German Registry Baffled over Evaluation Outcome

Yesterday, the international Internet organization, ICANN, announced the rankings achieved by the applications it had received to take over administration of the Top Level Domain .net. The application from the German registry, DENIC, finished in fourth place. This decision, which is based on an evaluation of all applicants carried out by the American firm of technology consultants, Telcordia Technologies, caused reactions of surprise and bewilderment.

In an initial statement on the matter, Sabine Dolderer, a member of DENIC's Executive Board, said: "DENIC submitted a sophisticated and thoroughly thought-out application at the highest conceivable technical level. Moreover, we can manifestly show more than eleven years of experience and competence in administering the German Top Level Domain .de. Added to that, our concept was a convincing one, which would have brought about more competition between registries and greater international cooperation. The evaluators' report does not make it at all clear how other applicants were, nonetheless, awarded much better rankings."

It is also a fact that the report contains serious factual errors. One of the key shortcomings held against DENIC in the report is that it allegedly uses home-made database software, whereas it actually uses a commercial product from one of the world's foremost suppliers – a point made expressly in the application documentation. Sabine Dolderer went on to add that "it is not now our intention to descend to the level of petty nit-picking, but there is no escaping the impression that the evaluation report was drawn up under great pressure of time, and it was its quality that suffered. It is precisely because there was little to choose between all the applicants – as Telcordia concedes itself – and because they would also all have the ability to administer .net that such sloppy mistakes are so problematical, since they give a false picture the applicants' true capabilities."

The highest ranking was given to the company that has run .net up to the present, VeriSign, and ICANN is now to start contract negotiations with it. ICANN had organized a worldwide competitive-bidding procedure for the administration of .net, which is the world's third-largest Top Level Domain with more than five million domains. Five organizations submitted applications: apart from DENIC and VeriSign, the others were Afilias, Sentan and Core++.