The collision of trademarks, domain names, and due process in cyberspace

(DNS), which plays a key role in routing the large majority of Internet traffic, was designed at a time when there were few hosts and the pre-Internet network was limited mostly to academic users, researchers, and noncommercial traffic. The idea of giving internetworked computers easily remembered names dates back at least to 1971 when Peggy Karp, an early author and editor of the network engineers’ Requests For Comments, prepared the first hosts.txt file, the predecessor of the modern “root” file. Each version of the DNS since then has sought to provide routing efficiency, ease of use, and the ability to scale, although it’s unlikely many of the founders foresaw quite how much it would need to scale. Today, with a substantial part of the name-resolution infrastructure still provided on a volunteer basis (and the name assignment function increasingly regulated and commercialized), the DNS continues to meet its objectives of providing mnemonicto-IP mappings while preventing name collisions on the Internet. It thus undergirds part of the network’s fundamental technical stability. Technical success, however, has bred social issues. In the mid-1990s, the DNS and the people admin-