The Race Is On For .net

mikrorechner writes "As reported previously, ICANN is looking for a new registrar for the .net tld. The biddings are in now, and The Register has a lengthy article about the five contenders. Their guess is that only two really have a chance: VeriSign and DeNIC. We will know more in two months."

Comments

Anyone but Verisign

[H_Fisher]

P. J. O'Rourke wrote that giving money and power to government was like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. With VeriSign's track record being what it is, I'd say that giving them .net might end up being the same kind of bad decision.

I know there's no totally-impartial, non-profit-driven corporation or entity that can do this job well, but Verisign's past practices ("Site Finder" and its blind ignorance of how the Internet should work is a perfect example) have led me to see them as worse than the rest of the pack. I simply don't trust them to do the job right because they can't understand that the Internet != the WWW.

Re:Can't see how Verisign could win.. (article)

[Zocalo]

so what the article author meant was that ICANN would hate to see either Verisign or Denic winning the bid.

In which case, I suspect that ICANN would probably have stuck with the Devil they already knew and hoped that the move would have smoothed the troubled waters between them and Verisign. That would however have led to all sorts of allegations about the selection process. Assuming that he's come to the same conclusions as the Register then the appointment of the independent body is quite a canny move by Dr. Twomey. Whatever happens, they should hopefully avoid any mudslinging after the announcement and can get on with what they should be doing.

Personally, I'd have to say that DeNIC is much better positioned than Verisign to be our .net gTLD overseer come July. DeNIC already runs a ccTLD with more domains that .net, so there should be no problems there. Moving the .net gTLD to DeNIC means that all the main gTLDs are managed by seperate entities; diversity is good here. Moving control of gTLDs about is certainly doable because .org has already been reassigned, and DeNIC has the additional advantage of knowing where PIR had problems. Finally, DeNIC is not a US company which addresses another issue for ICANN; they can use that as an argument against the UN/ITU's claims that control of the Internet is too US centric.

By contrast, all Verisign seems to be offering is a continuation of the status quo, for which they have managed to earn themselves a less than stellar reputation. Sure, they can do the job, but where's the vision? Big changes are afoot for the Internet over the next few years with VoIP, streaming media services and more all gaining momentum; I hardly think "status quo" is going to be a winning argument against that dynamic backdrop.