By Nick Patience

A group of domain name registration companies is calling on the US Department of Commerce and ICANN to revoke certain elements of the agreements forged between the two organizations and Network Solutions Inc last month on the grounds that they hand back an unfair advantage to NSI, the company that until this summer had the monopoly on domain name registration. The monopoly was ended when Register.com Inc became the first registrar to register domain names directly into the registry database of domain names managed by NSI under an agreement it has with Commerce.

In a letter sent to ICANN chair Esther Dyson and Commerce’s Becky Burr as part of the public comment period preceding the expected ratification of the ICANN-NSI-DoC agreements, eight registrars express their concerns about elements of the agreements. Rich Forman, CEO of Register.com, which is one of the signatories to the letter, says, if they [ICANN] don’t address these issues, it really brings into question what role ICANN is serving. The seven other registrars are either accredited or have applied to ICANN to become so and come from the US, UK, Japan, Israel and Kuwait.

The companies highlight the money that NSI will likely gain from selling its registry business within 18 months of the agreement being ratified, which it is being encouraged to do with the incentive that whoever buys it will have the license to run the .com, .net and .org database extended from to 2007 from 2004.

The registrars estimate the value of the business at more than $1bn and are worried that that windfall could be used to expand NSI’s registrar business. This co-mingling of the funds would unfairly favor NSI in the new, competitive domain name registration market. Forman says the group used a projection of 150 million to 200 million names registered over the next four to seven years at $6 per name, which is the amount registrars will be charged from mid-January 2000.

In other issues, the registrars, which also include Concentric Network and PSINet, point to an element of the agreement which will effectively mean that NSI will be able to enter into exclusive agreements with registrars earlier than expected, due to the testbed period being extended from an original end-date of June 25 to at least November 5. NSI has a premier partner program, which among other things, stipulates that the customer that signs up to it – typically an ISP – cannot sign with any other registrar for two years. The current agreement NSI has with DoC says that NSI cannot enter into such exclusive agreements for 18 months after the first deployment of the shared registration system that enables other companies to register names into the registry. That happened in early June when Register.com came online, but due to the testbed being extended through to November, the group wants the exclusivity stipulation extended by another four months to match it.

The group also calls for a service-level agreement (SLA), which they say is missing from the registry agreement between NSI and ICANN. The agreement deals with financial arrangements, privacy and rights to whois data, but says very little about the quality of the services NSI must provide. Forman says it is amazing, that no SLA is included in what will be a multi-billion dollar deal, when contracts considerably smaller regularly feature SLAs.

The group also points out that under the current registrar accreditation agreement registrars, including NSI are not allowed to activate a domain name until they have received reasonable assurance of payment. However, NSI has said that for technical reasons it won’t be able to meet that requirement for at least four months and the group feel it should be forced to get in line with the other registrars.

The ICANN-NSI-DoC agreements are expected to be ratified immediately following the ICANN board meeting on November 5. Forman promises to be very vocal at the meetings preceding it if it does not look as if these issues are go

ing to be addressed.