AL Alegre, a fixture in civil society circles, reminds me of a bulldog. This isn’t a reference to Al’s heft, but rather his tenacity. Once Al sinks his teeth into an issue, he’s unlikely to let go.
One of these issues that I’ve written extensively about is the need to reform the .PH domain, a campaign that Al’s Foundation for Media Alternatives has revived.
Since 1990, the country’s top level domain has been administered by a private individual and his company, DotPH. The operation is aimed at turning a profit, and nobody in the local Internet community has a say in how the domain is run.
In practical terms, this means that an Internet domain with the .PH suffix costs three times more than a generic .COM address because the local administrator can set prices without consulting anyone. And because there can be only one administrator, local Web site owners will have no choice but to shell out $35 a year if they want a .PH domain, instead of a new .COM address for just $8.95 a year at GoDaddy.
By some accident of history, DotPH’s monopoly also means that the group that independently manages the .EDU.PH domains for Philippine schools cannot add servers to improve network reliability without the .PH administrator’s say-so—and DotPH won’t say so unless it’s paid.
The tragedy of the .PH domain is that organization that assigns country administrators, the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), has already stated specifically that the country administrator must act as a trustee for the domain, which is considered a public resource. “Concerns about ‘rights’ and ‘ownership’ of domains are inappropriate,” the ICANN says in one key document. “It is appropriate, however, to be concerned about ‘responsibilities’ and ‘service’ to the community.”
In 2001, a group of Internet users and service providers took this to heart and began lobbying the government to make the local administrator adhere more closely to the ICANN vision. The group believed the Philippine domain should be run by a non-profit foundation that had wide representation from and was ultimately answerable to the local Internet community. It also believed that to avoid any conflict of interest, the administrator of the .PH database should not also sell domain names commercially, an activity that should be opened up instead to many registrars who compete freely.
This lobbying effort went through the bureaucratic mill—passing from the Department of Trade and Industry to the National Economic and Development Authority to the Commission on Information and Communications Technology and the National Telecommunications Commission. Throughout this process, the administrator was uncooperative and truculent. During one public hearing, he sent an employee to videotape the proceedings, but did not authorize him to speak for the company.
Finally, in 2004, the reform efforts reached a milestone when the government issued guidelines stating clearly that the Philippine domain was a public resource, and that the .PH administrator, as a trustee, was accountable to the Internet community. The guidelines also called for a separation of the administrative and commercial functions. If DotPH wanted to remain the administrator, it would have to stop selling domain names.
Unfortunately, this was as far as the reforms went, and the people who were tasked to carry out the guidelines never did.
This is where Al and the Foundation for Media Alternatives come in. Three years after the government dropped the ball, the foundation is pushing and probing. What happened to the mandated reforms? Was there a secret deal to preserve the status quo? What can we do to move forward?
These are the questions that the foundation is asking.
A few months ago, a Filipino blogger based in New York e-mailed me because he was incensed about something the PH administrator said on the Yugatech blog.
“Please Mr. Wong, I will do whatever I can to help you get the .ph domain into [the hands of] a rightful organization and not into a single private individual. Mr. [Joel] Disini [the administrator,] has the gall to say that he can do anything he wants with the .ph domain and yet says that the .ph domain is the ‘official’ domain of the Philippines. It’s so sickening,” wrote Rickey Yeneza. “It’s quite obvious that he is doing a disservice to the Filipino people, so I believe we should act. It’s not a lost cause is it?”
Looking back, I realize my reply to Rickey–tempered by my disappointment at the government’s inaction–was short of enthusiastic. What I should have done was to encourage Rickey and others like him to use their blogs to press the case. Maybe it’s not too late. With a little tenacity, we ought to be able to reclaim our domain.
