The so-called solutions for managing Internet top-level domains, proposed by groups including the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the Council of Registrars (CORE), the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Network Solutions Inc. (Internic) and the rebel domain name registries, are mired in struggles of power, politics and greed that don't respond to the needs of the marketplace.

There is no technical reason that any Internet addresses must end in .com, .org, .net or dot anything. Requests for these addresses are routed through a rudimentary database look-up process that replaces the textual name with an IP number. That number is the real address. The domain names are nothing more than a shell, and any database worth its salt can look up a text query and spit out its correlating numeric field.

Confining the proposed new top level domains to five or seven new generic suffixes misses the mark completely. For example, Microsoft owns microsoft.com and .net. You can bet it will be first in line to own microsoft.web, microsoft.biz, etc., or sue anyone who registers them first. The only result of this scheme will be to quadruple the costs of registering domain names, which are often treated by corporations as service marks to be protected.

If the DNS computers can look up anything and return an IP number, why not allow unlimited top level domains? Let people and companies pick their own. So Microsoft could have ".microsoft," and commence to preceed it with second-level domain names, such as windows.microsoft, nt.microsoft, www.word.microsoft, etc. IBM could have lotus.ibm, computer.ibm and even microsoft.ibm if they so chose. I could own the .bohush domain and charge my extended family members to register their first names on it. This would shift the power of domain names away from one organization (or a select few) to the users of the Internet, where it belongs.

Two years ago, I tasked a programmer to create a simple method of registering top level domains and assisting ISPs to reconfigure their domain servers (which took all of one line of code). Developing a business model where ISPs, individuals and corporations could profit from this plan was fairly simple, too. I called the plan "anything dot anything." The only hindrance to this process was political.

What's to stop another country (say a small island nation) from implementing a new, open top-level domain scheme? If a million people and companies registered domains (like .microsoft and .ibm), the U.S. system would be forced to acknowledge it.

The members of the IANA and U.S. government task forces have dominance over the U.S. Internet by controlling the root domain name server and the domain registrar contract. I have no doubt these engineers and civil servants are fine people, doing what they think is right. But the Internet is no more about technology than television is. Its international scope as a new communications medium is unprecedented. A coalition of technologists and bureaucrats cannot succeed in managing the market pressures driving the explosive growth of the Internet.

It's time to look at all the constituencies participating in the Internet, and open it up to global competition and global thinking. A future based on the past is doomed. Give the people of the Internet the power to decide their own fates.

While Peter Bohush is master of his own domain, he still can't get his cat to do tricks.