Incumbent VeriSign is the leading contender to operate the .net registry, according to an outside analysis of five submitted bids that was released just after midnight on Monday by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
IncumbentVeriSign is the leading contender to operate the .net registry, according to an outside analysis of five submitted bids that was released just after midnight on Monday by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
Compiled by Telcordia Technologies, the analysis ranked VeriSign slightly ahead of the other bidders, which include Sentan Registry, Afilias Limited, DENIC and Core++.
These five companies were bidding to operate 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.
In a statement issued Monday night, ICANN said it will “promptly enter negotiations with the top-ranked applicant to reach a mutually acceptable registry agreement.’’
VeriSign’s current contract to operate the .net registry is set to expire on June 30. The new .net contract will last for six years.
The five DNS operators submitted bids for the .net registry to ICANN on January 19. Telcordia evaluated the five bids and conducted site visits to each applicant’s facilities.
“All the vendors have the capabilities to run the .net registry,” Telcordia’s report says. But it found “distinguishing characteristics are largely difference in experience, risk and price.”
Telcordia’s scoring gives a slight advantage to VeriSign over Sentan, followed by Afilias, DENIC and CORE++.
VeriSign is the long-time operator of the .net and .com registries. Sentan is a joint venture of Japan Registry Services and NeuLevel, which operates the .biz and .us domains. Afilias operates the .info and .org domains. DENIC operates the German .de domain. CORE++ is a consortium of operators of the country codes for South Africa, Korea and Brazil.
Keeping the .net registry will be a major coup for VeriSign, which earns an estimated $26 million a year on this operation, according to analysis by Legg Mason.
Although it is less popular than .com, the .net domain is considered to be a critical component of the Internet’s infrastructure. Altogether, 5 million .net names have been registered, compared to 30 million .com names.
Many network engineers rely heavily on servers with .net names to keep their higher profile Web operations up and running. For example, several ISPs including Earthlink and Comcast run their e-mail operations on the .net domain. VeriSign estimates that 155 billion e-mails are sent each day either directly or indirectly via the .net domain.
Among the e-commerce sites that have DNS servers running on .net are Amazon.com, Microsoft.com and Walmart.com. Government agencies including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Security Agency depend on .net servers to support their .gov Web sites.
The .net domain represents 58% of worldwide hosts and 30% of the world’s name servers, according to VeriSign.
To read more about the Telcordia report click here .
