Network Solutions Inc (NSI) says it registered about 1.91 million new domain names in 1998, which is almost double the 960,000 it registered the previous year. NSI is the exclusive registry and registrar for domains in the .com, .net and .org top-level domain names. About 84% of the domains were registered in the .com domain. NSI has a network of about 150 resellers worldwide who offer registrations in .com and the others, and NSI gets a percentage from everything they register as well. The Herndon, Virginia- based company has had a cooperative agreement with the US government in various forms since 1993, though this summer will see the introduction of competition into its registrar business, the part through which it actually sells the registrations to companies and individuals. The registry part of the business is the maintenance and distribution of the database of all the internet’s addresses, which it will maintain exclusively until at least September 2000. Five companies will be allowed privileged access to NSI specifications so they can register names by the end of June and then the process should be thrown open to full competition by the fall. But it all depends on how quickly the nascent Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) can get its act together. The bottom line is that the longer that process takes, the more money NSI makes. The firm says that about 70% of its registration came from within the US, about the same proportion as 1997. In terms of US states, the top three were California, New York and Florida and after the US, the next three countries in terms of registration volume were Canada, UK and Germany.
