to redo what the POC has already done?" He is particularly critical of the suggestion of instituting for-profit registries.
On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from Kashpureff is Network Solutions. NSI, which derives 25 percent of its revenues from an intranet consulting business, began turning a profit in the last quarter of 1996. By September 1997 it had raised $54 million in an initial public offering despite the fact that the Justice Department began investigating the company to determine whether its exclusive arrangement with the NSF violates antitrust laws and despite an antitrust suit brought by PG Media, a small New York-based Web-design business that wants NSI to enter some new top-level domains into the root server. (Both actions are still pending.) On September 30 the nearly 300-employee NSI announced record quarterly earnings: $1.2 million on sales of $12.2 million – a 135 percent increase over the previous quarter. The following day, as coincidence would have it, Eugene Kashpureff was arrested in Canada on an immigration charge stemming from the arrest warrant the US Attorney General's office had issued weeks earlier.
But as Network Solutions' fortunes started taking off, so did opposition in the Internet community. Among the issues: NSI's unwillingness to add new TLDs, something the company says the NSF will not allow it to do. Critics also claimed that the company took a heavy-handed approach to handling domain-name disputes – a method that favored trademark holders. And many in the tech world felt uncomfortable that the board of directors of SAIC, which owns 75 percent of NSI, is packed with former government officials – the suggestion being that in some underhanded way, the Internet still is a tool of the DOD.
Nevertheless, naysayers aren't slowing NSI's business success. Even with a September showdown, its operations won't be devastated if, as the Green Paper suggests, it shares responsibility for registering the most popular domain names. The company already holds contracts to manage more than a million existing names. It's also in a strong financial position to exploit new TLDs and new markets for domain names. Network Solutions CEO Gabe Battista, who joined the company in October 1996 after a stint as head of telecommunications services provider Cable & Wireless Inc., repeatedly has said that his company doesn't object to allowing more TLDs. "We're working very hard with the industry and the government to bring about competition in .com. We're looking at different designs," he says, adding that a new domain-name system would require "reliability, stability, and security."
That, of course, is just the sort of warning that originally concerned Eugene Kashpureff. "Anyone who wants to run a TLD and can put forward a reasonable technical competence for doing such and can show a minimum level of interest in that TLD being created should be able to apply to a board and have that TLD issued to them to run a registry," he said in an interview at Toronto's Metro West Detention Centre, where he was held for nearly two months. Kashpureff's vision for seizing the Net from the grip of any central authority pitted him directly against NSI. "I could have taken whitehouse.com," he boasted of his InterNIC hack, telling friends he also had the capacity to remove China from the Internet. But instead, Kashpureff chose what he saw as a more suitable victim: the company that was amassing a fortune in domain-name registry fees.
Eugene Kashpureff has some of the trademarks of a bona fide revolutionary: He is the hero of all his stories, and he has left a trail of unfortunate encounters with authority figures. His mother kicked him out of the house at 13 for growing pot in his room and other adolescent offenses. Kashpureff says that he lived on the streets and stayed with friends during high school in Seattle, dropping out to become a mechanic despite the fact that he wasn't old enough to drive, and later passing the GED. His seaman/engineer father disinherited him when he married Sandy, a "hippie chick" who made copper-wire name pins in Pike Place Market. Kashpureff's the sort of guy who sees everybody in authority as the asshole eighth-grade science teacher.
There were two big turning points in his life. The first occurred when he was about 7 or 8 years old and saw the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, the kind of movie that passed for an action flick during the early 1970s. What impressed the young Kashpureff most while watching the film was the futuristic computer setup on an oil derrick: "I went to the library and started checking out books on computers; one was on binary mathematics. I went home that night and started playing with binary math and octal math and hexadecimal math, and the next day I showed my teacher what I was doing. She immediately freaked and sent me to the school counselor." Kashpureff built his first computer when he was 10.
At North Seattle Community College, Kashpureff spent most of his time at the computer lab. He dropped out of school again, this time when a company that developed medical accounting systems hired him for his computer skills. At 22 or 23, he recounts, "I started getting burned out on turning screwdrivers on systems, so I went back to the towing company where I worked as a teenager. I started computerizing paperwork in the industry. Don't laugh – there's a lot of paperwork with repossessed cars." Eventually, he wrote software in partnership with the company's owner. "I understand that Seattle Central Towing is still selling copies of it," Kashpureff says.
