NSI Plans New Directory To Fight Rivals

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April 30, 1999 (12:00 PM EDT)

By Madeleine Acey,

LONDON -- Domain name registrar Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) is embarking on a new life, and it plans to take its customers along.

The Herndon, Va.-based company was the only Internet domain name registrar for .com, .org, and .net addresses in the world -- under a contract with the U.S. government -- until this week. Monday saw competition open up to five rivals including America Online, the largest ISP in the world. A flood of others registrars is due to follow in July.

But NSI has plans beyond straight registration. The company aims to launch a service in June called the dot com directory. It is expected to offer a search facility, which, NSI said, will be a lot more efficient than a search engine.

"There's a lot of searching that gets done on the Internet and not a lot of finding," NSI senior vice president sales and marketing Douglas Wolford told TechWeb. "Search engines have become so ineffective, many people search by company name and domain name, guessing. We're going to take the guessing out of it."

Wolford said the dot com directory would allow searches based on company name or the name of a product, or a phone number. It was built on NSI's database of 4.2 million customers, all of whom will get a free listing in the directory unless they opted out, Wolford said.

A would-be competitor said this use of existing customer data was anticompetitive. "They are incredibly abusive of their position and always have been," said Ivan Pope, CEO of London-based NetNames.

Wolford said the other ways NSI would compete with new rivals included extensive support for its network of partners throughout Europe.

But many of the partners mentioned by NSI are known to be going into competition with NSI. "We think there's probably more profit in it for them to continue to work with us," Wolford said.

He said the cost and risks associated with running a major registrar operation were phenomenal. NSI had a "corridor of lawyers" to deal with trademark issues that came up with name registrations, and $100 million worth of equipment. "It is as though competition with us just means plugging into our database. There's billing, customer support," NSI's Wolford said. For those that remain partners with NSI, those costs would be picked up by NSI.

Still, NetNames, named by NSI as a U.K. partner, dismissed these warnings as "self-serving nonsense."

"We've run our own minor country registers -- we know how much it costs," Pope said. "It's by no means a given that the registrar is at risk of being sued for putting a name on the registry."

Furious that NSI would name his company as a partner when it had no choice about working with a monopoly supplier, Pope went on to say NSI did not support partners well.

"Recently, they just stopped processing our registrations -- for a week. Could we get a response? No. It's been an endless string of nightmares," he said of the relationship.

He said NSI was unpopular and estimated it would lose 90 percent of its business within the first year of competition.