Paul Garrin Says
Monopolies Choke the Web.
Now Congress Is Starting to Listen.
Casting a Wider Net
by Sarah Ferguson
From the Village Voice
http://villagevoice.com/issues/0114/ferguson.shtml
Media activist Paul Garrin is obsessed
with borders. Step into his East 4th
Street loft and you're met by eight
large TV monitors mounted in a wall of
thick corrugated steel, and four video
cameras that hop and pivot wildly as
they track your every move. The setup's
from an art installation Garrin devised
called Border Patrol. When the screens
are working, the cameras project a red
target on your image—an unsettling
metaphor for the way technology has
rendered us all sitting ducks.
Right now, the artwork is busted, but
Garrin's too busy to fix it. He's
engaged in a far more real border war.
For the past five years, he and his
company, Name.Space, have been seeking
to overthrow the U.S.-sanctioned
monopolies that govern the Web.
A self-styled outsider, Garrin has
recently heard his complaints echoed in
the halls of power. The European
Parliament has begun clamoring for more
international control, and just last
month, Montana senator Conrad Burns
warned the Department of Commerce that
the stability of the Net "could be
threatened by a policy-making process
moving forward under a legal cloud."
That cloud, for Garrin, hovers darkest
over the issue of access to the "root
zone," the master file listing the
so-called top-level domains—.com, .org,
.net, .gov, .edu, .mil—and some 244
country-code domains. The root zone is
the place that tells your computer where
to locate any one of the 33 million
existing Web addresses. Computer
scientists call it "the truth."
[...]
"The idea," says Garrin, "was to shift
the naming paradigm from one based on
commercialism and branding—you know,
ibm.com—to one based on content. I mean,
look at all the interesting and
expressive sites we publish now." His
Web site, we.reclaimthe.net, now offers
more than 540 extensions, from abc.news
and balkan.monitor to queer.punk and
sadistic.fun.
To access these, you have to tweak your
computer's settings—a simple
cut-and-paste maneuver. Then you can
view everything Name.Space publishes,
along with the entire contents of the
root zone.
[...]
