The Council of Registrars (CORE), which was chosen last week as one of the five new domain name registrars to compete with Network Solutions Inc in a two month test phase still has ambitions to become a registry. At present NSI is the registry for .com, .net and .org and will continue to be so at least until its current contract with the US government expires on September 30, 2000.
CORE was originally established in spring 1997 to be a registry for a bunch of new gTLDs that many hoped would be introduced into the root server network, but never were, for reasons too numerous to mention here. But because of that CORE has had to reinvent itself to find a role in life. It comprises about 90 registrars and would-be registrars around the world and about 20-30 of those will shortly begin registering names in .com, .net and .org under CORE’s role as a test-bed registrar.
We thought it a little odd that CORE was able to constitute one company among the five, but Ken Stubbs, chair of CORE’s executive committee, says a single face will be presented to the NSI interface, while multiple faces will be presented to consumers and business users around the world looking to register names. He says being a registry is definitely still on the agenda and is looking to the forthcoming World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) report to stimulate interest in additional top-level domain names and the increased chance of competition in both the registry and registrar market that would bring.
