Many of those looking to take advantage of a Thursday promotion to register
free domains were met with access denials blamed on a glitch in Network Solutions’ registry.
RegisterFREE.com was set up to
register domain names free for one hour Thursday by NameEngine Inc. NameEngine is
accredited by the International Corp. for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The promotion was done to promote
the idea of free registration, said Anthony Van Couvering, president of
NameEngine.
He said that more than 100,000 people accessed the RegisterFREE.com site
during the promotion, but because of problems with NSI’s (NSOL)
registry, only a few thousand were able to register domains for free.
“We had a few problems looking up names and that slowed some things down for
some people,” Van Couvering said. “I feel bad about that, because I was
hoping that everyone who came in would have the same fine experience as some
people did.”
NSI spokesman Brian O’Shaughnessy confirmed that NSI’s registry, which
provides information on whether a domain is registered, experienced problems
between 7:15 and 8:35 p.m. Eastern Thursday, but was fully operational when
RegisterFREE’s promotion began and 9 p.m. NSI is allowed four hours of “down
time” per month, and O’Shaughnessy called the coincidence in times a
“fluke.”
Although NameEngine is ICANN-accredited, its services are not yet
functional. So for the promotion the company entrusted the technology of Tucows OpenSRS system to provide the actual
registration. Tucows also provided special consulting and systems to support
the promotion. Tucows paid NSI $6 for each registration, but its fee to
NameEngine was not disclosed.
Van Couvering said the problems it had with registration will not stop the
company from offering a similar promotion in the near future.
“I’m tremendously satisfied with all the response,” he said. Domain names
are a database transaction, and they ought to be free.”
“There are certainly some people who will sell you value-added-services, and
maybe one wants to pay for them. I completely understand that and it’s a
very valid business model. But the domain name itself is not much more than
a domain name, and the one you get from one (registrar) is the same as one
you get from the other. It’s becoming a commodity market.”
NSI’s O’Shaughnessy disagreed, saying free doesn’t always mean better.
“It’s all well and good to say that people want things free, but not
everybody wants to drive a Yugo either,” he said in defense of
pay-for-registration services. “People are going to want to drive Jaguars,
Mercedes, BMWs and Cadillacs.”
“Just because something’s cheap doesn’t make it good. We are also
experimenting with our pricing and we began some initial experimentation
over the last couple of months, and we will continue to do so as the
marketplace changes.”