The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
last night issued a recommendation that the US-based Internet
Society, known as ISOC, should become the new operator of the .org
domain name registry, the internet’s fifth biggest registry.
The recommendation was contained in a preliminary Staff Report
on the selection of a new registry operator to replace current
operator VeriSign from 1st January 2003.
ICANN had already decided that VeriSign, which also controls the
.net and .com registries, should relinquish control of .org upon
the expiry of its current contract. The report is subject to public
comment and has yet to be approved by the ICANN board of
directors.
ISOC, which was formed in 1991, is an international non-profit
organisation of over 6,000 individual and 150 organisational
members in over 100 countries. It is the home of internet-standards
setting bodies Internet Engineering Task Force and Internet
Architecture Board.
In its application, ISOC said that it will co-operate with
Aflias, another non-profit registry that recently launched the
.info top-level domain.
ICANN, which manages internet domains under an agreement with
the US government, received applications from 11 entities wanting
to operate .org. The domain accounts for more than 2.3 million web
addresses. Stuart Lynn, president of the ICANN said: “We received
11 very strong and thoughtful proposals… The ISOC proposal was the
only one that received top ranking from all three evaluation
teams.”
