By Nick Patience
Once again, Network Solutions Inc and the Department of Commerce have agreed on an extension to the so-called testbed period of the brave new world of competitive domain name registration; this time extending it through September 30. The previous extension expired last Friday, September 10. This is the fourth time the test period has been extended, with once more all sides saying this extension should give them enough time to conclude negotiations.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers (ICANN) is also part of the negotiations, which are only believed to have resumed in the past 10 days, due to many parties taking vacations in late August, which left little time for talks before Friday’s deadline. The test period has been extended from the five original registrars chosen to by ICANN to include any of the 64 companies that have thus far been accredited. Some 19 companies have signed the necessary documents since that decision was announced on August 6, and 10 companies in all have got the shared registration system up and running.
NSI is also thought to be looking for an extension to its other contract it has with the US government, the one to run the registry of .com, .net and .org domain names, which is scheduled to run through to September 30 2000. NSI is expected to ask for an extension to that in return for recognizing ICANN as the body that will administer the DNS once the US government has left the arena, which it is trying to do. Any such extension to the registry agreement will likely require a public comment period of at least a couple of weeks. The test period was supposed to last 60 days, concluding on June 24. Register.com became the first company to start competing with NSI when it started using the shared registration system on June 6. Separately, Alan Baratz, the ex-president of Sun Microsystems Inc’s Java division who recently joined EM Warburg Pincus & Co, LLC as a managing director joined the NSI board last week, as did the chief executive, Jim Rutt.
