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.”
Even Congress is interested in how ICANN selects the .net registry. Rep. Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) has sent a letter to the Secretary of the Department of Commerce, which oversees ICANN, requesting assurances that the .net procurement will be held in a fair and open manner.
“I have been told that a failure of .net could result in disruption of 33% of all e-mail traffic, a loss of $320,000 per minute in e-commerce and failures across every major top-level domain, including such popular and critical applications as whitehouse.gov, blackberry.net and cybersecurity.gov,” Pickering wrote. “Therefore, the structure and administration of the rebid will be critical to the security and continuing viability of the Internet.”
VeriSign is pushing to retain its .net business, which brings in about $26 million per year, or 2% of its overall revenues, according to analysis by Legg Mason.
VeriSign executives are pitching the importance of the .net registry, the need for stability in .net operations and the potential problems that a transition of the .net registry could cause. The company boasts that it provides 100% uptime with .net and has withstood many hacker attacks, including a potentially devastating root server attack in 2002.
“Keeping .net is important for VeriSign,” Galvin says. “We’ve done a great job of running it, and we know it’s important to the economy and to communications. We want to be sure it continues to run at the highest levels of performance.”
It’s unclear how VeriSign’s long-running legal battles with ICANN will affect its chances to retain the .net registry business. Earlier this year, VeriSign sued ICANN over its right to introduce a new service called SiteFinder that directed requests for non-existent .com and .net names to a VeriSign search engine. ICANN prohibited VeriSign from deploying SiteFinder because it interfered with some DNS software.
“ICANN indicated at a Senate hearing a month ago that it would hire an independent third party, probably an accounting firm, to oversee the .net competition,” Galvin says. “That’s a good sign because it gives ICANN more credibility. It’s good to know there will be an impartial jury.”
The other companies bidding for the .net registry say it’s important for the domain name industry to have alternatives to VeriSign, which was the first and for many years the only company to provide DNS registry services. These companies also point out that other domains – most recently .org – have been successfully transitioned from VeriSign to another registry without failure.
Afilias says performance of .org improved when back-end operations migrated from VeriSign’s servers to its servers.
“It used to take 12 hours for new names and changes to resolve in .org. Now it takes several seconds,” says Roland LaPlante, chief marketing officer for Afilias. “Many of the registrants in .net make changes to their name servers and addresses regularly. It would be a dramatic improvement for them to see changes in seconds rather than hours.”
Rivals say VeriSign has been slow to introduce new capabilities into .net, such as the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), a standard method of DNS registry and registrar communications that was created by a team including VeriSign engineers. Among other capabilities, EPP provides password protection for network managers to make changes to domain name information such as IP addresses. Afilias and NeuLevel run EPP on their registries.
“We have run EPP since the start of .biz and .us,” says Richard Tindal, vice president of registry services for NeuLevel. “We’ve done dynamic, real-time updates right from the start, too. Our intention would be to do that in .net.”
Despite the new capabilities rolled out by NeuLevel and Afilias, many ICANN observers say VeriSign is likely to win the .net contract again.
“For anyone other than VeriSign, this is an incredible longshot,” says Bret Fausett, author of the popular ICANN blog and a partner with Hancock, Rothert and Bunshoft in Los Angeles. Fausett points out that VeriSign already operates a more robust registry infrastructure than any other company in the domain name industry and has the incumbent advantage.
“ICANN is going to have to have a compelling reason for moving the registry, because of the costs associated with that and the risks involved,” Fausett adds. “At the end of the day, I think that’s unlikely.”