The second big event happened in June 1995. That's when Eugene Kashpureff discovered the Internet. "I was a member of the Commodity Club of Seattle, a businessman's club, and at a weekly meeting one of the members gave a demonstration of the Internet. Having spent the previous two years in the front seat of a tow truck, I hadn't seen the Net yet. I knew then that it was going to revolutionize our daily lives.
"I literally got out of the front seat of the tow trucks on that day," Kashpureff recalls. "I picked up a copy of The Internet Starter Kit for Windows on the way home, and that afternoon I had my first Internet account. Within the first week we had a very extensive homepage up for the towing company – we were one of the companies featured in Daniel Janal's 101 Businesses You Can Start on the Internet." And within a month he had started a business with Diane Boling, a mechanic he'd worked with whose uncertain gender identity remains a hot topic among Toronto's Internet crowd. "We were competing with Nynex in the Internet Yellow Pages market," Kashpureff says. "Nynex put the city of New York on the Internet. We put the city of Seattle on the Internet. They put up New York State; we put up Washington State. They put up New England; we added Oregon and California. We were battling this massive company to see who could get the most comprehensive listings up first."
In February Boling gave Kashpureff the idea to start AlterNIC, an alternative root-name server, partly to make money – as much as $1,000 per year per TLD – and partly as a political gesture. The alternative registry became operational on April Fool's Day 1996 and began introducing such new TLDs as .xxx, .med, .nic, .ltd, .lnx, and .exp.
"We invested a good amount of money and a good amount of time placing eight servers strategically around North America," Kashpureff says. "And then we offered these files up publicly. These name servers not only supported new TLDs, but they also remained consistent with the TLDs that were already included in the government-run name servers. You could still get to the .com names, but in addition to those we would add those other new names into the file, and we would serve them up as well. At the height of operations over the summer, our surveys of the Internet showed that as much as 3 percent of the Internet was running off our root-name servers as opposed to the government's, which is very healthy, because that 3 percent made a conscious choice to change."
While AlterNIC gained ground, Kashpureff was quickly establishing a name for himself – and collecting enemies – among Internet pioneers. His reputation stemmed not so much from his politics, but from his propensity to criticize the people running the show and even those who shared his views. Kashpureff offers an example: "Karl Denninger. He's no longer a fan of mine. We had a falling out. We tried to evolve the AlterNIC into being eDNS – or enhanced DNS – last spring, and Karl tried to storm everybody and it became a 'Karl's law' type of thing." Responds Denninger: "I don't think at the root level of the DNS that charging people a large amount of money is appropriate. Eugene did. He thought he was God on this, on any alternative root system, because he set one up."
Kashpureff had also been earning a reputation as a valuable asset in understanding Internet security concerns. During the summer of 1996 he was invited to New York to meet with a team from a company that was considering a move into the domain-name registration business. He turned down a job offer because he didn't want to move to New York, but there he met another prospect for the enterprise, a longtime Internet consultant from Toronto named Richard Sexton. The two became quick friends, and Sexton introduced him to various members of the wirehead community in Toronto, where Kashpureff stayed for a time before returning to the Seattle area.
Then, last summer, when Network Solutions announced plans for an IPO, the hacker in the Washington woods became incensed at the company's hubris.
To the best of everybody's knowledge, the hack he fought back with from kissmyass.com was straightforward. If you ask a DNS server to look up a name it doesn't know, it locates and queries a server that can provide the address, which sends the information to you. The query format includes an "additional data" field with space for extra information. In this case Kashpureff used that field to his own ends, apparently sending off a message saying that www.internic.net referred to his IP address. Although Kashpureff provided a link to InterNIC, this trick sent traffic intended for InterNIC to his own AlterNIC Web site.
On July 21, 1997, Network Solutions filed a civil action against Kashpureff. Accompanied by girlfriend Rosemary Villalta, he journeyed to Alexandria, Virginia, to give a deposition and eventually worked out a settlement with NSI: Kashpureff was to pay NSI a token amount for some legal fees and issue a public apology, which he did over the Net. It read:
"I am very sorry about the name-service interruption that I caused. I sincerely apologize to the Internet community as a whole and to Network Solutions Inc. for my actions. The Internet provides a great free and open space. I want to be sure that it stays that way. My actions hindered others' freedom to use and enjoy the Internet. For this I am deeply and sincerely sorry. I will not engage in these or similar actions in the future. I am cooperating with Network Solutions to try and make sure that my actions cannot be duplicated by others. Again, I offer my apologies to the Internet community."
