Internet registries around the world are preparing to submit their bids
on one of the oldest, and most popular, domain extensions.
The deadline for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’
(ICANN) request for proposals (RFP) for .net is Jan. 18, 2005, at which
time an as yet unnamed third-party technical review board will debate
which registry is best suited to take management of .net when VeriSign’s
contract expires on June 30, 2005.
ICANN plans to announce the winning bid in March, 2005.
Frontrunners are already emerging. VeriSign will seek to re-establish its
.net ownership for another six years, but other well-established top-level
domain (TLD) registries will bid on the extension: DENIC, the registry operator for
.de, the German country code TLD (ccTLD), and Afilias, the registry operator for
.info.
VeriSign is relying on the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” factor. With seven years
at 100 percent uptime and an investment of a couple hundred million dollars into the
infrastructure, Tom Galvin, VeriSign vice president of public affairs, said
the company’s earned the right to keep .net going forward.
He said .net is not like the other TLDs, because when it was first envisioned
as an extension, .net was never intended for commercial entities, but as a
transport layer. Thus, while many of today’s Internet properties, like
whitehouse.gov or walmart.com, operate on that common domain address, their
name servers
“Overall, you have about 30 percent of e-commerce that is relying on .net,”
Galvin said. “So while it’s a smaller TLD when it comes to names, it’s every
bit as significant as .com when it comes to commerce and communications.”
The migration of .net from one registry to another is a primary concern for
registrars like Register.com. Jordyn Buchanan, director of policy at
Register.com, said it doesn’t really matter who takes over .net management
as long as there are no problems switching the registry databases over to the
new company if VeriSign loses out on its bid.
“Migration is the number one, number two and number three issue for us,
because it affects us as a business,” he said. “But more importantly, it
affects how people use the Internet. If you think about .net, there’s a lot
of very crucial infrastructure servers — name servers that serve thousands
or millions of other domain names — and if any of those were to be impacted
by the migration, it could have a pretty significant effect on the day-to-day
operations of the Internet. I can’t emphasize enough how important that
element of any bid is going to be.”
One quite capable company outside VeriSign is DENIC,
the German-based coalition of registrars that manages the .de ccTLD.
DENIC, a non-profit cooperative of registrars out of Frankfurt, Germany, has
jumped head-and-shoulders over its competition in the domain arena.
According to a recent report by VeriSign, 8 million
domain names are registered to .de, which accounts for 12 percent of the
world’s total domain registrations, behind only .com.
That’s double the number of registrations of its closest ccTLD competitor —
.uk at 6 percent — and nearly as much as all the other ccTLD names combined, which accounts for
20 percent. It’s also larger than the number of .net names out
there, 5 million, which nets a comparatively smaller — though third-largest
overall — 8 percent.
Sabine Dolderer, director of DENIC’s executive board, said its size and
the need for more competition among registries make
it a viable contender for .net.
“If you look at what ICANN is looking for and the community is looking for,
there’s something with having an incumbent operating a lot of the domain
space, and there’s a lot of inflexibility in that,” she said. “What ICANN
is looking for is somebody who is technically capable to do it and that is
something DENIC has proved over the last 10 years.”
Afilias is a long-odds favorite to take
over .net. ICANN awarded Afilias the .info registry contract back in
2001. As one of
the first outside of the seven original TLDs — .com, .net, .org, .mil,
.edu, .int, and .gov, the company had a rough start.
Afilias was beset with troubles
from the beginning, mainly in the form of technical glitches that downed
its service. It also had trouble with its policies, such as its early
registration program. Twenty-five percent of
the names reserved for companieswith legitimate claims to them
had lost out to cyber squatters
Those problems, which were later
resolved, were valuable learning experiences for the company and should
prove a boon to its .net bid, said Roland LaPlante, vice president and chief
marketing officer at Dublin, Ireland-based Afilias.
“The extent that the independent reviewers delve into that and really
understand it, I think that’s going to say more positive things about
Afilias than can be said about the other competitors,” he said.
Afilias might also have an ace in the hole — its part in the migration of
.org from VeriSign to the Public Interest Registry (PIR) in 2003. The company provides these
sub-contractor services to not only PIR, but eight ccTLD registry operators.
They are the name registry services providers for several current TLD
nominations going through the ICANN process, such as .mobi, .asia and .xxx.
“Frankly, no one else in the industry has the kind of transition experience
that Afilias has,” LaPlante said.
What plans VeriSign, Afilias, DENIC and other .net registry wannabes have in
mind for the domain extension is a closely held secret within the corporate
walls. None of the three interviewed would talk about details surrounding
their organizations’ proposals and will most likely wait until the week
before the Jan. 18 deadline to file.
Unlike the process for many RFPs where all the bids
are held confidential until they are all submitted, DENIC’s Dolderer said, ICANN posts the bids to
its Web site for all to see. No one, she said, is going to give up a
competitive advantage by posting soon enough for others to tailor their own
proposal.
Each .net proposal will be critiqued on a variety of functional areas like:
ICANN policy compliance, equal access for registrars, operations, financial
strength, technical competence and migration plan. And soon enough, we’ll
know what they were hiding in their proposals.