AN FRANCISCO, June 14 — An intense, largely behind-the-scenes competition is under way for the right to manage the global database that keeps track of Internet addresses of noncommercial organizations.

Although the business of registering Internet names has begun to shrink this year, as many as eight or nine bids are expected at a meeting this month in Bucharest, Romania, when the group that oversees Internet addresses will decide who should manage the list of names that end in .org.

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The decision will shift the .org domain from VeriSign Inc., which currently manages the list of 2.7 million organizations. The company struck a deal with the oversight organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, last year that extended VeriSign's control over .com and .net addresses in exchange for giving up the .org designation. VeriSign, based in Mountain View, Calif., also promised to contribute $5 million to assist in the transition.

Although the management of .org was once intended to go to a nonprofit organization, the competition has more recently attracted some profit-minded businesses.

In addition, the competition is likely to become much more visible with the entry on Monday of two iconoclastic Internet pioneers who say that many of the entrants have served as shields for large businesses that are hoping to help themselves to what some analysts estimate will be a $10-million-a-year business.

One of those pioneers, Carl Malamud, has previously forced the government to make Securities and Exchange Commission financial data available freely over the Internet. His partner, Paul Vixie, has been a longtime Internet software developer and a determined opponent of unsolicited commercial e-mail, known as spam. The two said they intended to run the .org registry on a nonprofit basis.

Mr. Malamud and Mr. Vixie say their plan differs from those of other competitors because they intend to place the database software needed to operate the .org name system in the public domain.

"Is this a public trust or a public trough?" Mr. Malamud asked.

James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, a Washington lobbying group, says the competition has drawn commercial bidders that have associated themselves with a nonprofit organization to improve the appearance in front of the Icann review committee.

But Icann's supporters respond that the organization has created a process that will select the group that will best manage the database.

"Icann is trying hard to make sure this isn't a gold rush," said Esther Dyson, chairwoman of EDventure Holdings and a former chairwoman of Icann.

One of the first partnerships to announce a planned bid is Poptel, the British manager of the new .coop domain, and AusRegistry, the operator of the Australian .au country domain. The two companies are calling their partnership Unity Registry.

Another bid is being planned by Global Name Registry, a British company that was recently awarded the .name domain, in conjunction with the International Red Cross, according to several people close to the company's plans.

In a similar fashion, Afilias Global Registry Services, which was recently awarded the .info domain, is planning to submit a bid in conjunction with the Internet Society, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Internet standards group, the Internet Engineering Taskforce.

There has also been speculation among a number of people involved in the bidding process that even though VeriSign originally struck a deal to release the .org domain, it is planning a bid of its own.

Icann's request for proposals has emphasized both diversifying control over the approved domains as well as a complex proposal process to qualify the bidders.

"The board wants a stable well-functioning .org registry," said Miriam Sapiro, founder of Summit Strategies International, a Washington company specializing in Internet policy and international issues. "It doesn't want to take a risk and jeopardize the domain names of 2.7 million organizations."

Mr. Malamud, who heads the Internet Multicasting Society, an organization in Stewarts Point, Calif., that develops open source Internet software, and Mr. Vixie, who founded the Internet Software Consortium, a group in Redwood City, Calif., that develops open source versions of crucial Internet infrastructure software, said they planned to place the complex software used to manage domain names in the public domain as open source, freely available to any organization.

They say that would have the twin effect of making it simpler for Icann to diversify control of the domains as well as making it easier to create new ones. The issue is a hotly debated one that the organization, which was created under a contract with the United States Commerce Department, is struggling with.

"This shouldn't be a dot-com opportunity," Mr. Malamud said. "There has been a lot of smoke and mirrors, but what we need is actually a public utility that is well managed in the public interest."