The Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Wednesday added 15 companies to its roster of accreditation qualifiers, with the new batch joining the turbulent market of domain registrars.
“These 15 companies are a powerful testament to the energy, commitment, and determination which have marked the Internet community’s ongoing efforts to bring the benefits of open competition to the market for domain name registration services in the .com, .net, and .org domains,” said Mike Roberts, president and CEO of ICANN.
The 15 include PSINet, Inc. and Concentric Network Corp., which just yesterday announced a co-marketing deal with register.com.
Thus far, of the five testbed registrars, only register.com is now successfully registering domain names, despite the passing of the testbed completion deadline last week. The deadline was postponed until July 16.
Previously, ICANN’s Esther Dyson and several approved competitors accused Network Solutions’ (NSI) of stalling the process.
The original five testbed participants are America Online, CORE (Internet Council of Registrars), France Telecom/Oleane, Melbourne IT, and register.com.
An additional 37 post-testbed registrars were announced in April.
ICANN was established in September 1998 to oversee the transition of NSI’s domain registration monopoly to a competitive market. ICANN is taking over responsibility for coordinating the assignment of
protocol parameters, the management of the domain name system (DNS), the allocation of IP address space, and the management of the root server system.
