November 5, 1997

Canada Weighs U.S. Charges
Against Domain System Protestor

By PETER WAYNER

man accused of protesting Network Solutions' monopoly over Internet domain names by intercepting traffic to the company's Web site faces a deportation hearing on Wednesday in Canada, where he is being held on charges filed by the United States.

Related Article Court Restrains Domain-Name Protester (July 25, 1997)

The protestor, Eugene Kashpureff, was arrested on Oct. 31 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He is being held on computer fraud charges stemming from his protest of the Internet domain name system last July. The hearing scheduled for Wednesday will determine whether he will be sent back to the United States to stand trial.

According to the complaint filed in Brooklyn on Sept. 12 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kashpureff “devised a scheme or artifice to defraud” by redirecting all requests for domain names to his own computer.

Kashpureff has never denied intercepting domain-name requests as a protest against Network Solutions, the Virginia-based company whose contract with the National Science Foundation gives it a monopoly over the system used by people to register domain names.

Kashpureff has until recently run a company known as AlterNIC, whose purpose was to compete with Network Solutions.

In recent months, Kashpureff has been in Canada working as a consultant. His lawyer in Toronto, Bill Gilmour, said he believed that the Canadian government would try to deport Kashpureff quickly using a part of the immigration code that prohibits someone from entering Canada knowing that charges are outstanding in the United States.

It is not clear that Kashpureff realized that charges were pending against him.

Gilmore said that Kashpureff has denied knowing that a complaint had been sworn out against him on Sept. 12. And Marc Hurst, an employee at a Canadian Internet backbone service, said that he met with Kashpureff in Canada “around the middle of September,” meaning that it was possible Kashpureff had left the United States before the charges were filed.

Kashpureff's case falls into a new area of the criminal code under which there have been few prosecutions in either nation.

If Canada should decline to deport Kashpureff to the United States, the Justice Department is expected to request extradition, a process that is much more complicated and often involves a mini-trial on the evidence against the defendant.

What complicates this case is that it falls into a new area of the criminal code under which there have been few prosecutions in either nation. It is not at all clear that Kashpureff's actions would be a crime in Canada, and some observers question whether they were a crime in the United States because there were no obviously measurable “damages.”

The domain name system, or DNS, is the Internet's equivalent of a telephone book. When a Web user wants to reach a site, his or her browsing software sends a request to a local DNS server, which tries to find the right four-part address, known as the IP address, used to route data through the network.

For example, when a user goes to The New York Times on the Web by pointing a browser to “www.nytimes.com,” his computer may be told send the request to 199.181.172.242, the IP address of one of the computers that serves up the content of the newspaper and CyberTimes.

Kashpureff is accused of sending commands throughout the Internet to point all requests for Network Solution's computer, which uses the URL “www.internic.com,” to his own machine. Kashpureff's computer then displayed a short message of protest about Network Solution's monopoly, after which the user was offered a link to the real site.

In effect, this is analogous to someone's rerouting telephone calls destined for the 411 information service to another line, playing a protest message, and then offering the caller the option of connecting to the real information services if he presses the number 1.

The case promises to help define the bounds of protest on the Internet. In some respects, the act of displaying a protest message to everyone trying to reach Network Solution's Web site was not much different from physically picketing a company or an abortion clinic. While visitors were inconvenienced, they could still click through to reach their destination.

But the protest could also be seen as commercial interference that stepped outside the bounds of acceptable business practices. Kashpureff was running a company that was trying to break the monopoly of Network Solutions, and that company would presumably benefit financially if he succeeded. Capturing the eyes of a competitor's customers through surreptitious means could be seen as an unfair business tactic.

There is no question that Network Solutions' monopoly has been extremely lucrative.

There is no question that Network Solutions' government-protected monopoly has been extremely lucrative. The company reported net revenues of $30.9 million for the first nine months of 1997. Most of this income was derived from the $100 that people pay Network Solutions to add their domain name to the company's database.

The FBI's complaint asserts, “As a direct result of the defendant's actions, potential registrants throughout the world who wished to register domain names in the top-level domains administered by InterNIC were denied ready access to the registration tools that allow such registration through the InterNIC Web site.”

The complaint states that Network Solutions estimates that it would normally process 25,000 requests during the five days in July that Kashpureff is alleged to have intercepted requests for the site. This, the complaint states, amounts to a loss of “hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue.”

In reality, Network Solutions probably did not lose the $100 fee paid by each of these 25,000 registrants, because most of them probably found another way to register. They either clicked past the protest message or registered after the disruption, since in the end, they had no choice if they wanted a domain name.

If the matter ends up before a federal judge in the United States, the court will have to weigh the damages claimed by Network Solutions and by each of the people who tried to access the company's Web page. The question then becomes: Is the disruption to each of the parties — or all of them as a class — serious enough to constitute a crime?

But beyond that narrow legal issue, the case will also help to define the balance between a protestor's free speech rights on the Internet and the public's right to “ready access” to a Web site.

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• Network Solutions

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Peter Wayner at pwayner@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.

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