Internet ‘Cop’ Faces Challenge Keeping Order Network Solutions Saddled With ‘Bad Guy’ Image

The Internet has no center, beginning or end, but nearly every company, institution or organization that connects to it eventually deals with Network Solutions Inc.

The company since early 1993 has run the main registry of Internet addresses, or domains. Called InterNIC, it is the place where IBM, for instance, signed up to get ibm.com as its Internet destination.

This distinction has thrust Network Solutions into a position of broad influence over the global data network. Originally a small government contractor, the technologically adroit firm has found itself turned into a kind of electronic traffic cop - and a target of longtime users who hate to see the Internet commercialized.

Until last fall, the federal government paid for the domain registry, a legacy of the Internet’s origin in military and academic computing. The government now pays to register only educational and governmental institutions.

Everyone else has to pay Network Solutions a $50 annual fee, a change that angered Internet users (individuals who connect to the Internet through a provider like CompuServe or America Online do not have to pay).

Network Solutions stirred up even more controversy by recently starting to remove non-payers from the Internet and with its policy that gives trademark holders priority when a domain name is in dispute.

“At every turn in trying to accommodate the community in this pioneering transition, we’ve created a bad guy image for ourselves,” said Donald Telage, president of Network Solutions.

But the company, for all the controversy, is also incredibly spry, keeping pace with the rush of companies and organizations connecting to the Internet and preparing new services to maintain its growth when that rush ends.

“We fix our wheels without stopping the wagon,” Telage said, drawing again on the frontier metaphor.

In addition to maintaining the Internet registry for the most popular domains - .com, .org, .edu, .gov and .net - Network Solutions has an Internet engineering group that works with companies to set up the connections and is jumping into the directory business. One aim: to create a way to find someone online without using a cumbersome address.

“We want to become the first global Internet utility,” Telage said. “We see ourselves as developing and offering the underlying services.”

That sounds ambitious for a company that employed about 20 people a year ago and 150 now.

But Network Solutions is a subsidiary of Science Applications International Corp., a $2.5 billion technology products and services firm. About 80 percent of its work is for the federal government and about half of that is military and intelligence-related.

SAIC bought Network Solutions in March 1995 to round out its telecommunications practice. At that time, the Internet registry was a small part of Network Solutions’ work.

Telage, who led SAIC’s telecom unit at the time, brought Network Solutions into that operation at first. Then, with the growth of the Internet registry, he made that business a stand-alone entity again.

“It wasn’t until two or three months after the acquisition that we really started to see the exponential explosion of the Internet,” said David Graves, who started Network Solutions’ Internet business several years ago and remains its top manager. “People were hit between the eyes.”

In March 1995, there were about 52,500 registrants in the domains that Network Solution records. By March 1996, the company was recording that many new registrants each month. By the end of July, there were just under 500,000 registered domains.

The windfall to the company has not been as great as the number of registrants would suggest. Many have not paid and a sizable portion of the registrations have been by speculators who try to sell domain names to people who really want them.

Chief financial officer Robert Korzeniewski said Network Solutions is earning a “reasonable profit but not exorbitant.” The National Science Foundation, the government agency that originally hired the company to run the registry, performs a quarterly audit.

Criticism about Network Solutions’ registration fee actually faded as people chalked it up as a small, previously hidden, cost for a basic level of stability on the Internet.

More troublesome has been the company’s policy for resolving disputes between parties that want the same domain name. It is designed to keep the company out of a fray and look to courts for more guidance.

“The courts will have to decide how trademark law applies to cyberlaw, which now is basically no law,” Telage said.

But, at its most controversial, the policy says that a trademark holder will have priority for a domain with the same name over someone who may have already registered that name. For instance, the National Basketball Association by virtue of its trademark could take nba.com away from an individual or company who had already been assigned it.

In addition, Network Solutions places a disputed domain name on “hold,” meaning it can’t be used while the matter is solved.

“They created great difficulty for us with their policy,” said Jane Hill, president of Roadrunner Computer Systems, an Internet access and consulting firm in Santa Fe, N.M.

Warner Bros., which has a trademark for Road Runner because of its cartoon character by that name, last year went after the roadrunner.com address that Roadrunner Computer Systems had used for some time.

Roadrunner Computer Systems obtained a court order to prevent Network Solutions from putting its domain on hold. Meanwhile, Warner and Roadrunner Computer Systems began talking and reached an agreement that allowed the New Mexico company to keep the address.

Hill and others question Network Solutions’ authority to impose rules that everyone connecting to the Internet must abide.

But company executives insist they need to bring some control to the chaos. Graves, who wrote the policy with intellectual property attorneys, turned for ideas to phone companies, on-line providers and even motor vehicle bureaus, which have committees that review applications for vanity license plates.

Michael Greenlee, an intellectual property attorney in Atlanta uninvolved with Network Solutions, said, “There tends to be a fairly equitable result from all of these domain name disputes.”

But he noted the issue and several others, such as when is it permissible for someone to use a trademark or logo that doesn’t belong to them on their Web page, must be resolved to give businesses more confidence about the Internet.

“The quality of information on the Internet is getting better,” Greenlee said. “The question is are existing copyright and trademark laws, which in no way contemplated this sort of medium, adequate for it.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: INTERNET REGISTRATIONS NEARING 500,000 MARK Internet addresses are characterized by three-letter initials that signify the type of organization attached to them. The initials used in the addresses, which are also known as “domains,” typically follow the symbol in electronic mail or “www” designation in a World Wide Web site. Two authorities in the United States control domain registration systems. The first, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority at the University of Southern California, controls names that end with a .us abbreviation. The Internet Network Information Center, or InterNIC, controls more commonly used addresses with endings like .com, .edu and .gov. InterNIC’s name registry is administered by Network Solutions Inc., a private company in Herndon, Va. Registrations in those domains have climbed from about 23,000 in July 1994 to just under 500,000 last month. The fastest growth has been in commercial registrants, signified by the .com suffix. Non-profit and other non-governmental organizations get a .org designation. Educational institutions are signified by .edu and government agencies by .gov. Companies with Internet-related services use .net. The military uses the designation .mil but its domain names are controlled by the Defense Department. Associated Press