When Steve Wolff took the internet out from under the government and handed control of it to the Internet community he forgot about the DNS and in retrospect considers this a mistake (pers. comms.). This, the US government still had control of the DNS. After the interagency task force meetings involving 13 government agencies to decide what to do about it, Don Mitchel of the NSF, who was program director for the internic project said that "Commerce said they had all the answers so every rolled thei eyes and said great, run with it". Thus, control rests with the department of Commerce.

Meanwhile the internet community was divided rather sharply about who should be in charge. Jon Postel wanted 300 new tlds in 3 years with 150 new ones right away. This was what he'd read as community consensus and would alleviate the .com problem that was twofold: 1) .co was getting near one million names and 2) NSI had control of them and this was felt to be putting all the eggs on one basket in a fincancial and technical sense.

One camp wanted to in control of all tlds registries and would the same policies and sofware, this was the "GTLD-MOU" camp, which became CORE. The other campe relied on the invisible hand of Adam Smith and just wanted to clone NSI 150 times.

In retrospect the obvious solution was to give 75 tlds to each and see what happened. If one was a total disaster the other could pick up the slack. If they were both disasters, NSI could take them over. For better or worse, at least NSI had running servers and working code.

Ira Magaziner talked to key members of each camp and announced the "white paper" and then the "green paper" to solicit comments.

Kathy Kleinman by this time had convinced Becky Burr, then DoC/NTIA acting head that there should be 3 conferences worldwide, Virginia, Singapre and Geneva to determine what common ground could be found. The Vorginia conference was chaired by Larry Lessig.

The outcome of this was to be a set of bylaws and structure of a new corporation that would determine policy and stucture of the "newcorp" that would facilitate creation of new tlds.

Keep in mind that at this point the community already had sevral alternative root server networks and new top level domain registration systems. Working servers and running code and a few saw this as a stall tactic

The conferences took place and both sides had an agreed upon set of common principles of what newco should look like and do.

And then, boom, Magaziner announced NSI and CORE had come to agreement, a board had been selected by him and Roger Cochetti of IBM and thus ICANN was created to handle the problem of making new tlds and "the trademark issue".