The Pasadena, California-based startup said that BulkRegister LLC, a top-five domain name registrar, has started selling registrations in New.net’s namespace. The deal was first announced in September 2001, but launch was delayed by technical problems.
We have some big resellers on board, and we expect the others to follow, New.net president Dan Sheehy said. The integration work is easy, and it’s another high-margin product registrars can add to their stores.
Sheehy added that the company will announce partnerships with more accredited registrars and their resellers over the coming weeks. In addition, the company is expected to announce a software distribution deal with a popular application maker soon.
Going live with BulkRegister is significant for New.net, which has striven for legitimacy in an industry semi-regulated by standards bodies and quasi-governmental organizations. Its proprietary system has come in for the kind of criticism one would expect.
New.net sells web addresses with 87 different suffixes, including .shop, .mp3 and .inc. The names can only by resolved by internet users that either have special software installed on their PCs or subscribe to an ISP that New.net has partnered with.
Because of this, whether you can call what New.net sells domain names is the subject of some debate. The suffixes are not a part of the standard domain name system as sanctioned by the various powers-that-be, but they function in pretty much the same way.
The New.net registry system, which its resellers plug their retail systems into, now operates using the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) that has become the standard interface for registry-registrar communications, Sheehy said.
The 18-month delay before going live with BulkRegister was due to technical difficulties building the registry, Sheehy added, rather than any kind of post-September 11 concerns about the stability and security of the DNS (the BulkRegister deal was announced five days before the terrorist attacks on the US).
We fully intended to go live that fall, he said. It turned out we had a little bit of a job to do getting the registry done until the spring, and it took between then and now to get back on BulkRegister’s calendar.
The delay building the registry was apparently due to its contractor, Basic Fusion, a subsidiary of KwikWeb.com Inc, falling behind. New.net actually had to acquire Basic Fusion last March in order to get the job done, Sheehy admitted.
In the meantime, the company signed on UK-based registrar EasySpace Ltd to its channel, and increased the number of internet users that can access its domains to 175 million, Sheehy said, increasing by on average 200,000 per day.
Source: Computerwire
