The Race Is On For .net

mikrorechner writes "As reported previously, ICANN is looking for a new registrar for the .net tld. The biddings are in now, and The Register has a lengthy article about the five contenders. Their guess is that only two really have a chance: VeriSign and DeNIC. We will know more in two months."

Can't see how Verisign could win.. (article)

[Staplerh]

Seems a little sketch. The article clearly argues that DENIC eG will win the contract. These two snippets say all, despite their conclusion that doesn't really support the evidence that they themselves introduced. From TFA regarding DENIC eG:

So Denic isn't messing about and while ICANN would love nothing more than VeriSign to lose the .net registry, it would be equally delighted to see Denic win it. Why? Because Denic is the most powerful registry outside of ICANN control.

So it appears that The Registrar thinks that DENIC eG will win the bid. This is especially apparent when contrasted with their earlier snippet about Verisign's bid:

These very reasons are also why ICANN would desperately love for its old foe to be humbled. With VeriSign weakened, ICANN can start to assert itself properly over the Internet. It may even mean the end of the lengthy legal battle that VeriSign has been running against ICANN - something that is as much a bartering chip as it is a legal dispute.

So there, the Registrar actually thinks that DENIC eG will win, despite their own conclusion and the story submission.

Re:Anyone but Verisign

[wertarbyte]

I know there's no totally-impartial, non-profit-driven corporation or entity that can do this job well,

Actually, DeNIC is a non-profit organization (http://www.denic.de/en/denic/index.html), and they manage 8336375 .de-Domains at the moment (http://www.denic.de/en/domains/statistiken/index. html)

Re: Registrar and registry backend processes.

[r5t8i6y3]

from: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.operators.nanog /28482 [gmane.org]

From: panix.com>
Subject: Re: Registrar and registry backend processes.
Newsgroups: gmane.org.operators.nanog
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 18:16:25 -0800

[second posting attempt, apologies if the first identical post ever arrives]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 15:47:50 -0700, Michael Loftis
wgops.com> wrote:

>It's clearly broken, and needs to be put up for
>public review by 'the powers that be' so that it can
>be fixed. What's happening now feels close to a
>boiler room poker game, noone seems to know all the
>players, and even fewer know all the rules, so in the
>end everyone is a loser.

i suspect part of the reason for it feeling this way is because of the large amounts of money that are made specifically off of the .com and the .net registries. ~$1.2 _billion_ for .com and ~$30 million for .net annually (numbers from the following article). for what? the actual costs involved in administering these databases can't be anywhere near the revenue generated. the public is being bled for the greed of a few (as usual), imho.

anyhow, it also makes me wonder about the motivations behind this incident coming so close to the application deadline for administration of the .net registry ($30 million/year x 6 years minimum = $180,000,000). i dislike conspiracy theories but i'm also a realpolitiker.

david
--
P.S.
can anyone comment on the reputations of the .net registry administration contenders (no need to comment on verisign)?

VeriSign Has Challengers to Run .Net, the Domain
By ELIZABETH OLSON
The New York Times

Published: January 17, 2005

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - As long as the Internet runs smoothly, few people think too much about its workings. But later this month, the system's underpinnings will become a topic of debate when rival companies publicly bid to run .net, one of the Internet's most popular domains.

This will be the first time that VeriSign's .net franchise will be challenged. While .net is not as ubiquitous as .com, it has more than five million registered domain names, which translates daily into millions of page views, 155 billion e-mail messages and some $1.4 million in commercial transactions, according to VeriSign, the company in Mountain View, Calif., that manages .com, as well as .net.

About 40 percent of government domains allow access through .net, including the White House, the United States Senate, Homeland Security agencies and the Social Security Administration, making it a vital Internet transportation layer, said Tom Galvin, a spokesman for VeriSign.

So far, at least three companies in addition to VeriSign have indicated that they plan to vie for the franchise, which expires June 30. They are NeuStar, a Sterling, Va., company that runs .biz, and Afilias, which manages .info. A nonprofit firm in Frankfurt, Denic eG, which manages Germany's eight million registered .de domain names, has also indicated that it is planning to bid.

Selecting the domain manager is the job of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. But Icann finds itself in a ticklish position because it has publicly clashed with VeriSign over the company's proposed Site Finder service, which would redirect queries from inactive or defunct Web addresses to a search engine supported by advertisers signed up by VeriSign.

When Icann concluded that was an unacceptable diversion and refused to allow the service, VeriSign accused the group

Re:are current registrations honored?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and the money will all go to the _current_ registry. If Verisign loses, whoever follows in its steps will have to keep your domain in the database for free until you need to renew it.

Re:Not for profit

[Florian Weimer]

DENIC is not as neutral as it claims to be. It pursues the interests of its members (like every good co-op should do), not those of all Internet users. Sometimes, the interests diverge. For example, DENIC members generally want easy domain transfers with as little validation as possible (because they make money by transferring domains), but most corporate users want rock-solid delegations that cannot be altered by anyone except themselves.

Re:Not for profit

[joel48]

There is an "unofficial" translation of their domain guidelines here [denic.de]. The first entry containing the phrase "without any profit motivation".

Re:Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging by the very OpenSRS look of their interface and the names of the CGI scripts, I'd say they are in the process of setting themselves up as a reseller. OpenSRS requires a "testing" phase for new resellers, wherein they have to connect to a "demo" server and successfully submit a certain number of domain registrations of various configurations. I.e., deomostrate to OpenSRS that they have the script correctly configured.

That demo server doesn't actually verify the availablity of domains requested, since the registrations aren't "real".

The most these folks seem to be guilty of is relying on obscurity to hide their testing server.