By Nick Patience
Day 25 of the 60-day test period for the newly-competitive domain name registration market came and went yesterday and it looks like being well into the second half of the period before any of the five companies get their systems up and running.
Register.com, the New York-based company that appears to be ahead of the others, is still a couple of weeks away, according to director of marketing Sascha Mornell. The companies are understandably reluctant to divulge their rate of progress for fear of appearing to be behind the other four companies, hence the vague nature of their guesses as to a start date – it always seems to be ‘within two weeks’ from whatever day we speak to them.
However, the five companies are apparently in regular contact with one another, discussing the problems and potential solutions. Once the test period has been concluded, the experiences of the various companies will be documented to aid those firms that have been accredited for the full competitive market that is supposed to start after the end of the test on June 24.
But after all, this is supposed to be a test period, during which the five registrars and Network Solutions Inc, which controls the registry, discover and hopefully solve the various problems involved in opening up a market that has been controlled by one company – NSI – for seven years. Some tell us bugs in the software have caused the delay, while others, including NSI say it’s more to do with the high level of security required. NSI provides not only the shared registration software (SRS) that all the five testers have now paid for and received, but also technical support, with at least one NSI engineer appointed to support each registrar.
Clive Flory, general manager of Internet Names Australia, a division of Melbourne IT that already acts as the administrator for the .com.au name space as well as being one of the five testbed registrars, says the length of time it takes for a registrar to get up and running depends on how much integration and automation it is prepared to do. He says there’s a big difference between putting some forms up on the web, capturing the data and handing it off to NSI for it to do all the processing and quite another to take on the processing role including the legal problems that come with it. Flory declined to give an estimated start date for Melbourne IT’s involvement in the test period.
Of course, each day that passes without a competitive market being established is good news for NSI. And while there is no suggestion, from us or the registrars, that NSI is dragging its feet, it should be remembered that it is not in its, or its shareholders interests to do any more than it has to under the terms of the agreements it has signed with the Department of Commerce and the registrars. Representatives from the Council of Registrars (CORE) and America Online Inc did not get to us by press time and France Telecom SA has never responded to any of our calls or emails on this subject.