Kashpureff repeated his apology at the beginning of a presentation he made at the ISPcon meeting in San Francisco in August. Then he returned to friends in Canada.
In mid-September, the lawyer representing Kashpureff phoned to say that the US Attorney General's office in Brooklyn was about to issue a warrant for his arrest on wire-fraud charges stemming from the hack on NSI. Kashpureff contacted a Canadian attorney, who made an effort to cooperate with Joel Cohen, the US attorney handling the case. According to Kashpureff, Cohen never returned his lawyer's calls. Cohen says the attorney left voicemail requesting a month's delay in any action, which Cohen reports he couldn't possibly have accommodated.
Kashpureff's friends say that his then-employer gave the domain-name activist $3,000 to seed his legal defense. Instead, Kashpureff turned the money over to his wife Sandy so she could rent a place in Canada for herself, Diane Boling, and the kids; they moved to a small house in the Toronto suburb of Brampton, Ontario. For his part, Kashpureff was living with Rosemary Villalta in her family's Toronto home and driving to the suburban offices of his new employer.
On Halloween 1997 Kashpureff was smoking a cigarette outside his office when two Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers ordered him to drop to his knees and put his hands behind his head. Kashpureff says the arrest came as a surprise. "It was basically my first knowledge that there was a problem," he insists.
"Our concern is that this is criminal conduct that needs to be redressed," says Joel Cohen.
On the day he was interviewed for this article, Kashpureff had been sitting in Toronto's Metro-West Detention Centre for 13 days without bail, and Cohen was asked whether the US government was not in some way using Kashpureff's political action – a prank, in some people's minds – to set an example for other would-be activists. That, or to establish boundaries in computer crime. "We have to make other individuals aware," Cohen counters. "There's always a deterrent value in any prosecution."
While Cohen will not explain why the Feds are pursuing Kashpureff with criminal charges, some observers speculate that they were angered that he fled the country despite possible warnings that he was under investigation by the FBI. For his part, Cohen says, "Whether he did flee or not had nothing to do with our decision to prosecute."
Network Solutions disavows any role in getting the US government involved. "We had no contact with them," says NSI spokesperson Chris Clough. "They had cause for action because some business on Long Island complained about not being able to access InterNIC to complete registration. Supposedly, they've had several of these." Adds CEO Gabe Battista, "We clearly settled with Mr. Kashpureff. We have had nothing to do with what the US government is doing. I don't know why they're pursuing it, and I don't even know what the charges are. It's not on our radar screen."
Kashpureff, following the advice of his then-attorney in Canada, William Gilmour, refused to comment on NSI.
On December 17, 1997, Kashpureff waived his rights to fight extradition. Friends said he was not holding up well. His wife was concerned about the cost of his legal defense. (Diane Boling racked up few contributors when she launched the Eugene Kashpureff Legal Defense Fund online. In fact, one member of the Internet community sent the message: "How much do I have to pay to keep him in jail forever?") Without immigrant status, Kashpureff's two school-age boys were not permitted to attend school in Canada.
Kashpureff was flown in handcuffs to a prison in New York, and on Christmas Eve he was released after signing a $75,000 personal-recognizance bond that his father-in-law, Earl Peterson of Tacoma, Washington, cosigned several weeks later. Eugene, Sandy, and the four boys were invited to stay in an extra bedroom in his uncle's basement. Kashpureff's attorney promptly cut him off from the press.
With Kashpureff out of contact, Richard Sexton and the other Toronto wireheads who had custody of the alternative registry suddenly found themselves without access to the root password. Kashpureff would neither respond to email nor make himself available by phone to AlterNIC principals, one of whom offered himself up to the US attorney as a character witness – against the domain-name radical.
Meanwhile, Ira Magaziner, President Clinton's senior adviser on electronic commerce, was soliciting all factions in the domain-name controversy for the long-anticipated Green Paper, the game plan for privatizing the Internet. In an attempt to get input from every possible stakeholder, he conducted interviews with more than 100 players, among them the DNRC's Kathryn Kleiman.
"The forces have to recognize each other's strength and use them instead of fighting them," says Sexton. "They have to work at it, starting from what they agree on, instead of arguing. Unless there is peace there is war, and war only wastes time and money."
