By Nick Patience
Network Solutions Inc and the US Department of Commerce have agreed to extend the period of testing of a competitive domain name registration market for a third time, prolonging what was originally a 60-day period into one that will last almost five months – barring any further extensions. However, more companies will be introduced as a result of the new agreement, and NSI has relinquished some of the restrictions it places on the database of registration information. However, it has not withdrawn its claim of intellectual property rights to the data.
The current test period involving up to five new registrars, along with NSI, expired on Friday, August 6 and the new agreement will see the test period run through September 10. NSI began relinquishing its monopoly grip on the domain name registration market in June as part of its long-standing agreement with the US government. It has run the system since 1992. It also has an agreement to maintain the registry of domain names – the registry – through September 2000.
However, two important changes have been made to the agreement in order for it to be extended this long. First, NSI and Commerce have agreed to bring in additional registrars, which begs the question of when the test period ends and when open competition actually begins. The distinction is relevant because while it is still classified as a test period, NSI can put off signing an agreement with Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to eventually take over the running of the DNS.
Once the test period is over, NSI is supposed to recognize and sign contractual agreements with ICANN under the terms of Amendment No.11 to its cooperative agreement with Commerce that was signed last October. At present, four of the five ICANN- accredited testbed companies have got the shared registration system (SRS) up and running. They are Register.com, Council of Registrars (CORE), France Telecom and Melbourne IT. The only one that hasn’t got it working yet is America Online Inc, which some observers feel is a somewhat reluctant participant in the scheme, being brought in late to add some heavyweight credibility to the whole exercise.
ICANN has 52 other companies already accredited and waiting to enter the market and they are all now eligible to join the test, says Becky Burr, the associate administrator at Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). However, NSI has said in the past that it feels they could only be added at the rate of about five each month and Burr says there is likely to be some natural staging in the introduction of new registrars.
The second important change is that NSI has agreed to remove restrictions it has placed on the ‘whois’ data that details the registrants of all current domain names in .com, .net and .org, which NSI recently utilized to form its dot com directory – a web-based business directory. Now third parties will able to use that data to develop their own similar value-added services. It means the withdrawal of a policy statement on the whois page that says the data cannot be repackaged without NSI” written permission, according to Burr. NSI could not get back to us by press time to comment.
NSI claims proprietary rights to that data because it gathered it during the period of its cooperative agreement with Commerce. But others in the community, including Commerce itself dispute that, arguing that it is public data owned by nobody, expect perhaps the US government, which is Commerce’s view. Burr says that issue is still to be resolved. Late last month, Commerce general counsel Andrew Pincus and NSI chief executive Jim Rutt both testified before the same Congressional committee that they were the rightful owners of the data, and the battle looks like heading for the courts.
The original 60-day testbed period, which was to end on June 24, was extended to July 16 and then again through Friday, August 6. Each time lengthy negotiations were held between NSI and Commerce before and agreement was reached and this time the two sides have been talking solidly for more than a week. NSI says it has spent about $15m developing the SRS so far.
