By Nick Patience
Network Solutions Inc yesterday confirmed its claim that the data it is using in its new business directory service, called dot com directory, is the data it gets from being a domain name registrar, not from being the exclusive registry for .com, .net and .org. And anyway, it’s not the database some people think, says senior VP marketing Doug Wolford, as the registrar data has been combined with data from the likes of infoUSA Inc as well.
Wolford told ComputerWire last week that it had not run this specific proposal past the Department of Commerce (DoC) prior to talking about it publicly, because the data is that of its own customers. It’s a bit of a legal tightrope and one that Wolford was not really prepared to negotiate on a conference call announcing the directory service yesterday, saying his specialty is marketing, not intellectual property law.
But he reiterated that users registering names through NSI’s registrar competitors, such as Register.com and Melbourne IT would not be contacted by NSI in an attempt to get them to sign up to the dot com directory, which costs $119 for non-NSI registrants. He says that such companies are welcome to do their own directories, which is true enough but obviously not feasible until they have got somewhere close to the four million or so registrations NSI has amassed over the past seven or so years of monopoly registration.
The vast majority of the businesses included in the directory were registered during the time that NSI had a monopoly under the terms of its agreement with the DoC, but that still makes the data the property of NSI, the company insists. However, the DoC’s general counsel, Andrew Pincus sent a letter to NSI late Friday that said he had no problem with the dot com directory plans specifically, but nevertheless asked the company to open the contents of the database up to competitors.
Paradoxically, Wolford told us last week that NSI did not have an exclusive right over the data used in the dot com directory and any company could take a snapshot of the database. But that’s all it would be, he said, a snap shot and NSI alone can provide businesses with the chance to belong to such an extensive database. Again, Wolford is not a lawyer.
So either the data is NSI’s exclusively, as NSI CEO Jim Rutt claimed in last week’s congressional hearings, or it isn’t. Nobody seems quite sure and we cannot help thinking that a court will have to straighten this one out eventually. Incidentally, the launch of the service has been put back a few days while some last minute glitches are being ironed out.
