November 7, 1997

From Jail and Boardroom,
A Street Fight for the Internet

By PETER WAYNER

erein a tale of two very different men who want to tell the world who’s who on the Internet. One is wealthy and successful. The other is broke and sitting in a Toronto jail.

Today in CyberTimes ARTICLES AND COLUMNS From Jail and Boardroom, a Street Fight for the Internet By Peter Wayner When Even Grandma Is More Cyber-Savvy Than You By Matt Richtel Tiny Web Broadcasters Return to Radio Days By Jason Chervokas & Tom Watson Senate Holds to Tradition, Bars Computers on Floor By The Associated Press TODAY'S SECTION FRONT SEVEN-DAY INDEX CYBERTIMES FORUMS CYBERTIMES NAVIGATOR

One holds a master’s degree in engineering and an MBA; the other is a high school dropout who figures he’s now “a couple of credit’s short of an associate’s degree.”

One was the chief executive of a string of high-tech corporations; the other ran a towing company until he “traded his trucks for cable and routers.”

One now heads a company that just went public, raising millions of dollars of cash; the other recently give away his company to a friend to settle a debt.

These two disparate characters stand center stage in a drama over how people will find each other on the Internet using the Domain Name Service, the Internet’s phone book. Just as a telephone directory cross-indexes a person’s name with a telephone number, DNS, as the system is commonly known, lets a computer convert a domain name like “www.nytimes.com” into the four-part number known as an IP address.

The man with the golden résumé is Gabriel Battista, chief executive of Network Solutions, the company blessed with a monopoly contract from the National Science Foundation to compile a central list of all domain names ending with “.com,” “.org,” or “.gov,” the three-letter suffixes that designate the most popular generic “top-level domains” on the Internet. Network Solutions charges $100 for the service and keeps $70 to cover its costs. The other $30 goes into a fund for improving the Internet.

Business is booming. In the nine months ending Sept. 30, the company reported revenues of $30.9 million.

And Battista is well compensated. He started at the company in October 1996 at an annual salary of $350,000. He was also granted stock options — 467,250 shares at $11.25. At a current share value of about $18, these options are worth about $3.1 million.

The former tow-truck operator is Eugene Kashpureff. Until recently, he ran AlterNIC, the company he formed to challenge Network Solutions’ monopoly over domain name registration. His computers would answer requests for addresses ending with suffixes like “.xxx” — nowhere near as well recognized or as lucrative to register as Network Solutions’ top-level domains.

On one hand, Kashpureff is simply a competitor. On the other, he’s a citizen enraged by what he sees as the injustice of a publicly traded company running a government- protected monopoly.

In fact, many computers on the Internet only respond to the original top-level domains, like “.com” or “.org,” which emerged in the days when domain names were distributed at no charge. This is what makes Network Solutions’ contract with the National Science Foundation so valuable.

AlterNIC has been out of commission lately, and Kashpureff recently transferred title to Richard Sexton, a Canadian entrepreneur, while he sits in jail awaiting a deportation hearing. On Sept. 12, the United States Justice Department charged him with fraud in connection with a protest last summer in which Kashpureff intercepted Web traffic to Network Solutions’ site and rerouted it to AlterNIC’s site.

In a telephone interview from the Toronto West Correctional Center this week, Kashpureff said that giving his company away was “mostly for the health of the AlterNIC.”

“This is a good time for a new hand to take the reins of it,” he said.

Kashpureff and Battista have vastly different opinions about how the DNS should be run.

Battista’s Network Solutions operates an efficient central computer system that automatically takes people’s requests to register a domain name, sends them an e-mail confirmation, then follows up with an invoice for $100.

No human is involved unless an error occurs, which it does from time to time. This summer, a computer glitch corrupted the DNS database, effectively making many major sites temporarily disappear from the Internet. In other cases, payments have been lost or domain names have been mistakenly deleted.

Battista declined several requests for an interview for this article and did not return calls or e-mail messages. The information presented here has been gleaned from public documents filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In Kashpureff’s vision, there would be many top-level domain registrars, all of them competing to offer the most reliable service at the lowest prices. AlterNIC would be one of them. Many other companies and individuals share this view and intend to enter the registrar business, and there are many competing plans for just how such a free market in domain services could evolve.

