Supplemental Question #1 to .org Applicants (With Responses)
Supplemental Question #1 to .org Applicants (With Responses)
Supplemental Question No. 1:
(posed to all applicants on 4 August for response by 8 August 2002)
According to the Criteria for Assessing Proposals, "ICANN will place significant emphasis on the demonstrated ability of the applicant or a member of the proposing team to operate a TLD registry of significant scale in a manner that provides affordable services with a high degree of service responsiveness and reliability." In various parts of the written proposals submitted, and in the presentations given at the ICANN Public Forum on the evening of 26 June 2002 in Bucharest, applicants frequently made references to the number of domain names they (or their team members) support as either a registry operator or a registrar that interacts with a registry. For consistency sake, we are asking all applicants to clarify their responses and presentations by providing details, including the number of domain names, they (or their team members) support in each registry or registrar operation they wish to have considered in the course of the evaluation.
Specifically, please give the following details separately for each registry or registrar operation you wish to have considered:
a. Identify each registry or registrar operation you wish to have considered.
b. State whether it is a registry, a registrar, or both.
c1. If it is a registry, state the number of domain names and registrars supported by the registry.
c2. If it is a registrar, state the number of domain names supported by the registrar, and state what registries it interacts with.
d. State which of the following protocols the registry or registrar operation uses for registry-registrar communications: EPP and RRP. If both protocols are used, please provide details regarding which communications employ each protocol.
e. Identify all differences between the protocols identified in your response to item (d) above (i.e. as implemented in the registry or registrar operation concerning which you are responding) and the protocol you propose to use for the .org registry.
f. Name which of the applicant and members of the proposing team is/are responsible for the operation of the registry or registrar, and describe the role(s) under which it is/they are responsible.
Responses to Supplemental Question No. 1:
The DotOrg Foundation
The Global Name Registry,
Limited
Internet
Multicasting Service, Inc. and Internet Software Consortium, Inc.
The Internet Society (ISOC)
NeuStar, Inc.
The .Org Foundation
Organic Names Ltd.
Register ORGanization, Inc.
SWITCH Swiss
Academic and Research Network
Union of International
Associations
Unity Registry
The DotOrg Foundation is relying on Registry Advantage for its outsource registry solution. Therefore, we have requested Registry Advantage to provide the answers below.
a. Registry Advantage (RA) is a division of Register.com. While RA operates independently of Register.com in terms of management, staff, information sharing, and the relevant technical and non-technical facilities, it has had the benefit of drawing upon Register.com’s expertise and experience, particularly for its architecture, database schema, and core software set. To a large extent, Register.com’s operations mirror or exceed the requirements of operating a DNS registry.
Therefore, Registry Advantage would like ICANN to consider both:
a) Its experience as a registry outsource provider to ccTLDs and .pro; and
b) Register.com’s experience as the first competitive registrar and manager of the largest number of domains on its domain name system.
b. Registry Advantage is a registry outsource provider. Register.com is a registrar.
c1. Registry Advantage has agreements with 8 registries, which have over 15,000 domain names registered in them, and 19 registrars.
Several of the different registries supported by Registry Advantage require different types of information (e.g. thin versus thick). Consequently, while Registry Advantage's stable of domain names may be small in comparison to some registry operators, its experience with different transitions, registry policies and data requirements provide it with a breadth of experience unmatched by most other applicants.
c2. Register.com supports approximately 3.4 million domain names, for many of which it provides DNS services simultaneously. This requires a greater amount of social data, variety of resource records and often a much larger number of resource records per domain name under management than in a comparably sized registry operation. This represents the largest collection of names administered by a single provider of authoritative DNS services.
Register.com interacts with all of the legacy gTLDs (.com, .net, and .org), the new unsponsored gTLDs that have been launched (.biz, .info, and .name), and all of the ccTLDs that may be offered through a non-local registrar.
