The Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has received applications from at least four companies that hope to take over the running of the .net internet domain from VeriSign Inc.
VeriSign is facing competition from bidders led by Afilias Ltd, Denic eG, NeuStar Inc, and a new coalition of domain name infrastructure firms calling itself Core++.
Between now and the end of March, an ICANN-selected committee will decide whether to renew VeriSign’s .net contract for another five years, or whether to award it to one of these competitors.
The main selection criteria, most people are agreed, relate to technical ability. The .net domain handles too much critical internet infrastructure to be subject to anything less that 100% uptime, they say.
A VeriSign spokesperson said that .net, a domain of about 4.8 million names, is disproportionately important in the internet’s infrastructure, with 37 of the 100 top .com sites also relying on .net behind the scenes.
Since at least October, when ICANN kicked off the process of looking for a successor registry, VeriSign has been framing the issue as one in which change is not needed.
Senior executives at companies including Microsoft, Sun and MCI have put their names to letters endorsing VeriSign’s performance to date.
We’ve been at 100% uptime for seven years, Verisign’s spokesperson said. Others, he said, cannot boast of such high performance. What makes us stand apart is our track record.
It would be a bold ICANN indeed that would hand .net to another operator, knowing only too well that it would take the blame for any subsequent outages, and at a time when its own legitimacy is being questioned.
But the if it ain’t broke don’t fix it attitude doesn’t ride with some of the competing bidders, who say brokenness doesn’t necessarily mean just downtime.
It is somewhat broken, said Richard Tindal, vice president of the registry at NeuLevel. It’s not being run in a way that meets users needs from a technical perspective. It is not performing optimally right now.
NeuLevel, which runs .us and .biz, is a joint venture of NeuStar and Melbourne IT Ltd. NeuLevel is applying for .net as a 70% stakeholder in Sentan Registry Services Inc, a joint venture with Japan Registry Services Co Ltd, which runs .jp.
Tindal says that moving the registry to a fat model, where more of the registration data is held centrally with the registry, rather than with the registrar as under VeriSign’s thin model, will add to stability.
Both NeuLevel and Afilias intend to move to a fat model if they win the .net contract, which Tindal said would create create a safeguard against registrars going offline or out of business.
It would also make moving registrations between registrars simpler and less prone to errors, such as the one that saw veteran ISP Panix.com become unaddressable last weekend, he suggested.
Verisign said that the fat versus thin debate should be left to the registrars, which are in essence the registry’s customers, and that most registrars are happy with VeriSign’s current model.
Tindal also suggested that VeriSign running .com and .net – the two most-used domains on the internet – on the same registry infrastructure is inherently risky. One goes down, so does the other.
Verisign’s spokesperson disagreed. If that’s the case, he said. Then every operator that already has a [top-level domain] would counting themselves out. Tindal says it’s the size of the domains that counts.
VeriSign’s greatest problem in the selection process could be its perceived attitude towards .net and .com as corporate assets that can be exploited to the detriment of the internet.
When the company launched its Site Finder service 15 months ago it was accused of being irresponsible, breaking current and future applications that rely on DNS being dumb but predictable.
Site Finder intercepted lookups for non-existent domains and returned not an error but a web page that included advertising and tracking cookies. Web users had no option to disable it
ICANN ordered VeriSign to shut it off on the advice of technical experts, and VeriSign is currently suing ICANN for the right to launch that kind of service without permission in future.
Since the Site Finder controversy, VeriSign has gone on the offensive, framing the issue as a philosophical war pitting a small clutch of old-guard internet engineers against a company that wants to innovate by greatly commercializing the internet’s infrastructure.
Neither NeuLevel nor VeriSign are talking about price publically. Both are expected to ask for less than $6 per name per year, which is VeriSign’s current wholesale price.
Afilias, which currently acts as registry provider for .org and .info, is talking numbers, however. The firm says it will reduce the price to $4 per year, with a promotional price of $1 in the first year of operation.
Afilias will also create a Technical Advisory Group to provide advice on security and other technical matters, and will fund it to the tune of $1m for R&D.
Afilias, as a pioneer of the competitive registry space, has experienced a number of hiccups in it registry operations over the years, but it also has some unique experiences, such as transitioning a large domain (.org) away from VeriSign relatively hassle-free.
Denic, which operates the German .de registry, claims 100% uptime and a non-profit ownership structure that it says will allow it to invest more in the infrastructure and not feel compelled to do things like Site Finder.
Core++, a joint venture of the registries of Korea, Brazil and South Africa (the latter two countries are not known to be especially ICANN-friendly) is an unknown quantity, announcing its existence yesterday.
The organization said it is promising security enhancements and substantial price reductions as part of its bid.
According to ICANN’s schedule, any handover to a new registry operator would be executed by the end of June. The smart money says that this will not happen on time. Any rush-job transition would present a stability concern in and of itself.
For VeriSign, the .net contract brings in less than $30m a year in direct revenue, and price reductions mean it will bring in less should it win the contract renewal.
The amount is immaterial to the company’s overall business, which extends into areas as diverse as security and mobile ringtones, but to lose .net would cause brand damage and potentially lost business.
This goes to the heart of VeriSign’s DNA, Verisign said. The ability to build and manage large databases, it’s very important to the company’s brand.
