ICANN Board Designates VeriSign to Retain Control of .NET Registry
(press release)
Marina del Rey, CA – – ICANN’s Board has named VeriSign, Inc. as the designated .NET successor registry. ICANN has also approved entering into a new agreement with VeriSign for their continued management of the .NET registry for six additional years. This announcement is the culmination of the .NET RFP and successor registry process that began on 6 March 2004 and included an independent evaluation of VeriSign and four other applicants.
In taking this action ICANN’s Board considered the entire RFP Process, an independent evaluator’s report, Internet community comments and the terms of the new agreement.
ICANN hired Telcordia Technologies, Inc. (an independent third party) to conduct the evaluation of the applications and the qualifications of the applicants. In April, Telcordia declared that all five applicants were capable of running the registry for .NET but gave the highest ranking to the incumbent registry, VeriSign. In May, Telcordia confirmed this ranking after evaluating an additional round of comments from all five applicants.
VeriSign’s current agreement for .NET is scheduled to run out on 30 June 2005. The agreed framework for ICANN and VeriSign’s new arrangement will be set out in a new .NET Registry agreement which will strike a balance between innovation and business certainty, with the need to ensure competition, security and stability in the domain name system.
Commenting on the designation, Dr. Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN, stated: “We would like to thank all five qualified applicants, the entire Internet community, ICANN’s Generic Supporting Organization, and Telcordia for the work in making this a successful process.â€
A detailed outline of the .NET Successor Registry Process can be found here.
Leave a Comment