By Nick Patience
Competition in the domain name registration market is still a fair way off, at least in terms of internet-time. As of the end of business Friday, only one of the five newly accredited registrars – Register.com – had signed all the paper work and received the shared registration system software from Network Solutions Inc. Of the other four, America Online Inc has not even signed the non-disclosure agreement yet, let alone the software licensing agreement, while Melbourne IT, France Telecom SA and the Council of Registrars (CORE) are expected to sign this week. NSI is obliged to provide them with the software and protocols within three business days of receiving their signature and bond.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) chose five companies two weeks ago to compete with NSI in a 60- day test period, after which it will open the market up to any company that meets its criteria. So far 29 companies have been accredited in addition to the initial five. The companies are required to post a bond of $100,000 with NSI and are subject to a $10,000 license fee at the end of the planned 60-day test period which started last Monday, April 26 and runs through June 24. They also pay ICANN a $10,000 fee before they start registering names. It now looks as if Register.com may be ready by the end of this week, with the others following after that.
NSI’s senior VP engineering, Dave Holtzman, who led an April 23 meeting with the five accredited registrars, says the company has told ICANN that it can handle about five additional companies per month after the test phase has been completed. He says the limitation is due to technical and operational support, rather than technical issues, because while the domain name registry that NSI maintains is just a database, the ramifications of a mistake are very very large, he says. Holtzman notes that the checks and balances in the system are 20 times the size of the functional code, which is written in Java and C/C++. He will continue to meet with the technical advisory committee that was established under the terms of NSI’s agreement with the Department of Commerce to review its system and says the next meeting of the nine or ten-person team will be around mid-May.
Holtzman confirmed that the system employs a thin-registry/fat- registrar model whereby most of the information about the registrant is stored at the registrar. He says that’s because NSI was not sure which business model each registrar would employ, so it needed to be flexible. Holtzman says CORE, which is a collection of about 80 companies in all, with around 30 of them participating in the test period, will be treated as a single company and get one copy of the software and one contract. What CORE does with it at its back-end is up to CORE, he says.
