US moves to keep control of net names

October 2005

Members of the US House of Representatives said this week the US should resist international pressure to give up authority over key internet functions amid a mounting feud over the issue.

In a letter to Commerce and State Department officials, the lawmakers said the Bush administration should retain strong oversight over the internet domain name system, specifically the root servers that guide traffic to huge databases containing addresses for all the top-level domains, such as dot-com, dot-edu, and the country code domains such as dot-uk and dot-jp.

The letter said: "Given the internet's importance to the world's economy, it is essential that the underlying domain name system of the internet remain stable and secure.

"As such, the United States should take no action that would have the potential to adversely impact the effective and efficient operation of the domain name system. Therefore, the United States should maintain its historic role in authorizing changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file."