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.