By Nick Patience
None of the five organizations that have been accredited to begin registering domain names today, April 26 are expected to be doing so, due to the lack of preparation time since they heard they were one of the chosen five. In fact, depending on who you speak to, the five are likely to start anywhere between the start of May and the end of the intended 60-day test period.
The announcement of the names was made last Wednesday and meetings were held between the five companies and Network Solutions Inc, the keeper of the registry. They will not be able to get going today because none of has yet received the shared registration software (SRS) needed to register names in the database of .com, .net and .org. Under the terms of the registrar license, NSI is obliged to hand over full documentation for the registry registrar protocol (RRP) the C and Java APIs and client software within three business days, which will be April 29.
NSI held a technical session for the companies at its headquarters on Friday morning led by senior VP engineering Dave Holtzman. Each of the five companies was represented by three or four people and four out of the five companies signed the necessary license agreement. NSI’s own registrar business was excluded from the discussions.
The first to sign the agreement was Melbourne IT, which will be registering names through its subsidiary Internet Names Australia (INA). The Council of Registrars (CORE), Register.com, France Telecom SA’s Oleane subsidiary also signed on Friday, but AOL did not sign, apparently because it sent technical, not management people along to the session.
Register.com says it will probably begin accepting registrations at the start of May, and from what we can gather, AOL may well be the last. It says it got involved not for its traditional customer base of AOL users, but for the ones it got from the acquisition of Netscape Communications Corp and the ones it hopes to get through its alliance with Sun Microsystems Inc. It will market domain names as just one of its many business services.
Sources within the five companies tell us that NSI is employing a thin-registry, fat-registrar model, whereby the registry records only contain a minimal amount of information, such as the IP address, domain name and basic contact details. The registrar retains the rest. At first glance that may appear to be advantageous to the registrars, but it could make it more difficult for users to switch registrars, which would benefit NSI as it is starting the competition phase with a head start of millions of names it has registered over the past seven years. Moreover, the registrar agreement states that registrants must pay the $18 fee again for two years registration even if the two years have not elapsed. The losing registrar will not get a refund.
Today, Monday NSI will publish what its sees as the timetable for the test-bed period and beyond. Nobody was available at the Department of Commerce to comment on NSI’s timetable, but NSI says both the DoC and the Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers (ICANN) has known for quite some time that a start date of today would prove unrealistic. NSI says the atmosphere at the technical suggestions was surprisingly cordial and there was even some applause at the end. We wonder how long such bonhomie will last.
