Network Solutions Inc has agreed to the US Department of Commerce’s request for an extension of the Shared Registration System (SRS) testbed period to August 6, 1999. The original testbed period was scheduled to run from April 26 to June 26. It has already been extended once, and was supposed to wind up today. This latest three-week extension is expected to be the last. It was proposed as a way of giving the five testbed registrars a chance to conduct more tests to make sure their systems are bulletproof.
All five registrars have already achieved SRS technical certification and can access NSI’s registry for real time domain name registrations in the .com, .net and .org top level domains (TLDs). Eleven more registrars have been contacted by NSI’s business affairs office. The eleven can now begin developing the client ends of their own SRS interfaces. Each new registrar will be required to build its own registration system and take responsibility for pricing and customer service. It’s all part of the first phase of the evolution of competition between registrars, as described in the June 1998 White Paper.
