How would you like to administer .net? It’ll be available as of the end of June 2005, but you’ve got until the end of March to bid for the privilege, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
VeriSign’s deal as administrator of .net, signed in May 2001, expires at the end of June 2005. And though .com is considered the world’s largest Internet domain, analysts and VeriSign’s own vice president of government relations, Tom Galvin, believe .net has a disproportionate economic effect.
"Thirty-seven of the top 100 Web sites rely on .net, and about 37 percent of all e-commerce relies on .net to get to its destination," Galvin told reporters.
There are currently five million registered .net participants while a reported 150 billion e-mail messages go through the domain every day.
"It's vitally important that a year from now .net runs at least as well as, or better than, it's running now," Galvin said. Among those who use .net, either as a domain location or for its transport layers, are the Web sites for Wal-Mart and Amazon.
ICANN planned to issue a formal call for .net bidding November 12, and at least one company – Deutsches Network Information Center (Denic) of Germany, a non-profit organization that believes nonprofits might be best suited to administer domain registries – has been quoted as saying they would compete heavily with VeriSign to win the next .net contract.
Other possible competitors, according to several reports, include .biz administrator NeuLevel Inc., and .info/.org administrator Afilias Ltd.
And VeriSign may not necessarily have the inside track of incumbency to win the new .net contract, since the company’s relationship with ICANN has not always been smooth. VeriSign and ICANN butted heads over a year ago regarding VeriSign’s SiteFinder program, which was intended to direct Web surfers who mistyped domains or tried connecting nonexistent Web pages but got VeriSign a passel of accusations of trying to shanghai other sites’ visitors.
ICANN forced VeriSign to close the service in October 2003, prompting VeriSign to sue ICANN three months later for improperly trying to regulate their DNS authority and interfering with new services. The suit was thrown out in May, with a federal judge ruling concurrently that ICANN broke no antitrust law by trying to restrict VeriSign service offerings.
Denic has also said supporting international characters might be a boost for its chances in winning the next .net contract, as well as believing that that is part of a coming Web growth that any domain registry must be ready to handle, thanks in large part of a rise in such Net-capable devices like cell phones, PDAs, and other portable devices.
