By Nick Patience

Despite assertions at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meeting in Berlin yesterday that New York- based Register.com was to start accepting registrations.com, .net and .org and directly feeding them into the registry maintained by Network Solutions Inc (NSI), Register.com tells us that it is still two weeks away from getting its system up and running. The announcement was made by NSI’s VP customer programs, Chuck Gomes, who Register.com suggested is not totally familiar with the technical issues.

Such a move would signal the start of competition in the domain name registration market for the first time in the history of the internet. At present Register.com, like the other 180 or so NSI resellers simply passed the registrations on to NSI, which enters them into the root zone files. Those resellers have to pay $70 per name, but the new competitive registrars only have to pay it $18 per name and can add what they want on top. That fee may change once the testbed phase is complete, but it is not thought likely to rise by much, and will more likely decrease.

Two weeks has quickly become a de facto standard time span we are fed each time we inquire as to when competition will be up and running. Sascha Mornell, Register.com’s VP marketing says the company gets close to solving the technical issues, only for something else to crop up and cause a delay. Still, Register.com is thought to be ahead of the other four companies that ICANN has accredited for the 60-day test period. Siegfried Langenbach, the person responsible for the technical liaison between NSI and one of the four, the Council of Registrars (CORE), said at the ICANN meeting that the implementation of the testbed is not going smoothly. Yesterday was day 31 of the 60-day test period designated by ICANN. Yesterday was day 31 of the 60-day period.

Meanwhile, eight more companies have been accredited by ICANN to be registrars after the test period, bringing the total number to 37 companies, plus the five test-bed registrars. The eight are Ababcus America Inc/A+Net; Advanced Systems Consulting Inc; CasDNS Inc; Domain Bank Inc; Marvin Enterprises Inc/Global Knowledge Group; The Name-It Corp/Advanced Internet Technologies Inc; NetNation Communications Inc; PSI-Japan Inc.