.ORG MOVED TO NEW REGISTRY
January 24, 2003
In a little under 24 hours the final procedures will begin
for transferring .ORG away from Verisign forever. ICANN has decided to reassign
.ORG, the third largest TLD, to keep competition in the gTLD market. This
reassignment separates ORG from its sister TLDs (COM, NET) for the first time
since they were all brought online on January 1, 1985. As soon as Verisign drops
out on January 25th, Public Interest Registry (PIR)
will take over operations of the TLD.
The administrative end of the .ORG registry has resided with
PIR since January 1, 2003, ORG's 18th birthday. PIR and Verisign have had
overlapping control since then to allow for a smooth transition, and it appears
that Verisign is complying with ICANN orders for once. This weekend's transfer
is the technical transfer of the TLD. PIR will maintain its own servers for
.ORG, and will handle registrations.
While we can all agree that it is a good thing that Verisign
GRS is loosing control of .ORG, there is also a downside to this transfer,
during the transfer tomorrow evening new registrations will not be accepted, and
all modifications to existing registrations will be postponed until further
notice.
PIR is a division of the
Internet Society (ISOC). PIR was selected to operate ORG in much the same
manner that the BIZ, INFO and NAME operators were appointed. A list of registry
candidates was created, and each candidate submitted its proposal for how to
operate the registry. Many companies applied, only one was accepted.
I believe that PIR will do a great job with the TLD, but I
still question some things about the transfer. First, when the initial
selections were made to narrow down the list of candidates, the
ENOM sponsored candidate was thrown out
because they planned to use Microsoft technology to maintain the registry. The
ICANN board cited the security holes as reasoning behind that decision, however
they never fully provided backing information to show that Unix/Linux based
plans would be more secure. The second item that I question is PIR's
licensing of EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) from
Afilias, the INFO operator, and and ally of
Verisign. EPP is more secure than the old Verisign authentication method, but
this reliance on Afilias creates an eerie feeling that ORG is jumping out of the
fire, and into hot lava.
Overall, I think that ORG customers can expect better
service, faster updates and more secure domain transactions with the new
registry. I wish PIR luck in their brave endeavor to save .ORG from Verisign.
