San Jose Mercury News, Calif., Dan Gillmor Column.(Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News)

Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, July, 2000 by Gillmor, Dan

Jul. 17--YOKOHAMA, Japan-- DOMAIN NAMES ASIDE, FUTURE OF NET IS AT STAKE: Whose Internet will it be, anyway?

The question wasn't on the agenda when the board of directors of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, convened here Sunday. But ICANN, administrator of the Internet's domain-name addressing system, which is the way computers on the Net can find each other, is fundamentally in the business of deciding whose Internet it will be.

And so, if you care, are you.

The board, following days and weeks and months of wrangling among various constituencies, did the expected when it voted to expand the number of global "top-level domains" -- such as .com, .org, .gov and the like -- to bring new competition into an arena...