Almost every country in the world hopes that the Internet will ensure its prosperity. One place where this has already happened is the obscure, impoverished and isolated Pacific island of Tuvalu, which had the luck to get the top-level domain of ".tv". The rights to administer this domain were initially sold for £68 million sterling in 1998, and the island received another £7.5 million this year, doubling Tuvalu's national income. Individually, domain names can be worth a lot of money - for example, the domain name "webcar.com" is being advertised for sale online for $3.5 million. But as Tuvalu's islanders have shown, administering domain name registries can also be a highly profitable activity.
In view of this potential value, Irish people may wonder who owns the Irish domain name ".ie"? Ireland's domain name registry was run by computing services in UCD until recently, but is now administered by an independent company, IEDR Ltd. This has two apparent functions: firstly, to process applications for domain names in ".ie", and secondly, to maintain a database of those names.
The rules that the IEDR applies to the first of these functions are famously complex, although undoubtedly motivated by a determination to prevent cybersquatting chaos in the ".ie" domain. Still, the ".ie" domain appears under-utilised, with only around 17,000 names registered, compared to over 2.3 million in ".uk". IEDR's name-assigning function appears to have arisen as a result of convention and not as a result of any treaty or statutorily assigned function. This distinction is important, as the right of the IEDR to limit the registration of domain names may be queried in the same way as the right of the Minister for the Environment to limit the issue of taxi plates was recently denied by the High Court. At present, the IEDR is proposing to introduce democracy into its decision-making process by holding a vote on changes to its rules. These proposed changes would relax the prohibition on the registration of generic domain names, allow the registration of domain names by anyone within the island of Ireland, and enable authors and entertainers to register their own names.
The introduction of democracy is a positive development. The Irish Internet is a community and, as such, it should make its own decisions about how it is run. The problem is that, in its current form, the IEDR does not really have this power, as under section 31 of the Electronic Commerce Act 2000, the Minister for Public Enterprise has the right to prohibit or regulate the registration and use of the ".ie" domain name.
The minister concerned, Mary O'Rourke, may consult with others, such as the Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Mary Harney, and ICANN, but she is not under any statutory obligation to consult with the IEDR or any other representative of the Irish Internet. It could be argued that the IEDR is simply voting on rule changes to be submitted to the minister, who retains ultimate power to control how the ".ie" domain is administered. The Irish Internet community needs to decide how it wants the ".ie" domain to be administered; if it wants the Minister for Public Enterprise to do the job, then it should lobby her directly. If, on the other hand, it thinks that a democratically elected body responsible to the Irish Internet community should assign domain names, it should seek to have IEDR and its procedures placed on a proper statutory footing. These rule changes will not be decided in isolation. ICANN is preparing to launch a variety of new generic domains onto the market and is currently reviewing applications for these.
At the same time, the European Union is anticipating the launch of the ".eu" domain, which it hopes will come to rival ".com" in popularity. It is likely that registration of names in these new domains will be cheaper and easier than currently allowed by ".ie", which may encourage Irish companies to use them instead. As a result there is a danger that the Irish online identity will become diluted.
Denis Kelleher is a practising barrister. Contact by email at: deniskelleher@ireland.com