By David McGuire
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer Tuesday, August 20, 2002; 2:01 AM
"Dot-org," the world's fifth-largest Internet domain and online home to thousands of nonprofit groups, should be managed by a Northern Virginia-based group when the domain comes up for re-delegation in December, global Internet addressing authorities said late Monday night.
The staff of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recommended that its governing board of directors choose the
Reston-based Internet Society (ISOC) to run dot-org when it awards the contract later this year.
Operated for years by Internet addressing giant VeriSign Inc., dot-org is slated to get a new landlord in December when VeriSign relinquishes
its hold on the domain.
Earlier this year, eleven entities applied to operate dot-org, which accounts for more than 2.3 million Internet addresses.
ICANN, which manages the Domain Name System (DNS) under agreements with the U.S. government, commissioned three evaluation teams to weigh the
technical and individual merits of the 11 proposals.
"The ISOC proposal was the only one that received top ranking from all three evaluation teams. On balance, their proposal stood out from the rest," ICANN President Stuart Lynn said in a prepared statement.
The recommendation will be thrown open for public comment before being submitted for final approval by the ICANN board in late September. In the past, the board has tended to closely follow staff recommendations on major decisions.
ISOC Officials were not immediately available for comment. But last month, ISOC spokeswoman Julie Williams said the group's longtime
involvement in coordinating the development of Internet standards and protocols made it a logical choice to operate dot-org.
"ISOC was formed in 1991 by a lot of the pioneers that originally developed he Internet as a focal point for cooperation and coordination in the development of the Internet," Williams said in July.
ISOC has members in more than 100 countries and serves as the institutional home for two key Internet standards-setting bodies, the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB).
In its bid, the nonprofit ISOC said it would rely on a for-profit addressing company to provide backend operation of the domain.
Under the ISOC proposal, Afilias, based in Horsham, Pa., would administer the
physical operation of dot-org, charging ISOC a flat fee for each name registered in the domain. Williams said last month that while ISOC was
still hammering out the details of that arrangement, the fee was expected to be in the range of $3 to $5 per name, per year.
If the bid is ultimately confirmed, ISOC would maintain the annual wholesale cost of a dot-org name at or below its current level of $6, Williams said in July.
Individual Internet users buy dot-com, dot-org and other domain names from Internet address retailers (called "registrars") who in turn pay
flat per-name wholesale fees to the registries that manage the domains.
VeriSign, the current dot-org registry, is giving up its management of the domain as part of a deal it struck last year to cement its control of the valuable dot-com domain.
