July 23, 1999
The Honorable William Daley Dear Secretary Daley: Yesterday the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing on the efforts of the Commerce Department to transfer responsibility for Internet domain name registries and registration to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is a non-profit, non-governmental, international organization set up to establish competition in the domain name business. Until very recently, the exclusive right to register new domain names in the .com, .org and .net registries was held only by Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) as a result of a cooperative agreement with the Department. Mostly as a result of the growth of ".com," addresses, NSI has now registered approximately 80 percent of the domain names in the world. Under the agreement, NSI also controls and manages the .com registry database. As expressed in the hearing yesterday, we are very concerned about the influence over the registrar and the registry functions held by Network Solutions, and NSI’s apparent refusal to negotiate with the Commerce Department for reasonable terms of transition to full competition and ultimate control of these activities by ICANN. NSI stated yesterday that it owns the .com database and, we presume, the related WHOIS database which includes more detailed information about the registrant. This information was received by NSI in its role as the sole registrant for the U.S. government, and the Department believes that the database is owned the government. This is very valuable information because it provides an almost-complete directory of .com addresses and information about their owners, and can be used on the Internet in the same way that AT&T for decades provided an invaluable and exclusive yellow pages of businesses with telephones. However, for many years under its agreements with various agencies of the federal government, NSI has treated the information as public and made the WHOIS database available to the public. However, just one month before a testbed with five competitive registrars was to begin, NSI took the WHOIS database off the Internet, thus denying access to its potential competitors. Yesterday, NSI announced that it would begin a new commercial service on Monday with this database called "dot com directory" based on this directory. ("The Download," The Washington Post, July 22, 1999, E-1) The new directory will include the information from the WHOIS database plus additional information about the registrants, such as company financial information. Although the directory will be free to all Internet users, NSI plans to sell advertising to other parties to profit from the service. The use of this previously public database as an exclusive "dot-com yellow pages" could give NSI, the dominant registrar, a significant advantage in soliciting new registrants over its emerging competitors. In addition to its registrar services, it will offer its customers inclusion in the comprehensive dot-com yellow pages amassed under government contract. This is a very troubling development by a company in a monopoly position that already appears very reluctant to give up that position. Moreover, under the cooperative agreement between NSI and the Commerce Department, NSI cannot change the services that it provides to registrants without the agreement of the Department. It is our understanding that the Department has not agreed to this change. By this letter, we are requesting that the Commerce Department immediately review this situation and respond by Tuesday, July 27, 1999, with a legal analysis of whether this is a proper use of the WHOSIS database, whether it represents an unauthorized change in the agreement with Commerce, and the potential impact of NSI’s actions on competition in the registrar business. The staff contact on this issue is Edith Holleman, minority counsel, at (202) 226-3400. Sincerely, JOHN D. DINGELL
cc: The Honorable Fred Upton, Chairman
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