Which brings us to our current story. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a well-known Internet governing body, just approved a request by VeriSign to start up a 12-month trial of a Wait Listing Service for domain names. The decision still needs to be approved by the Department of Commerce before it goes into effect. VeriSign should be willing to wait that long; after all, it's been working with ICANN for the past two years to hammer out all the details of the service. Okay, granted, the domain name registrar got a little impatient back in late February of this year and filed a lawsuit against ICANN in an attempt to convince ICANN to let VeriSign go ahead with the wait listing service already -- but hey, what's a little lawsuit in the name of progress, right?
The Wait Listing Service would work like this: a customer lets a domain name registrar know that he or she is interested in buying a particular domain name ending in .com or .net. The registrar then makes reservations for that domain name on behalf of the customer. Each domain name accepts only one "waiting" reservation, and those would be on a first-come, first-served basis. And oh yes, the entity already holding the domain name would always have the option to renew it.
Those are the general rules. The specifics run to about 10 pages of .pdf document, available at the ICANN web site. They include such matters as not playing favorites among domain name registrars; informing current domain name holders when someone has waitlisted their names; and time limits on wait list subscriptions, so that they last no longer than one year past the end of the trial period. This is a new and potentially controversial service, after all -- and who wants to wait forever to get Hotmail.com?
Excuse me, did I say "potentially" controversial? Raise your hand if you haven't heard of VeriSign. One can almost describe the still-huge domain name registrar as the Microsoft of the Internet, with one big difference (and not one that reflects nicely on VeriSign): the registrar was granted a monopoly by the US government to register .com, .net, and .org domain names, while Microsoft had to spend some time fighting other operating systems out in the market. The registrar fought tooth and nail to maintain that monopoly, and when they were forced to give it up, they still kept a government contract to run the master database for .com and .net. VeriSign claims that it's just good business to introduce "new services that benefit Internet users and promote the growth of the Internet." (That's from VeriSign's press release explaining why they filed a lawsuit against ICANN). Ah, but these new services have reportedly inspired some domain name registrars to file lawsuits of their own against both ICANN and VeriSign. The argument is that VeriSign will be able to unfairly take advantage of its government contract in offering this service, giving waitlisting preference to those who go directly to VeriSign.
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