Jan. 31, 1997
						at APNIC meeting in Hong Kong

			Overview of JPNIC

							N. Maruyama
							maruyama@nic.ad.jp
							JPNIC

1. History and organization. 

JPNIC was founded as the Union of Internet service providers in Japan
in April of 1993. Its main purpose is to carry out JP domain name
assignment, IP address assignment and related issues, and thereby to
contribute to the development of the Japan's Internet.  We have taken
over these jobs from the voluntary association JNIC. Though the number
of members were only about 20 at the beginning, JPNIC is growing quite
rapidly (transparency page 2).

A rough sketch of our organization is shown on the transparency
(transp. p.3). The general assembly meeting decides budgets, authorizes
audit reports, elects the Board members, and makes other important
decisions.  Members of the Steering committee are appointed by the
Board. The secretariat currently consists of 9 employees.

The Budget for fiscal year 1996 is about 4.7 million US$
(transp. p.4). The financial base of JPNIC is quite concrete since we
have been charging for domain names and IP address assignment since
June 1 1995 (transp. p.5,6).

For the fiscal year 1996, we estimate that 38% of the total income is
due to membership fee, and 42% is due to assignment charge.

2. JP domains

   Assignment of JP domain name is quite a large undertakings for
JPNIC, so I would like to use this opportunity to go into more detail
about it.

   JP domain names are categorized into two groups: one is functional
type domains, and the other geographical domains. Currently we have 6
functional types, each of which is identified by 2 letter coded second
level domain names (transp. p.7). For example, nic.ad.jp is assigned
to Japan Network Information Center, which is working on network
administration, so that the domain name has "ad" as its second
level. The six second levels are ad, co, ac, go, or and ne.

   Geographical domains have suitable codes indicating the location
of the organization as the second level.

Our assigning policy is roughly summarized as follows (transp. p.8):

2.1. first come, first served,
2.2. one domain name for one organization,
2.3. non transferable,
2.4. local presence in Japan,
2.5. uniqueness in the third level.

Point 2.5 means that we did not assign nic.co.jp because we have
already assigned nic.ad.jp. Having a rather long history, this was
indeed an unflexible restriction, which was removed quite
recently. The principles 2.2 and 2.3 may come to your attention. As
you can see, one may not find analogous policy in the InterNIC com
domains. We think these principles play an important role in reducing
possible conflicts of domain names, and prevent trading of domain
names, of which we think adds little to the development of the
Internet.

3. Recent topics

Recent topics in JPNIC activities which we would like to report
here are as follows (transp. p.9):

3.1 Introducing new functional type "ne" (Nov. 6,1996),
3.2 Removing the "third level uniqueness" restriction (Dec. 10,1996),
3.3 Revising documents for  IP address assignment to reflect rfc2050,
3.4 Discussion on trademark domain names,
3.5 Incorporation of JPNIC as a government authorized organization
    (probably be done by the end of March 1997).

The new second level "ne" is for "network service".  We are
assigning domain names with this second level for services which will
issue IDs to individual clients. One such example of this is the famous
commercial service "compuserve" in the US. However, if we assign a
co.jp domain name to such a service, then there will be no way to
distinguish the e-mail addresses of the employees of the service
company and the e-mail addresses of the clients.  Therefore, we think
that we should distinguish between these two, and although we had been
assigning "or" domains for such services until Nov. 5 1996, we have
recently created a new second level unique to this.

3.2 is for simplification, and 3.3 is to follow new international
guidelines. Concerning 3.4, we have been discussing it for about 1
year within JPNIC and with some associations which are in charge of
Intellectual properties and trademarks. To speak of 3.5, JPNIC is
making efforts to obtain autorization as an "Organization of public
welfare" from one Government Agency and three Ministries -- Science
and Technology Agency, the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and
Culture, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and the
Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. The process is still going
on, but we believe that it will be finished by the end of this March.

4. Statistics

   To sum up this speech, I would like to share with you some
statistics concerning  our activities (transp. p.10-14).