Domain Registration Related News
The .Net Race Is On
January 2005
Officials at the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) expect to
announce early next week the name of the
third-party evaluators who will decide which
registry is best suited to assume management of
the .net domain extension.
Kieran Baker, an ICANN spokesman, said the
announcement could be made as early as Monday,
setting into motion the organization's timetable
to end evaluations by March 9.
Officials at the organization have spent the past
couple of weeks going over the applications sent
by five bidders to make sure there were no
conflict-of-interest issues between those five and
the would-be evaluators.
ICANN plans to announce the new .net registry at
its board meeting in March. Its registry agreement
with the current registry, VeriSign , ends June
30.
With the bids now out in public, five registries
have the task of showing the independent review
board -- through their applications -- that they
should be entrusted with managing the
third-largest domain extension on the Internet. To
the four losers will go a $150,000 refund for
their $200,000 application fee; the winner will
take control of one of the most visible and
important domain extensions.
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