[thelist] Is there ONLY VeriSign???

Sean G. seanmgerman at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 15 11:22:05 CDT 2002


Howdy,

Actually Joel hit the nail on the head with
> This http://www.google.com/search?&q=domain+registrar yields this
> http://www.icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html as the first hit.

ICANN assigns operators for the TLDs (listed at the above link) and
"accredits" domain name registrars (also listed).  Note that the ICANN list
is not up to date, as The Internet Society was recently chosen to operate
.org (http://www.isoc.org/isoc/).


HTH,


Sean G.


"Jason Bauer" <jbauer at chimesnet.com> wrote
> Up until a couple of years ago, it was basically just VeriSign. Then, they
> opened up the registration process so anybody and their mother could set
up
> a registrar. This resulted in much lower prices for us, and an explosion
in
> the number of companies that you could register your domain with.
>
> Now, for an answer to your question of "Does it still all come back to
> VeriSign?": I'm going to say yes and no... Yes because I think they still
> run the database of available domains and the DNS servers of the top-level
> domains. There has to be a central repository so you don't get duplicate
> domains, and I imagine that VeriSign has something to do with it.
>
> On the other hand, I don't think they have any hand in the actual
> registration process... If they did, then we wouldn't be able to get a
> domain for $6 a year or whatever the price has dropped to now. So, as part
> of the opening of the registration process, VeriSign was forced to let
other
> people register domains on its database, without making money from them.
>
> DISCLAIMER: This is just an educated guess as to how this all works, I
have
> no facts to back this up. Please correct me.





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