That seems to be the thinking of Network Solutions, which is wasting neither commodity – time or money – as it prepares for the inevitable postmonopoly life. The company has lured more than a dozen new senior managers from such powerhouse corporations as IBM and GE Information Systems and has hired NSI's first lobbyists. The firm has watched the international portion of its registry business grow from 13 percent of total sales to nearly 30 percent in the past year and is setting its sights on capturing more of that business, even as other registries enter the picture. It's also pushing forward into the small-business market. In January the company introduced WorldNIC, a front-end product that enables customers to quickly register a domain name without going through an ISP. NSI can host the domain-name system records until the customer selects an ISP for Web hosting.
In Internet time the Kashpureff prank is ancient history, and rather than dwelling on such unpleasantness – or the potential for more mishaps – NSI seems to be enjoying the prospects of a win-win situation.
"If there is the development of a central registry and there are shared registrars, we would support it if it can be done in a way that provides for stability and reliability," says CEO Battista. "Also, if new TLDs are introduced, we would expect to be prepared to offer those. It's not likely our business will be devastated." For one thing, the company has a solid financial cushion – its IPO raised $54 million. And its method of recognizing revenues – the two-year registry fees are recognized throughout the 24-month period – gives NSI a high degree of predictability. "Those reserves put us in a strong position for alliances and acquisitions," explains NSI spokesperson Clough.
Of course, because of would-be Kashpureffs, NSI is also trying its best to keep a low profile. The building that houses its InterNIC operation is located away from the company's headquarters, and NSI will not divulge its whereabouts. "We try to keep its location low key," explains Dave Holtzman, NSI's senior vice president of engineering, pointing out that InterNIC's root server is a single potential point of failure on the Internet. "We've had bomb threats," he adds – most of them online. "We get roughly 150 penetrations a day." So far, no one has done any damage.
And perhaps it will stay that way. Villalta, one of the few people in contact with Kashpureff, reported that the domain-name activist was expecting to trade prison and a felony conviction for an agreement to never again work in the computer industry.
In a phone interview from his attorney's office in late January – the day of the release of the Green Paper – Kashpureff refuses to discuss such prospects, or anything involving his case. But he says of the report, "I read it first thing this morning. It's a better thing. It's still a bad thing."
Says Villalta, "He might just have to go back to driving a tow truck."
Battle of the Acronyms
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Who's who in the domain-name debate.
SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) A technical conglomerate that owns 75 percent of NSI. Business
NSI (Network Solutions Inc.) A company that registers the majority of domain names under a registry known as InterNIC; purchased by SAIC in 1995. Business
CORE (Council of Registrars) An association of registrars that proposed adding seven new TLDs. Private
IAB (Internet Architecture Board) A tech advisory group for ISOC responsible for defining the overall architecture of the Internet and providing guidance and direction to the IETF. Private
IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) An open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet's architecture; established by the IAB. Private
ITU (International Telecommunication Union) A UN-affiliated standards body based in Geneva that coordinates global telecom networks and services. International
POC (Policy Oversight Committee) An organization that hopes to oversee the DNS. Under a current proposal it would include representatives from many Internet organizations, including WIPO and the ITU. Private
IAHC (International Ad Hoc Committee) A body formed in 1996 by ISOC to propose changes in the DNS; the IAHC evolved into the POC and proposed establishing CORE. Private
ISOC (Internet Society) A nonprofit, nongovernmental international professional-membership organization for global cooperation and coordination of the Internet and its technologies and applications; it announced the formation of the IAHC in 1996. Private
WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) A UN-chartered group that negotiates the arbitration of international trade law. International
IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) A largely government-funded overseer of IP allocations, chartered by the FNC and ISOC. (IANA's root system and DNS databases are being gradually transferred by the US government to a new nonprofit corporation.)
FNC (Federal Networking Council) An 18-member board that includes representatives from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, the NSF, and other federal agencies; it acts as a forum for networking collaboration and is affiliated with IANA and the IETF. Government
NSF (National Science Foundation) The US government agency that formed a cooperative agreement for registering the majority of domain names with NSI; it could – in theory – pull the plug on the Internet when NSI's agreement expires on September 30. It also has authority over the root-zone structure created by Jon Postel of IANA. Government
AlterNIC An alternative root server created by Eugene Kashpureff to rival InterNIC; principally financed by Jason Hendeles of Skyman Enterprises. Business
White House Interagency Working Group on Domain Names A team headed by White House adviser Ira Magaziner that has fashioned a transition plan to transfer DNS oversight to the private sector after NSI's contract agreement expires. Government
