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.

[...]