BY SIMSON L. GARFINKEL
Special to the Mercury News
Today, roughly 25,000 companies, organizations and individuals around the world will disappear from cyberspace.
The reason: They didn't pay their ''Internet tax.''
People who say that ''no one controls the Internet'' should meet the folks at SAIC Network Solutions Inc., a government contractor in Northern Virginia that runs the InterNIC -- the veritable white pages of cyberspace.
Network Solutions is, in many ways, a government- created monopoly.
It is arguably the most powerful entity in the wired world, because it controls who gets what name on the Internet. And today Network Solutions is flexing its on-line muscle. For the first time in its 27-year history, the Internet will get smaller.
For those individuals, companies and organizations that failed to pay Network Solutions for the right to have their own address in cyberspace, their addresses disappear.
After repeated notifications by electronic mail, fax and even first-class mail, NSI says it has enough. Most of the domains that will be deleted today are probably not in use, but those that are will experience immediate problems: their users will be unable to receive electronic mail. People on the Internet trying to access the company's Web pages will see the ominous message, ''The server name does not have a DNS entry. Check the server name in the location (URL) and try again.''
How did Network Solutions achieve such power? That requires a bit of a history lesson.
The Internet started off life as the ARPANET, the network of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Membership was limited to a few military research laboratories, some government contractors and the universities where the network technology was being developed. Registration services were provided by SRI International, a defense contractor in Menlo Park.
That's where things stood until the mid-1980s, when the National Science Foundation embarked on a national project to give U.S. scientists and researchers access to supercomputers. Rather than build a supercomputer center at every university, NSF decided to build a small number of regional centers and fund a network -- NSFNET -- to connect researchers around the country with the big machines. In short order, NSFNET became the newly renamed Internet's first high-speed backbone.
As NSFNET grew and more schools got access to the Internet, the registration center at SRI was increasingly doing non-military work on its military contract.
''Not surprisingly, (the Defense Department) felt that it wasn't its mission'' to run a civilian network, says George Strawn, who runs the National Science Foundation's Division of Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure.
In 1992, Strawn published three solicitations for companies to provide Internet service to the NSF. The first was to run Internet registration service. The second was for directory service. And the third was for information services. The five-year contracts were awarded in 1993 to Network Solutions, AT&T and General Atomics, respectively.
Eighteen months later, the contracts were put up for external review. As a result of the review, the General Atomics contract was terminated, but the other two continued. Little did anyone realize at the time that the stage had been set for Network Solutions to become the 800-pound gorilla on the Internet.
As proof, the conspiracy theorists say all you have to do is look at who owns Network Solutions -- SAIC, a privately held defense contractor whose executives are former military and intelligence officers. SAIC, which purchased Network Solutions in March 1995, has more than 25 years experience as a military contractor and a strong background in national security and signals intelligence. SAIC's purchase was seen by some as part a military plot to lay the framework for seizing control of the Internet in the event of a national emergency.
Indeed, SAIC prides itself on its command and control technology and its ability to ''manage military operations in rapidly changing world situations,'' according to the company's annual report. Its board of directors include former Adm. Bobby R. Inman and M.R. Thurman, a retired Air Force general of the U.S. Air Force.
But experts familiar with Network Solutions and SAIC discount such fears. Network Solutions' role in the Internet's infrastructure was the result of a military decision to divest itself from the increasingly commercialized Internet in the mid-1980s, they say.
Furthermore, the experts say, even though Network Solutions controls changes to the InterNIC's master database, there are many copies of the database on many different computers across the network. Should Network Solutions decide to ''turn off the network,'' it would be simple for another organization or group of organizations to rise to the challenge and begin offering domain service themselves.
''The bottom line for me and for the NSF management was that with the explosion of commercial interest in the Internet'' it was not appropriate for the Science Foundation to continue subsidizing the operation, Strawn said.
''It's almost like a repeat of what happened some years before when the military decided that most of the registration wasn't being put to military purposes. Now most registration activity wasn't being put to research and education. NSF doesn't have the mission to support commercial users of the Internet,'' he adds.
Costs also were spiraling out of control. Whereas the NSF contract originally had provided for roughly $1 million per year for registration service, the Net's explosive growth meant that costs were quickly approaching $1 million per month, Strawn says.
That's why it was decided so quickly to start charging fees for the registration of domain names, Strawn says, and with little public discussion. There was a pressing financial need to do so. The decision prompted cries of foul from the Internet's eclectic crowd of hackers and academicians who saw the move as a power grab.
''NSF was sorry to move with dispatch in terms of the way that it handled fees, and did so only because of financial expediency,'' he says. ''We are trying not to pull any more fast ones on the Internet community without a more complete discussion in an open forum.''
In other words, any company or person that wants its own special address on the Net must pay Network Solutions for the right.
Network Solutions' contract puts it in control of the Internet's five top-level ''domains'' or suffixes -- ''.com'' for companies, ''.org'' for non-profit organizations, ''.net'' for network service providers, ''.edu'' for educational organizations and ''.gov'' for civilian agencies of the U.S. government. (Network Solutions also controls the ''.mil'' domain, under a separate contract with the military.)
The NSF's decision was a financial windfall for Network Solutions. During the first 2ì years of the NSF contract, Network Solutions was awarded a total of $4.4 million, according to NSF figures. But under the new system, Network Solutions' domain registration service is bringing in nearly $3 million a month -- even though half of its tenants are in arrears on their rent.
The company's defacto-monopoly on the Internet registration service has privately been valued at more than $1 billion, with its contract not up for renewal again until 1998.
Meanwhile, the Internet and more specifically the World Wide Web, keeps getting more and more popular. In April of this year, the last month for which statistics are available, NSI registered approximately 49,000 domains, said David Graves, NSI's Internet Business Manager.
While there is only one Internet and one ''.com'' domain for commercial or business users, there are many businesses and products that have the same name.
For that reason, Jon Postel, one of the original inventors of the Internet and the Domain Name System, has suggested that additional commercial domains be created.
But rather than offering four or five new commercial domains -- such as biz, inc or corp -- Postel wants more than 100 choices. The domains could be administered by different companies, which would break NSI's monopoly.
That could change the entire dynamics of the Internet. But that's in the future. Today, there is only one company administering the domain registration system. And just like any other business -- has had people who haven't paid their bills. David Graves, Network Solutions' Internet Business Manager, estimates that only about 50 percent of the people and companies that have ''purchased'' domain names actually have paid up.
Until now, NSI has not deleted any domains for non-payment.
''We have been trying to give the benefit of the doubt to new applicants,'' says Graves. ''About a month ago, as a final effort to those who hadn't paid, we started sending out a ... letter to the registrants themselves -- to the president of the company that holds the domain name, and explained to them that we haven't received payment, and if they don't pay by a specified time their name will be removed from active use.''
Hence today's cutoff.
After repeated notifications by electronic mail, fax and even first-class mail, NSI says it's had enough. Most of the domains that will be deleted today are probably not in use, but those that are will experience immediate problems: their users will be unable to receive electronic mail. People on the Internet trying to access the company's Web pages will see the ominous message, ''The server name does not have a DNS entry. Check the server name in the location (URL) and try again.''
Graves doesn't know if the company's get-tough policy will dampen the growth in domain names or not.
''Once people realize that in fact their names will be removed from active use for failure to pay, that may have an impact on the number of people who register domain names,'' he says.