.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."

Comments

Re:If VeriSign wants to keep it

[StevenHenderson]

With the twin bastions of evil that are of MS and IBM behind them, I'm sure they can't lose.

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...

Whatever

[Staplerh]

This made me roll my eyes, and I hope I wasn't alone. This quote:

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 .net, one of the Internet's most popular domains.

It is rather disturbing at a base level that a company controls the domain. I know VeriSign runs .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."

So weird.. WHY does VeriSign want .net - what advantages does this convey on them?