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.net Domain Up For Grabs
belmolis writes "
The New York Times is reporting that the bidding is on for the .net domain currently
administered by VeriSign. VeriSign's current contract
expires June 30th; applications are due today. Three companies are known to be interested:
NeuStar, which currently manages .biz,
Afilias, which manages .info,
and Denic eG, a non-profit that manages the German .de domain.
ICANN is bending over backward to avoid any suggestion of bias due to its conflict
with VeriSign over VeriSign's Site Finder "service" and has appointed an independent team
to evaluate the applications. VeriSign has been lobbying hard to keep the domain and
is reported to have received letters of support from Microsoft and IBM."
Just put the authority to the .net tld on ebay. This would raise millions, possibly billions for ICANN - as the new owner could take ownership of every single .net domain... or raise the price to very high levels. If panix.net thinks its situation is bad, what will they think when the new owner of the .net domain asks for $10000/year for a registration... Or makes google.net install spyware...
Wait, IBM is evil now? What about the patents that they are opening up to spur innovation? What about the vast funds that they pour into OSS? Just because a company is big, it does not necessarily make them evil.
I like to think of IBM as a very "Apple-esque" company - putting out good products and encouraging innovation at all opportunities...
This made me roll my eyes, and I hope I wasn't alone. This quote:
.net, one of the Internet's most popular domains.
.com but still... I will admit ignorance in these matters, but it's weird to think that a coroporation would run the .net domain - which, as the article points out, is responsible for a vast array of sites - including "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."
.net - what advantages does this convey on them?
VeriSign has been lobbying hard to keep the domain and is reported to have received letters of support from Microsoft and IBM.
Hah! Woopty-doo, hopefully this doesn't matter and there is some legitimacy in the bidding process. I'm not an anti-Microsoft crusader (although I did ditch Windows), but come now . . . unless they're willing to throw their money behind VeriSign (as opposed to a letter), they should simply STFU. From the NYT article:
But later this month, the system's underpinnings will become a topic of debate when rival companies publicly bid to run
It is rather disturbing at a base level that a company controls the domain. I know VeriSign runs
So weird.. WHY does VeriSign want
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
What's one that better? I'm serious. All the ones I've dealt with are worse. Recently dealt with droc.com. What slime balls.
I have yet to see a registrar that has a nice a web management interface for a bunch (30+) domains, but I'd be happy to switch to someone better than verisign.
Wonder if Tucows / OpenSRS will make a bid -- though I haven't seen anything on their reseller resource center. I'd trust them over MS or Verisign - they listen to their customers and actively support the Linux platform (heck, even their site is PERL and PHP). /me wanders off to call his Tucows rep...
This astounds me.
Having used four or five registrars myself (Register.com, GoDaddy, Dotster, and Network Solutions/Verisign) - and working with a few others that my clients have used - I have never found a registrar with better service than Network Solutions. I can talk to a real person and rarely ever have a problem that can't be resolved within an hour of reporting it.
I had to wait three weeks for another registrar to resolve issues which should have been done within minutes. I'm not thrilled about the lax policies on domain hijacking (as we've read about recently) but those aren't limited to just Verisign.
Despite their SiteFinder crap, I'm happy to pay $35/year for the best service, tools, etc. If someone can point me in the direction of something better, I'd be open to switching. But in the five or six years that I've been managing domains, this is the best I've found.
Years back, between migrating from AOL and my dialup ISP getting sold, resold, and resold, I decided to go to a third party for a popbox, so I could get a stable email address, and that worked for a few years.
Then the popbox provider changed their policies. It wasn't just that they weren't free - I could have handled that. They really didn't want to fuss with individuals, they wanted to provide for businesses.
So I bought a third-level domain, forwarding email to my ISP's popbox. That worked for a few years, and during that time their billing department was a bit odd, at best. Then last year their billing department got to be too much to deal with. (They wouldn't accept a cashier's check issued to the name of their company - they wanted it to a person . Sounds too shady, to me.)
So I went to DynDNS.org and bought my own domain last year, along with mail forwarding, etc.
My domain is a ".net".
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Verisign exercises a lot of power - between .com and their CA business. They
.net TLD, in spite of .com TLD as well. When does their .com TLD expire, anyway?
managing
have already aptly demonstrated that they
cannot be trusted to comply with ICANN, so
ICANN should let them have it. Right between
the eyes.
Verisgn should be barred from bidding on
management of the
support from MSFT and IBM. In fact, ICANN
should be looking for a new manager for
the
contract for the
Just my rapidly depreciating $00.02 worth.
It would be interesting if there were domains for multi-pronged corporate (or even non-corporate) initiatives.
.pass domain. So you could go to, say, BestBuy.com if you wanted the regular site, but BestBuy.pass if you were a happy Passport user (I'm sure there's one or two out there) and didn't want to bother with a manual login.
For instance, let's use Passport as an example (despite the fact that this particular service appears to be dying off). What if every passport-enabled site had a
Aren't those guys extremely burocratic w.r.t. domain transfers etc? Didn't they require real paperwork to transfer domains in their .de ccTLD (at least in the past)? Anyone with DeNIC experience cares to comment or explain?
There's also another point here: transferring .net to a ccTLD operator would also mean that all .net domains would be subject to the national laws of that operator's country. Do we really want the whole .net domain managed by an entity outside the US, governed by totally different rules and regulations?
This is by no means a rebuttal of or prejudice against DeNIC eG or other ccTLD operators. I'm just a bit worried that such a transfer would affect existing domains in negative ways (like less legal protection, higher legal costs, UDRP overrides, etc...).
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Yeah I uess we could do that. I don't mind using IP addresses instead of domain names.
.net is near zero. DeNIC is a good choice though, the DNS could use a dose of Germanic rigour, and those guys do good work.
My confidence in Affilias and those other wonks to handle
Need Mercedes parts ?