October 29, 1999 Web posted at: 12:06 p.m. EDT (1606 GMT) by James Niccolai

From...

(IDG) -- The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has given its approval for 11 more firms to provide registration services for Internet addresses ending in .com, .org, and .net, bringing the total number of accredited registrars to 88.

Registration services for those three "top-level domains," as they are called, were handled until June by Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) of Herndon, Va., under an exclusive contract with the U.S. government.

ICANN was set up last year to oversee the introduction of competition, with the goals of improving services, lowering prices, and bringing some global representation into the registration process.

Registrars that have been accredited by ICANN must sign an agreement with NSI and meet certain technical requirements before they can begin to register Internet addresses. According to information on ICANN's Web site, 12 companies so far are operational.

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ICANN is set to hold its annual meeting next week in Los Angeles where officials will hear feedback from registrars, Internet service providers, intellectual-property experts, and others on its proposals for how to handle certain aspects of the competitive registration system.

At the top of the agenda will be the agreement reached last month between NSI, ICANN, and the Department of Commerce about the terms under which NSI will participate in the new system, and the terms of its relationship with its newfound competitors.

The proposed agreement already has generated some heated feedback, with officials from some of the new registries complaining that the agreement is unfairly advantageous to NSI.

ICANN officials have posted information about the meeting, including the proposals they will consider, on ICANN's Web site, at www.icann.org. The meeting runs Nov. 1 to Nov. 4.

Meanwhile, the 11 new registrars accredited this week are: Easyspace and Reacto.com, both of the United Kingdom; Schlund + Partner of Germany; ExtremeNames.com, FreeYellow.Com, infoUSA.com, Virtualis Systems, and Web Express, all of the United States; Hangang of Korea; OnlineNIC of China; and Speednames of the United States, Denmark, Singapore, and Sweden.

James Niccolai is seniour U.S. correspondent for the IDG News Service in San Francisco.