The enmity between Battista and Kashpureff is rooted in a mixture of business and politics. On one hand, Kashpureff is simply a competitor who wants to take a slice of Battista’s business. On the other, he’s a citizen enraged by what he sees as the injustice of a publicly traded company running a government-protected monopoly. It makes for an unusual blend of protest rhetoric and free-market passion.

The rancor came to a head in July when Network Solutions appeared to be claiming sole ownership of the “.com” and “.org” top-level domains. According to the charges filed in federal court in Brooklyn on Sept. 12, Kashpureff devised a way to “hijack” Network Solutions’ Web site, “www.internic.net,” and direct the requests to his own computer.

During those several days in July when his protest was under way, anyone who wanted to register a new domain name with Network Solutions would be redirected to Kashpureff’s computer, which displayed this message:

By re-directing the domain name WWW.INTERNIC.NET, we are protesting the recent InterNIC claim to ownership of the “.COM”, “.ORG”, and “.NET”, which they are supposed to be running in the public trust.

Potential registrants were then given the option of clicking on another link that would take them to Network Solutions’ legitimate Web site.

(The name InterNIC is a historical term for the center that publishes the phone book — that is, controls entries to the database that matches domain names with the IP addresses of computers on the network. Under the terms of Network Solutions’ contract with the National Science Foundation, it has the exclusive right to operate this database.)

Related Article Canada Weighs U.S. Charges Against Domain System Protestor (November 5, 1997)

Reaction to Kashpureff’s protest was almost universally negative, but a wide range of words were used to describe it. Some, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, used the term “hijacking” and focused on the fact that people had no choice but to be confronted by Kashpureff’s message. Others used softer terms like “protest,” likening the action to people picketing the entrance to a building.

Today, Kashpureff says that what he did was wrong. In part, this is because he was forced to issue a public apology in August to settle a civil lawsuit filed against him by Network Solutions. Even so, he insists that the apology was sincere. “The words weren’t mine,” he said in an interview on Wednesday, “but the sentiments were.”

The settlement also included a promise of silence, and Kashpureff refuses even to use the names “Network Solutions” or “InterNIC” in a sentence.

After reaching the settlement, Kashpureff said, “I changed my ways. I turned everything off and left it off. I have been behaving myself. I’ve been attempting to show good faith.”

He traveled to Canada for consulting work and to write client-based software. It was not foreign territory. In 1996, he had secured a permit to work for a Canadian backbone provider, Skyscape. Recently, Kashpureff had been consulting for another Canadian company that he declines to name.

Network Solutions wasn’t the only entity that took umbrage with Kashpureff’s actions. The FBI was also interested. After all, if Kashpureff could redirect traffic heading to Network Solutions, he — or someone more dangerous — could also redirect data traveling to the White House or to an online brokerage. The techniques he employed in his protest were obviously a potent weapon in the battles and street fights that were erupting in cyberspace, and many people were frightened by their potential to wreak crime and chaos.

On Sept. 12, the United States District Court for Eastern New York in Brooklyn issued a warrant for Kashpureff’s arrest based on the affidavit sworn out by an FBI agent, Thomas Swink. The affidavit concluded that Kashpureff did “knowingly cause the transmission of a program, information, code or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally caused damage without authorization, to a protected computer.”

The legal definition of “damage” in this case is “any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information that causes loss aggregating at least $5,000 in value during any one-year period to one or more individuals.” A “protected computer” is any machine “used in interstate commerce or foreign commerce or communication.”

In response to the warrant, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested Kashpureff on Friday, Oct. 31, as he was heading out the back door to sit by a pond. Kashpureff’s deportation hearing, orignally scheduled for last Wednesday, was postponed until Monday. His lawyer, Bill Gilmour, said he would fight deportation in favor of an extradition hearing, which is more like a trial.

Kashpureff’s act has been described by some as “protest” and by others as “terrorism.”

“To rush the judgment out under an administrative procedure rather than give him the fairness of an extradition hearing is objectionable,” Gilmour said Wednesday. “His problem isn’t that he doesn’t want to return to face these things. His problem is he doesn’t want to be ushered out of Canada under circumstances that will prejudice to his ability to return in the future.”

The deportation hearing turns on whether Kashpureff left the United States knowing that charges were pending against him. Such a hearing is necessary because of the way his arrest was handled — basically a series of missteps that were equal parts Kafka and the Marx Brothers.

