The declaration, which runs to more than a thousand words, was posted on hundreds of Web sites and was a clarion call to regulators, lawyers and courts to leave the Internet community alone. As the Internet became more commercial and the space more contested, various new conflicts erupted between governments and the community and between individuals and corporations. In these it was often the spirit of this declaration – its wilful libertarianism and plea for independence from the laws and courts of the corporeal world – that was invoked.
When etoy heard John Perry Barlow talking at Ars Electronica, they were struck most of all by his question about cyberspace, ‘Does it supplant the real or is there, in it, reality itself?’ Barlow drenched his answer in the utopianism of the euphoric believers in the Californian technological dream. The new world that he was describing was not just going to be a replacement for the real one; it could, he hoped, be an improvement on it, more humanistic and wonderful. ‘When we are all together in cyberspace then we will see what the human spirit, and the basic desire to connect, can create there … Despite its current (and, perhaps, in some areas permanent) insufficiencies, we should go to cyberspace with hope. Groundless hope, like unconditional love, may be the only kind that counts.’
Zai, Brainhard, Gramazio, Kubli, Esposto, Udatny and Goldstein had now found real motivation to explore the new world. They were willing to go into cyberspace with dreams that it could perhaps be a more interesting place than the real world. They were also ready and willing to protect this new space from the drones of the old world who were intent on imposing a dull morality on it. They were to be the ‘the First Street Gang of the Information Super Data Highway’.
After the festival, Zai and Brainhard returned to Vienna, the others to Zürich. Their determination to live online crystallised. The only impediment was their need for a catchy and distinctive domain name of their own – like in cnn.com or bbc.co.uk – the address where they would park their Web site. To continue the metaphor of cyberspace as the digital West, the domain name was like a homestead, the claim of the frontiersman. During the Internet’s goldrush years, millions of hopeful punters bought such claims, in the belief that a name was all it took to strike Internet gold. Indeed, some did win out, selling simple names – such as events.com or business.com – for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and later millions. etoy were conscious that their decision to acquire a domain name was vital to their future.
When the Domain Name System was invented, the possibility for avaricious demand was never even contemplated; it was simply designed to make the locating of information easier and to organise the network more efficiently. But, as the Internet grew more commercial, the Domain Name System became the focus of a heated and rancorous conflict, at the heart of which lay the question of who should control the Internet itself.
At the epicentre of this battle was Jon Postel, of TCP/IP Standards fame. Since co-authoring the Standards, he had gone on to edit the documents that further improved the working of the network. It was his work on the Domain Name System, however, that ultimately gained him heroic status.
The Domain Name System began life in 1983. Postel had asked his colleague Paul Mockapetris to write a specification about how a naming system for the Internet could work. Already in place was the system of giving every computer on the network a number, the so-called IP number, but these were difficult to remember. Also, rather like the old telephone system, there was no easy way to carry the numbers between computers – in effect meaning that every time a user switched computers they had to take a new email address. The Domain Name System was to overlay the IP numbers with a portable and easy-to-remember name system.
The central idea of Mockapetris’s Domain Name System is that there is only one ‘address book’, which accurately locates every computer on the Internet. Without a unique address for each computer, information intended for one machine could end up at another; were this to happen, the Internet would no longer be a unified and universal information system, but rather a set of fragmented, networked fiefdoms. In deciding on this single naming system, Mockapetris gave enormous power to the authorities in control of the registration and stewardship of the domain names, in that they could decide to delete any entry from the Internet without offering an alternative.
Essential to Mockapetris’s system is arguably the most powerful document on the Internet, the A-Root, containing the key to the complete road map – all the addresses for every named computer connected to the Internet. Following the creation of the Domain Name System, this document became the Royal Standard, the Holy Grail over which competing armies in the domain wars would fight. What is most remarkable about the all-important A-Root is that it contains only 250 lines of information. Yet this tiny record, while not a list of every computer sitting on the Internet, can determine the addresses of the hundreds of millions of computers on the Internet; it is a collection of pointers to where this information can be found.
The distribution of the singular address book among many hands was not only an elegant technical solution to the problem of managing what would become such a big network, but also an ideological one. As Mockapetris – in whose Silicon Valley office now hangs a rebellious skull-and-crossbones flag – remembers, ‘At that time I was a true believer in the idea of distributing the authority, rather than having it centrally.’
Mockapetris wrote the specification for the Domain Name System and gave it to Jon Postel, who became the pre-eminent domain-name politician. At first, this simply meant that he was the one who stewarded the technical details through the consensus-gathering process of Internet engineering. But it was also Postel who later determined the precise contents of the A-Root; as if he controlled the address book which in turn contained the addresses of the other 250 address books of the top-level domains. Postel chaired the committee that decided there should be 243 top-level domains named as country codes – .uk for Britain, .ch for Switzerland, etc. – and seven generic domains – .com for companies, .edu for academic institutions, .org for not-for-profit organisations, .net for networks, and so on.
The first dot-com domain name was registered on 15 March 1985 by a software company called symbolics.com. The registration process involved Postel creating the first entry in the database of dot-com domains, the dot-com address book. This in turn pointed to the database for the symbolics.com address book in which their own systems administrators could allocate numbered computers to specific sub-domains. For example, they would later take ‘www’ for their Web site – www.symbolics.com – but they would also have an email computer, at something like mail.symbolics.com. As the Internet grew, the fact that system administrators could name additional computers without resorting to a central command made it all the easier for the network to expand at incredible rates.
Jon Postel reigned benign and supreme across the Domain Name System from its inception until the 1990s. He was at the head of a shell organisation, the Internet Assigned Numbers of Authority (IANA), that had control over the A-Root and its future. But as the Net became more commercialised, so his authority was challenged. The biggest such threat came from an organisation that was initially brought in to help him out. In 1993, the US Government’s National Science Foundation (NSF), which subsidised the Internet and funded Postel, gave a contract to a small company based in Herndon, Virginia, called Network Solutions. They were charged with physically looking after the A-Root while Postel kept control of the policies relating to the ways in which it could be changed. Network Solutions was also required to maintain the database of new generic-domain registrations like dot-com.
By 1995, this somewhat lowly administrative contract was on the verge of radical change. As the Internet blossomed and increasing numbers of for-profit firms and foreign organisations registered names, those at the National Science Foundation began to feel queasy about the prospect of continuing to subsidise these operations. In addition, Network Solutions was faced with developing legal liability as the first ‘domain dispute’ – between the owner of a trademarked brand and the owner of a domain name – was filed in a Chicago court and named Network Solutions as a co-defendant. As the problem grew, the company had no real idea of the kind of liability such a dispute might entail – there was the possibility of bankruptcy, which could have forced the collapse of the naming system and even the Internet itself.
It was at this time that