Executive board member Sabine Dolderer told ComputerWire that Denic’s organizational structure and experience could provide .net with technical and financial stability and a traditional standards-based approach to Internet infrastructure.
The .net domain is currently run by VeriSign Inc under contract with the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). That contract expires next summer, and ICANN is expected to soon publish a request for proposals for a successor.
Also expected to be in the running are Ireland-headquartered Afilias Ltd, which runs .info, US-Australia joint venture NeuLevel LLC, which runs .biz, as well as incumbent VeriSign, which also runs .com and several other domains.
Technical prowess and experience will be the key factor that will be considered during the application process, which ICANN will outsource to an as-yet-unnamed accountancy firm to avoid allegations of bias.
VeriSign, as incumbent, may have an advantage here, but Dolderer pointed out that .de is the second-largest domain in the world, after .com, bigger than .net in terms of the number of domains registered.
There are over eight million .de names at present, and Dolderer said Denic’s name servers handle about a half a million lookups every minute. The name server constellation of 11 locations globally runs at about 5% capacity, she said.
We’re just as technically capable as VeriSign, but we have a very different approach to the Internet community, Dolderer said, highlighting differences between the for-profit and not-for-profit approaches to infrastructure management.
VeriSign’s attitude to its rights and responsibilities as an infrastructure player is arguably informed by its position as a public company that has an obligation to maximize revenue and profit to increase shareholder value.
CEO Stratton Sclavos often talks about moving intelligence, in the form of commercial services, into the Internet’s infrastructure. Many Internet technologists think this is a bad idea, that the network should remain essentially a dumb conduit for edge services.
The best illustration of this difference of opinion is the Site Finder controversy last year, when VeriSign temporarily started intercepting misspelled domain lookups to make money from advertising.
If we keep the infrastructure stupid, then there is much more opportunity to introduce new services at the edge and to encourage innovation there, Dolderer said. The not-for-profit approach is a real advantage to the Internet community, as it allows us to put more revenue back into the infrastructure and allows us to lower prices.
Dolderer also talks of increasing competition as a reason to move .net away from VeriSign, and of moving .net out of the US as a reason to select Denic. Encouraging competition and international cooperation are in ICANN’s mandate.
On the flipside, Denic would have to implement new registry systems in order to handle .net, which currently uses the registry-registrar protocol called RRP. Most newer registries use the extensible provisioning protocol, EPP.
Denic will offer EPP as standard, but would also offer an RRP proxy so that people [registrars] could continue to use RRP, Dolderer said.
While Denic needs to secure the support of a majority of its members before officially bidding, gathering such support is expected to be fairly easy. The proposal will be voted on at a meeting of Denic members on November 22.
