The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said yesterday that it has approved 15 more companies from around the world to compete as registrars for the .com, .net and .org Internet domains.
The 15 companies will be accredited when ongoing tests of the new Internet address system have been completed, which is scheduled for July 16. The new companies join the five accredited registrars that are carrying out the tests and another 37 companies that ICANN has said it will accredit when the tests are finished.
Nine of the companies named yesterday are from the US, two are from the Middle East, and four are from Europe.
Until competition was introduced last month, Network Solutions Inc (NSI) of Herndon, Virginia, handled exclusively registration for the three most popular top-level domains, under a 1992 contract with the US government. Register.com of the US, one of the five test-bed registrars, became the first company to compete with NSI.
The new system is being introduced in part to provide more global representation among the companies that manage one of the Internet's most important resources -- Internet addresses.
The 15 companies approved yesterday are: Affinity Hosting, Alabanza, Animus Communications, Concentric Network, Domain Registration Services, EnetRegistry.com, InterAccess, PSINet, TierraNet, all of the US; Computer Data Networks of Kuwait; SiteName of Israel; EPAG Enter-Price Multimedia of Germany; Research Institute for Computer Science of Japan; TotalWeb Solutions of the United Kingdom; and World-Net of France.
Further information about these companies will be available shortly on ICANN's Web site, at http://www.icann.org/registrars/accreditation.html.
ICANN is a non-profit group formed in September 1998 to sort out who will manage a set of Internet management functions currently handled by the US government and its contractors. Specifically, ICANN is responsible for coordinating the assignment of protocol parameters, the management of the domain name system, the allocation of IP address space, and the management of the root server system.
ICANN's Web site is at http://www.icann.org/.