Competition heats up for key piece of 'Net infrastructure

When most people think of the Internet, they think of Web sites with names ending in .com. However, many network engineers rely heavily on servers with .net names to keep their higher-profile Web operations up and running.

Among the e-commerce sites that have DNS servers running on .net are Amazon.com, Microsoft. com and Walmart.com. Government agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Security Agency depend on .net servers to support their .gov Web sites. Several ISPs, including EarthLink and Comcast, run their e-mail operations on the .net domain.

Indeed, .net is the largest top-level domain when ranked by number of hosts connected to the Internet, according to VeriSign, which operates the .com and .net registries. More than 44% of hosts use .net, and 31% of all Web page views are dependent on .net for resolution, VeriSign says.

With just less than 5 million .net names sold, the .net domain is often overshadowed by the .com domain with its 30 million registered names.

That's about to change.

The .net domain will be thrust into the limelight over the next six months as the government-funded organization that oversees the Internet's domain name and addressing schemes awards a contract to a company to operate the .net registry.

".Net was designed to be the transportation layer of the Internet,'' says Tom Galvin, vice president of government relations for VeriSign. "Thirty-seven of the top 100 e-commerce sites rely on .net. . . . It's much more important than 4.9 million names indicates.''

Two camps are emerging in the network industry: Those who support VeriSign and don't want to risk switching .net registry providers, and those who favor more competition in the domain name industry and think a new provider will offer innovative services.

The .net registry has been operated by VeriSign or its predecessor, Network Solutions, since 1993. VeriSign now is competing against several other providers of domain name registries, including Afilias and NeuLevel, to keep its .net business. Denic, the German nonprofit organization that operates the .de country code top-level domain, is another potential competitor.

The .net registry operates the highly available and redundant servers around the globe that handle billions of .net queries per day. The .net registry also supports a massive database that includes information about each .net name and handles additions, deletions and changes to that information.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will select a contractor to operate the .net registry before VeriSign's contract expires in June. ICANN is expected to release an RFP any day now, with bids due in early January and a winner to be selected in March.

The .net competition is expected to be one of the main topics of discussion at ICANN's next meeting, which will be held the first week of December in Cape Town, South Africa.

"Selecting who is going to operate .net is the most important decision ICANN's ever had to make,'' Galvin says. "No matter who runs it, the bar can't be lowered because of the importance of .net to the economy and to communications.''

Already, the .net competition is garnering interest in the network industry. Among the vendors that have publicly endorsed VeriSign's bid to retain the .net registry are Microsoft, Sun and Thomson Group. Other vendors that are tracking the .net rebid and say it is critical to their online operations include IBM, Internap and MCI.

"When it comes to .net, things are a lot more interconnected than you might expect,'' says Paul Mockapetris, inventor of the DNS and chairman of DNS software vendor Nominum. "It's possible that a winner could bring new innovations to .net, such as in the area of security, that might then work their way into other domains.''