When charges were filed, the United States Attorney’s office in Brooklyn tried to get in touch with Kashpureff by notifying the lawyer in San Francisco who had handled Kashpureff’s civil lawsuit with Network Solutions. The lawyer passed the news to Kashpureff, who retained a Canadian lawyer, Hugh Mantha, to look into the matter.

Mantha called Joel Cohen, the Justice Department lawyer who was prosecuting the case, but Cohen didn’t return the calls of either Mantha or Kashpureff’s wife, who says she also called twice.

“It’s kind of hard to turn yourself in when the guy won’t return your calls,” Kashpureff said. Cohen refused to comment on a pending case.

(Recently, the voice-mail system at the United States Attorney’s office has been malfunctioning. It did not work on Wednesday when this reporter called for an interview.)

Kashpureff said that he learned the details of the charges only after he was arrested. In the interview, he admitted to redirecting Network Solutions’ traffic to his own computer, but he insisted that doing so had not violated any laws.

“I didn’t attempt to deceive any of the public,” he said. “I made it quite clear what was going on, and I left a route back to where folks wanted to go.”

Kashpureff also asserts that he did not seek unauthorized access to computers throughout the Internet, because by definition, his access was authorized.

“They were all public DNS servers running DNS as a public service,” he said. “There was no authorization control turned on on these machines. All of my DNS was in response to a DNS query.”

In fact, Kashpureff prompted thousands of DNS servers throughout the Internet to ask his machine for the IP address of a particular machine. When these servers asked, his computer responded with the right information, then added one false address — for Network Solution’s computer.

This technique exploited a bug in the DNS infrastructure that caused each of these servers to accept this extra information as valid and store it for future reference. Once distributed around the Internet, this false information forced an estimated 25,000 people who tried to get to Network Solutions’ computer to go to Kashpureff’s page first.

Opinions on the danger of this technique vary widely. Some have called it “terrorism.” Christopher Clough, a spokesman for Network Solutions, dubbed it “polluting.”

If everyone exploited loopholes like Kashpureff did, the Web would collapse.

Kashpureff insists that “this was a political protest,” but when asked whether in the tradition of Thoreau or King, he was willing to spend time in jail for his civil disobedience, he stated, “It’s my opinion that this should have been left as a civil matter.”

In fact, Kashpureff’s settlement with Network Solutions in last summer’s civil suit appears to have decided the issue in the minds of both parties. Neither seems to have been aware that the United States government was pursuing criminal charges. Clough said in an e-mail message, “We have had no dealings with him or any Federal authorities since” the settlement was reached.

Still, most of the evidence available to prosecutors will have to be provided by Network Solutions. The prosecutors’ biggest challenge will be to prove that Kashpureff’s actions crossed the damage threshold of $5,000 prescribed by the law. Network Solutions almost certainly registered the domain name of everyone who was waylaid by Kashpureff, since the company’s registration monopoly was still the only game in town.

But even if all the estimated 25,000 detoured domain-name seekers were able to complete their registration, they were still inconvenienced. If each person’s time was worth as little a 20 cents, the damage threshold was crossed.

Prosecutors are clearly looking to make an example of Kashpureff. While his motives were, at least in his mind, noble, there are many others who might try a similar stunt for pure profit or simple vandalism.

There is no question that if everyone exploited loopholes like Kashpureff did, the reliability of the Internet would slowly deteriorate, as many Web pages would become unreachable. If protesting became as easy and as automated as bulk e-mail, the Web would collapse.

For now, Battista and Kashpureff will continue along their separate paths. Kashpureff will have to extricate himself from a legal mess and perhaps spend time behind bars if he’s convicted and sentenced to prison.

In his telephone interview, he described his dinner as “some kind of summer sausage over noodles, green beans, pineapple and the usual two pieces of bread — breakfast, lunch or dinner, there’s always two pieces of bread.”

Battista will no doubt dine more elegantly, but his life will not be easy either. While Kashpureff is his most strident critic, there are many angry, vocal opponents of Network Solutions’ monopoly. Congress is considering legislation that would introduce competition to domain name registration, and many entrepreneurs are gearing up to cash in on the opporunity.

Still, in stark contrast to Kashpureff’s jail time, Battista’s success offers an instructive measure of the value of favor — or lack of same — with the United States government.

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

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