Nearly one year after it was set up by parent companies NeuStar and Melbourne IT, Sterling, Va.-based NeuLevel – the exclusive registry operator for the .biz top level Internet domain – has today formally activated more than 160,000 pre-registered .biz domain names from more than 150 countries, and has also started taking registrations for additional names on a first-come, first-served basis.
Companies interested in obtaining a .biz name can register through any of the almost 90 .biz-accredited registrars or their resellers worldwide. A full list of .biz registrars can be accessed at the NeuLevel Web site.
“.biz is where business will be conducted in the future because it has what the business community needs: superior technology, better security and a platform to facilitate the business transactions of the future. This isn’t just the future of the Internet; this is the future of business,” said NeuLevel chief executive officer Douglas B. Armentrout.
The future of the .biz TLD was itself called into question last month when the Los Angeles Superior Court issued a preliminary injunction to prevent the activation of several .biz domain names, prompting Armentrout to release a press statement in which he stressed that the decision “only affects .biz domain names for which there were multiple applicants for the same name during the domain name application process,” which worked out to be less than 20 percent of all names applied for during the domain name application process.
Armentrout also reiterated that the company strongly believed that the process it had so far developed in conjunction with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was “the most fair and equitable way to distribute domain names,” and that the affected names would eventually go ‘live’ once the legal proceedings were resolved.
That left about 80 percent of the domain names unaffected by the court’s decision, freeing NeuLevel to activate them by the initially scheduled October 23 launch date. However, just six days prior to the launch, the company announced it would be pushing back the deadline by slightly more than two weeks to dedicate “more time for testing in anticipation of high demand.”
“NeuLevel is taking extra care to ensure our systems will support the early ‘go-live’ demand,” Armentrout had said then. “Due to the significant recent market demand for the new TLDs, including .biz, we concluded that we needed extra time to test our systems in conjunction with our registrar channel partners.
“We are determined to turn up our live registry service with a system that can accept the market’s demand, regardless of the amount of traffic generated.”
And now that the .biz TLD is officially ‘live,’ U.S.-based NeuLevel can finally concentrate on creating, maintaining and servicing what is said to be the world’s first Internet address exclusively serving the needs of businesses.
Company officials envision the .biz technology platform to ultimately enable businesses to communicate across different platforms and devices, and satisfy the need for higher levels of security, among other requirements.
Added Jeffrey E. Ganek, chairman of NeuLevel and chief executive officer of parent company NeuStar, “NeuLevel will draw on NeuStar’s rich heritage of operating mission-critical infrastructure and public resources to the highest levels of reliability, security and stability. All of our registries are protected by the highest grades of encryption and security technologies – on a 24 x 7 basis – and provide a 99.999 percent level of availability.”
As the Local Number Portability Administrator, NeuStar manages the registry database that is a critical component for the routing of all telephone calls in North America. It also acts as the North American Numbering Plan Administrator, which manages a registry database containing all area codes and central office codes (or exchanges) in North America.
