Registrars attack new ICANN VeriSign plan - News

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Registrars attack new ICANN VeriSign plan

March 12, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/soa/Registrars-attack-new-ICANN-VeriSign-plan/0,139023165,120208318,00.htm

A group of registrars has banded together to oppose a plan for Verisign to surrender control of the ".net" and ".org" suffixes in exchange for keeping long term rights to manage the valuable ".com" domain name space.

Registrars, including Register.com, Melbourne IT and BulkRegister.com said in a draft letter to ICANN, the proposal failed to provide tangible benefit to the Internet community in return for several windfalls for Verisign.

"We believe that if approved as currently drafted, the agreements will significantly undermine the competition that has only begun to emerge in the registrar and registry industries," said the draft letter.

"In effect, these proposed modifications will make a contract that was already bad for the industry even worse," it said.

The registrars drafted the letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as they gathered in Melbourne for the organisation's quarterly meeting but had not yet presented it to the ICANN board.

Verisign operates the world's master list of web addresses and acquired registrar operations by buying Network Solutions last year.

Under a 1999 agreement with the US government Verisign would have had to sell off half of its Internet domain name registrar operation by May 10, 2001, to retain the registry unit until 2007 rather than 2003.

The new deal where it gets to keep the registry and registrar units by giving up .net and .org was a welcome move for Verisign, pushing its shares higher and wining praise from analysts.

ICANN's outgoing chief executive Mike Roberts said on Saturday the debate raging about the Verisign deal was an issue that needed to be addressed, but that did not mean all the concerns were valid.

"Some of those comments are valid and need to be paid attention to and a lot of them are smoke and very little fire," Roberts told Reuters.

Roberts said the initial agreement was an imperfect deal and while the current option improved on that some were not happy as they wanted a full scale re-assesment of the agreements, which was unrealistic.