.net up for grabs
p2pnet.net News:- The Net is up for grabs.
Not the Net net, but .net (as in p2pnet.net ; ) and there are officially five contenders lusting after the third largest registry.
“From 1 July this year, 5.1 million .net domains will be handed over to the applicant that an independent group of advisors, working under the auspicies of ICANN, decide is most suitable,” says The Register. “Their decision will be made in just two months.
In the running are: Afilias, Core++, Denic, Santan and VeriSign.
It’s the, “biggest shake-up of the Internet landscape for two years, when all 2.4 million .org domains (there are now 3.2m) were handed over to the Public Interest Registry,” says the story. “There are similarities – the .org registry was previously the property of VeriSign (which also runs all .coms), and the company running the back-end is Afilias, which is one of the three contenders for the .net crown.
“However, the issue of who will get to run a big chunk of the Internet is far bigger than ownership and power – it also has an intriguing political angle. VeriSign currently runs all .net domains and it is going all out to win the contract back. Without .net, it may still have the most profitable registry (.com with 31.9 million domains) but it will be a huge blow to the company that was the Internet pre-1999.”
But as far as .net is concerned, “what we have is a two-horse race: VeriSign and Denic,” says the article’s author, Kieren McCarthy.
Who’ll win? “Well, for the good of the Internet, our bet goes with Denic,” says McCarthy.
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See:-
up for grabs – The race is on for ownership of .net, The Register, January 20, 2005
January 20th, 2005 at 6:32 pm
Verisign has the most disgusting business model i can think of.
Their servers, which serve the entirety of the internet, register any domain which is queried but not found.
They then squat on it and extort money from people for whom those domains would otherwise be free.
They’re no better than any other who’se been convicted of domain squatting, theyre just rich enough to bribe off officials and make it utterly impossible to challenge it.
They are thiefs of the public domain. They steal from virtually everyone.
January 20th, 2005 at 6:45 pm
I absolutely agree. A company shouldn’t be put in chargre of handling public domain if they are to abuse it and turn the internet into an ugly place with the domains owned by them with annoying search pages.
January 21st, 2005 at 3:46 pm
Maybe I will write a program that will lookup thousands of domains a day. This will give verisign registration hell. If everyone who is interested in website design decided to run this script, then it would make Verisign’s suatting unprofitable.