Among the groups vying for control of the .net registry — and the more than 5.1 million .net domains that it controls — are three non-US based companies as well as a Barcelona-based consortium of domain registrars and technology companies expected to carry on the Internet tradition of community spirit.
The contract for administration of the .net registry, currently held by Mountain View, Calif.-based VeriSign, is set to expire on June 30, and the group selected by ICANN to receive the next six-year administration contract will take control on July 1.
At issue are not only the millions of .net domains, which account for roughly 3 trillion page views every year, but also the roughly $700 billion in e-commerce that is conducted over .net domains every year.
The winner is expected to be announced in March.
Contenders include Internet giant VeriSign, which also currently controls the .com registry of almost 31.9 million domains; Denic, the administrator of Germany’s 8 million .de domains; Santan, a new company which runs both the .biz registry and Japan Registry Services; Afilias, the Dublin-based company that administrates the combined 6.1 million domains in both the .info and .org registries; and CORE++, a consortium of domain registrars, registry operators, and telephone and technology companies that currently operate the .aero and .museum registries and contains members that run the Internet Systems Consortium, the National Internet Development Agency of Korea and the .za domain name authority.
VeriSign has turned up the heat on its competitors already by launching a massive lobbying spree aimed at both journalists and ISPs and calling attention to possible reliability problems with the other providers.
Currently, 12 letters sent to ICANN in support of VeriSign use very similar wording to point out that the company has “100 percent uptime.”
News stories and criticism are also becoming rampant regarding possible problems that Afilias had with its administration of the .info.
When .info was first introduced in 2001, there were several problems with the first-time registry operator, and just this past September, the .info registry was broken by a registrar that attempted to register one million names in a very short period of time.
VeriSign has good reason to be concerned about the possible loss of the .net domain, though. For every .net or .com registered, the company now makes $6, even if it was registered through another registrar. All of the other current .net bidders promise to lower that amount.
Denic has also begun putting pressure on several large companies in its bid to obtain the .net registry, at least according to letters filed with ICANN.
Dieter Horn, head of NIC operations for international telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom, originally sent a letter on July 16 endorsing ICANN.
On Sept. 10, Horn filed another letter informing ICANN that he had made a mistake with his previous endorsement.
“It is my serious duty to inform you that this particular letter has been signed by myself as a result of accidental concatenation of internal administrative misinterpretations,” wrote Horn.
The company than announced it support for Denic.