It may also be of interest to the reviewers that, much like a registry operation, Register.com’s Third Party Protocol (TPP) provides its reseller partners with the capability of performing automated registrations through an SRS-like interface. In addition to providing registration-related features, TPP also allows resellers to perform additional functionality such as updating the authoritative zone file information (such as A, MX or CNAME resource records) for each of their domain names.
d. Registry Advantage currently supports its registry operations by allowing for registry-registrar communications through various mechanisms, including EPP and its own proprietary protocol, SRP (Simple Registration Protocol). EPP and SRP are supported in a true multi-protocol environment: both protocols provide access to the same registry database, and registrars have the option of selecting either protocol for their registry-registrar communications.
Registry Advantage has already begun the process of adding the RRP protocol to its existing suite of registry-registrar protocols, leveraging the existing SRP software to facilitate a rapid implementation. Requirements specifications and project plans have been formulated to add RRP by the end of September. This product addition is planned regardless of whether Registry Advantage must do so or not to support the .org registry. RRP support will be in place well before the mid November deadline in our transition plan. This will enable registrars to start testing EPP as well as RRP connections to our Shared Registration System well in advance of January 1, 2003.
Register.com makes use of both the RRP and EPP protocols in order to perform its registrar function. The company has a lengthy history with the RRP, and was the first registrar to begin using the protocol, beginning in June of 1999. Since that time, Register.com has used the RRP to perform millions of successful registrations, modifications, deletions and transfers, as well as literally billions of check commands. Register.com also has extensive experience with various versions of the EPP protocol, which it uses to perform registrar activities in a number of new gTLDs (.info, .biz, and .name) as well as the .us ccTLD.
e. Registry Advantage’s EPP implementation is based on the most current versions of the EPP Internet-Drafts, version 06/04. It is anticipated that this will be the same version initially used for the .org registry. A slight implementation difference will exist: currently, Registry Advantage operates thick registries, which allow for the use of contact objects; initially, the .org registry will be operated as a thin registry, so the use of contact objects will be prohibited. This behavior is only a temporary step, however. As the registry is migrated to thick operations, the use of the contact object will be restored. Please see the migration schedule in sections C18.1 and C22 of the original application for further details.
Registry Advantage has also implemented its own SRP protocol for registry-registrar communications. While this protocol is not directly related to the RRP, it is a simple text-based protocol with many similarities to RRP. Full details of Registry Advantage’s registry-registrar protocols are provided in Attachment P to the original application.
Register.com implements the current version of the RRP used by VeriSign to support the .com, .net and .org registries. In order to facilitate an easy transition for .org registrars, however, it is extremely important that the new registry operator implement the same version of the RRP in place at the time of the change of operators. To that end, Registry Advantage may implement either the current version of the RRP, or the new 2.0.0 version of the RRP currently proposed by VeriSign. A further discussion of the differences between the RRP versions is made in Section C22 of the original application, although a new version of the Internet Draft describing the proposed 2.0.0 version of the RRP has been released subsequent to the original application timeframe.
Finally, Register.com currently implements a number of different EPP versions to perform its registrar function for various registries.
f. The DotOrg Foundation plans to manage the policies pertaining to the operation of the registry and oversee compliance by Registry Advantage with the registry contract, the service level agreement, and all relevant ICANN requirements. The Foundation will rely on a Chief Technical Officer, to be named if this bid is selected by ICANN. The Foundation will also rely on its directors and advisors with the relevant technical and industry expertise, such as Charles Pfleeger and Charles Musisi, two of the directors named in the proposal.
Registry Advantage will rely on its current twelve member staff, described below, as well as additional staff to be hired if this bid is selected by ICANN.
Business Personnel
Elana Broitman, General Manager, Business Development and Policy, has been with the company for over two years, during which she has served as the main liaison with ICANN and has been responsible for policy guidance and development for the Register.com businesses and divisions, including at various times, the registrar, RegistryPro, and the registry operations. Elana’s current role is to lead the business development, policy and legal aspects of the registry operations. Elana’s role in .org would include policy implementation, particularly with respect to ICANN policy and related issues; compliance with OCI and Code of Conduct requirements; and supporting the Foundation’s negotiation of its ICANN agreement.
