By Nick Patience
With Network Solutions Inc required to run the .com, .net and .org
registry on a cost plus fixed fee basis once competition has been
introduced into the domain name registrar market, support appears to be
growing for a cooperative registry model, much like the one employed in
the UK, where the registry, Nominet, is a non-profit collective ‘owned’
by the registrars that feed their data into it and pay a fee for each
domain registered. It would not seem too attractive for a
publicly-traded company such as NSI to run a registry in the long term
that will basically make no money, and comes with the constant threat of
legal action and 24×7 maintenance requirements.
We ran the idea past Mike Roberts, president of the Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which will ultimately make the
decision as to what type of registry model will be employed. However, he
urges caution if anybody thinks his is going to happen any time soon –
as Asensio & Co, the short seller that targeted NSI last week, seems to
think it is. The company used it as one of the fundamentals for shorting
NSI’s stock.
Roberts says the ICANN board has not formally discussed a cooperative
registry and has no position on it, but he notes that it gets a lot of
favorable comments from those in the community with whom he consults.
Roberts says he understand that the Department of Commerce, which
oversees NSI contract, has been aware of the possibilities of a
cooperative registry for some time, but is reluctant to take any
position because the solution must be seen to be coming from the
internet community itself.
Roberts also points out that the registry model has wider implications
for the expansion of the top-level domain name space with the
introduction of new suffixes, such as .web or .shop, which is not likely
to happen until next year, but will definitely happen at some point. He
says the issue will initially be in the hands of the domain name
supporting organization, which will advise ICANN on domain name policy.
The first meeting of the general assembly of the DNSO, as it is known,
will be held around the time of the next scheduled ICANN board meeting
in Berlin in late May and no doubt more will be heard about a
cooperative registry at that point.