By Nick Patience
The word on the net is that large telecommunications companies will dominate the list of five companies chosen by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to participate in its registrar testing procedures from April through June, so it was natural, given its telco ambitions, that PSINet Inc should be asked yesterday if it is looking to be one of the five (02/11/99). ICANN’s board will pick five companies to test the software developed by incumbent monopoly provider Network Solutions Inc and the market to register names in .com, .net and .org will be thrown open later this year to companies that meet ICANN’s yet- to-be defined accreditation procedures. PSINet Chairman, president and CEO William Schrader, who has attended some of the meetings over the past few years that have led to ICANN’s existence in one way or another, noted that PSINet has been certainly heavily involved in the process and also pointed out that through its acquisition of Tokyo Internet last October, PSINet now houses the Network Information Center (NIC) for the .jp country-code domain. But, he said, the ICANN process is a little bit unfixed right now and he described PSINet as being as close as any company can be with the ICANN process without being fully engaged with it yet.
