Whats In a Name? Everything!
By Don Rittner

When computer gurus were putting the Internet together years ago they realized it would need some way to organize the way information was transferred to all the users of the network. They came up with a scheme called the Domain Address, which is probably familiar to you if you have been using the Net for any time. The idea was to take all the computer networks that belong to the educational community and group them into the .edu domain. Take all the commercial companies and group them into the .com domain, and so on.

Every time you type in a Web address or email to someone you are using the domain address. There are about 100 top level domains, although in the United States you are most likely familiar with com., org., gov., edu., and net.

Since 1993, Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI), an organization with an interesting history, has been the only provider of domain name registration services in the .com, .net and .org top-level domains. This little cozy relationship was established between NSI and the Government. Until recently, their fees for registering a domain were pretty high and each year you had to pay them an annual sacrifice to keep the name. Of course no one really knows why you need pay anything at all? Couldn't a computer keep track of that for free? I'm not a big fan of NSI. Nothing personal. I just dont like monopolies. They don't return phone calls either.

Well starting this month, NSI has to share this responsibility, that is give up their monopoly on domain registrations for the .com, .net, and .org domains. This is now called the "Shared Registration System."

What does that mean to you? There are now five other registrars looking for your money and that also means you may see a drop in the price of $100 to register and $35 per year renewal. There will be more new registrars as well in the near future. That is good news. Competition is good (listening Bill Gates?).

According to NSI, this new registrar accreditation process is being conducted by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a not-for-profit corporation created by the global Internet community to assume responsibility for certain Internet domain name system functions. We will talk about them in the future.

Most people register domains through their local Internet Service Provider (ISP) like Global2000 or Wizvax. Some ISPs charge $50 more as a handling fee. You can, of course, register a domain by yourself by going to www.internic.net and save a few bucks. You can also search at the Internic site to see if the domain name you want is available.

Naturally, like anything humans create, there tend to be quirks. When the Net went public in 1990, several enterprising people began buying up the domain names of big name companies like McDonalds, IBM, etc., and then resold the rights back to those companies for a high price. This practice, known as "cyber squatting," has been checked for the most part, but there are still conflicts over who owns a domain name.

I found this out personally recently.

When I was writing my book "EcoLinking - Everyones Guide to Online Environmental Information," back in 1990, I was struck by the use of the term MESH as the original name for the World Wide Web in a concept paper written in 1989. This is the first name that Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Web, applied to this interconnecting hyperlink of information that we call the Web today. MESH seemed more appropriate to me since I could envision this electronic mesh of computer connections around the globe. When I decided to publish an Internet magazine in 1994, "The MESH" seemed like a perfect name and it has been known as "The MESH - Inside Cyberspace," ever since. In 1994, I registered mesh.com as our domain name and the web site of the same name so you can read the articles online.

Well recently, I received a letter from a high priced Washington D.C. law firm telling me the government, actually the Library of Medicine, wants my mesh.com name and that I was infringing on their trademark.

I am a big believer in protecting intellectual property, but disagreed strongly with their claim. As a government entity they should be using mesh.gov anyway (they are). Their trademark which was given long before the Net was around gives them protection for the storage and retrieval of biomedical literature. Sorry, but I don't cover that. Also, they were not harassing the owners of mesh.net or other domain names with mesh in it. Sounds fishy to me.

So, now I will have go fight Uncle Sam who is using my tax money to pay a law firm to harass me over a legally obtained domain name? Hmm, sounds like a David-Goliath story. Stay tuned.