Internet Society wins control of .ORGs

The .ORG Internet domain is home to millions of non-profit and community groups, and is the Internet's fifth-largest domain. The Internet Society is a group of over 11,000 engineers and other networking experts. It has offices in Washington, DC and Geneva, Switzerland.

From January, ISOC will take control from current manager VeriSign Inc., which agreed to give up its valuable .ORG role last year as part of a deal that allowed it to hold on to the more popular (and lucrative) .COM domain.

Eleven different commercial and non-profit groups had lobbied for control of .ORG since ICANN opened the bidding process in April. Many were lodging furious protests after ICANN identified ISOC as the front-runner in August.

ISOC has already established a new not-for-profit organization to succeed VeriSign Global Registry Services Inc. as the registry operator for .ORG when its contract with ICANN expires on December 31, 2002.

The Public Interest Registry (PIR) will introduce new services designed to meet the unique needs of noncommercial organizations including: name locking, site linking, a directory, and ID certification. In addition, PIR will establish a .ORG Advisory Council to be made up of non-commercial community leaders.

Afilias Limited, a global domain name registry services provider and current registry operator of the .INFO top-level domain (TLD), will provide PIR with a full range of back-end registry services to support .ORG.

ISOC and Afilias have already begun planning for the technical transition and expect that it will be virtually invisible to .ORG users. Existing .ORG domain name holders will simply renew their name on their regular schedule, and new registrations will be accepted just as they are today. Domain name registrars, the retailers of .ORG domain names, should also experience an easy cutover due to the special processes being developed for this transition.

VeriSign will continue to profit from .ORG as it owns a small interest in Afilias Limited. µ