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Inside the Rise of the Domain Name System

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the it-sucked-back-then-too dept.

Greg Huang writes "Looking back, it's almost impossible to believe that for most of the 1990s, a single company, Network Solutions, had a government-issued monopoly on registering domain names on the Internet. And considering how central the company was to the growth of the Web, it's surprising how little of the company's back story — how it got into the domain name business, or who owned it — has been told. Xconomy has an in-depth interview with two former executives from SAIC, the secretive San Diego defense contractor that bought Network Solutions in 1995 for $5 million and sold off the domain registration business in 2000 for billions of dollars."

4 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Not To Celebrate Network Solutions, But... by damn_registrars · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There was a definite advantage in terms of ICANN enforcement of registrar responsibilities when there was only one registrar. Now that we have hundreds or thousands of registrars, we have all kinds of nonsense going on in blatant violation of registrar accreditation terms and ICANN can't keep up with the problems. Which apparently lead ICANN to their new strategy - nothing. Now we have unscrupulous registrars all over the world selling domains to bogus registration information, making it much more difficult to uncover who is really behind various nefarious acts on the internet (including but by no means limited to spam).

    So in the end, the monopoly was indeed broken up, but the consumer lost, and lost big.

    --
    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    1. Re:Not To Celebrate Network Solutions, But... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There was a definite advantage in terms of ICANN enforcement of registrar responsibilities when there was only one registrar.

      Take off your rose tinted glasses, please. Have you forgotten the exorbitant charges for domains when NetSol were the only player in town? May not seem like a big deal to a business, but it certainly prevented the internet from expanding as quickly as it could have, but sooner, due to the lack of affordable options to people who were online at the time. I sure as hell would have had my own domain a lot sooner if it wasn't for the fees that NetSol was charging... and everyone knew it monopolic overcharging then.

      Despite the insane amount of money they were charging for domain registration and renewal, their security was worse even then. They didn't even bother to contact people by phone or mailing address before accepting a SPOOFED EMAIL as a valid request for changing domain ownership.

  2. Peer to peer db's? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You know, I'm not sure some of you people know how the Naming system works. The difference between the Root Zone and some registrars like Network Solutions(at present)are night and day. If you think a single source of accurate data can be distributed between different companies in different nations, you are high. Really, there are so many things you aren't considering that you short start by considering swallowing your tongue. In the end, there can be only one. It's not that they're just so unhip- it's physical reality.

    And I would comment further, but I shouldn't because I actually know what I'm talking about.

  3. Re:Single entity by jjeffries · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Remember when ICANN routed all unassigned IP space to a helpful web page full of advertisements, breaking many other things in the process?

    Me neither.