ICANN in Hot Seat over .net Registry Report

April 2005

A report recommending that VeriSign is well positioned to remain in charge of the ".net" domain name registries is coming under repeated criticism, as the Internet's international governing body finds itself in the eye of yet another controversy.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers Latest News about Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) received a report earlier this week from a consulting firm hired to determine what vendor had the best infrastructure in placed to handle the registration oversight.
'Sloppy' Work Alleged

The report scored VeriSign higher than all four other bidders for the work in many of the 14 categories it examined. The report was conducted by Telcordia Technologies.

Earlier in the week, Germany-based Denic, one of the other four firms vying with VeriSign for the right to control the domain, slammed the report, saying it was "sloppy" work replete with "serious factual errors" that led to mistaken conclusions.

One drawback cited in the report by the reviewers was that Denic uses a proprietary software system to operate its domains; Denic says that's not the case and provided evidence to that effect to ICANN.

More recently, the chairman of an internal ICANN committee that established the methodology for the report added his voice to the din, citing a "serious flaw in the methodology."

In a note to an ICANN mailing list, technical committee head Philip Sheppard said Telcordia "used a scoring system which was biased towards multiple technical criteria" rather than using competition as a key factor, as the committee that launched the review had ordered.