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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
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.