Competition Sizzles In Domain Name Business

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May 06, 1999 (2:12 PM EDT)

By Mary Mosquera,

Competition is heating up in Internet domain name business, as companies are officially allowed next week to vie for customers formerly monopolized by Network Solutions Inc.

Register.com is one of the first five companies that will begin handing out domain names for the Internet directly to registrants without going through NSI first.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust division is reinvestigating possible anticompetitive practices by the Herndon, Va.-based company over how much information about the existing database of 4 million registrations the company must share with new competitors.

Richard Forman, CEO of register.com, said he anticipates the software that will allow direct registration of .com, .net, and .org will be in place by May 10.

TechWeb's Mary Mosquera recently interviewed Forman on his selection April 21 by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which now oversees the Internet.

Register.com has been, until now, a reseller of domain names. What does direct registration mean for your business and customers?

What it does for us as a business is put us on the same footing as Network Solutions. It allows us to enter a domain name to the registry database without going through the NSI registrar. That means we'll be taking over responsibility of invoicing, customer service, and managing domain names. It will give the customer more choices, more services, more options, and maybe different prices

What other services do you offer?

We offer Web forwarding services so if you have a domain name, you can forward e-mail to communities like GeoCities or the theglobe.com or a domain name. We also offer e-mail forwarding services so once you have a domain name, you can forward messages into your different accounts. There really are a lot of services we can introduce. Some are in already in the pipeline, and some we haven't even thought of.

Negotiations between the government and Network Solutions have been long and contentious to get to this point. Do you expect the actual registering to go smoothly?

It's too early to tell.

April 26 had been the target date for competition to start. When will it actually begin?

A: At this point, competition is slated to begin as soon as any one of the newly accredited registrars has implemented the system on its website. At this point, I don't think anyone has. We expect to start May 10.

The number of competing registrars is to increase to 29 in June. Will the large number of competitors make registration confusing for the Internet user?

A: It is really not going to be confusing because there are already so many resellers for NSI. The change is only a behind-the-scenes change in the landscape for what the consumer perceives.

Could we foresee more hot Internet IPOs as a result of competition among registrars?

A: The number of domain name registrations worldwide and the opening of the market should be a positive sign for the Internet IPO market vis-a-vis domain name registrars.