Lauren Gaviser, Director, Strategic Initiatives, has been with the Company for over three years, and has served in both business development and policy roles. Lauren is responsible for billing systems; account management; interaction with both registrars and registries supported by Registry Advantage; and business development, which involves working with other entities to enhance Registry Advantage’s existing systems and to offer larger scale, non-DNS related deployments. Lauren would oversee the account management, billing support and customer support services for the DotOrg Foundation and its registrars.
Seth Jacoby, Manager, Account Relations, has been with the company for over three years. Seth has sales and business development responsibilities. In that aspect, Seth has broad interactions with both registries and registrars, and is expert at managing registries’ transition plans and supporting their ongoing needs. Seth’s expertise would support registry transition plans, particularly training of registrar regarding the transition.
John McClellan, Manager, Account Relations, has recently joined the company from VeriSign, where he worked in Technical Support for nearly two years directly supporting .org and many other TLDs. John assisted with the integration of the .cc Registry into VeriSign GRS and has a strong familiarity with the registrar community. At Registry Advantage, John manages invoicing, billing, and customer relationships. His expertise in managing the registry outsource provider’s interface with registries and registrars and helping to support the registry-registrar work is critical to designing and managing a smooth transition for .org registrars and registrants in terms of notifications, data migration, and billing migration.
Technical Personnel
Richard Webby, General Manager, Technology and Operations, has over a dozen years of experience in software development and project management, including particular expertise in building and operating mission critical software systems in the Internet and telecommunications industries. He recently joined the company from a leading wireless applications service provider where he was Vice President of Technology. Richard has a Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Richard would direct the technical aspects of Registry Advantage’s services to the DotOrg Foundation.
Jordyn Buchanan, Director of Technology, has 10 years in systems management and architecture. His six years of technology management include three years leading the technology department for a regional ISP. Jordyn has been working with the DNS for over eight years, and has been featured as a guest speaker on DNS related issues at fora such as RIPE-DNR, AfriNIC, and ISPCON. He has extensive experience working within technology and policy fora, and is a member of ICANN's Names Council. Jordyn was one of the key architects of the transition plans and service level commitments and, as such, will be one of the key experts at Registry Advantage in managing registry services.
Richard Roberto, Director of Operations, has 14 years in mission-critical enterprise operations management. Notably, he was the Chief Technology Consultant on the purchase and sale agreement of a major equity derivatives company between two of the world’s largest financial institutions. He is also the former Head of Information Services at the Japan-based satellite office of a leading U.S. brokerage house. Richard has been managing mission critical global DNS services for over 10 years, and was a leading member of the global DNS steering committee for one of the world’s largest banks. Richard Roberto will be responsible for ensuring that Registry Advantage achieves the service level commitments for the DotOrg Foundation.
Charles Sun, Lead Software Engineer, has spent a dozen years developing software for the Internet, telecommunications, and data-communications industries. He also has eight years of software project-management experience. He spent two years studying in the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at New York University. Charlie will be responsible for leading new software development initiatives as required by the DotOrg Foundation.
Patrick Power, Unix System Administrator, has two years of professional experience and three years non-professional experience with Linux/Unix system administration. He was lead system administrator for a company developing and deploying artificially intelligent sales agents. He has a BS in Mathematics from the University of Georgia. Patrick will work to maintain and upgrade the systems for the .org registry.
Daniel Leng, Software Developer, has two years experience in Internet software development and consulting. He holds a dual Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Art History from Duke University in North Carolina. Dan will work on software development and maintenance initiatives, with particular focus on our Account Management Interface.
Lei Yang, Software Developer, has several years experience in the scientific computing and Internet software development. He has a M.S. in Computational Mechanics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China and a M.S. in Computer Science at New York University. Lei will work on software development and maintenance initiatives, with particular emphasis on RRP/EPP server improvements.
Jeff Leong, Junior Software Programmer, is a recent Computer Science graduate from Columbia University. He focuses on the development and maintenance of Registry Advantage’s backend software systems.
Additional Personnel
In addition to the members of the team currently within Registry Advantage, Register.com has over 500 personnel with extensive experience in all aspects of registration operations. We will draw upon the experience and expertise of selected personnel from Register.com should ICANN award the .org registry to the DotOrg Foundation. To the extent that specific personnel work on .org and have insight into confidential or sensitive registry information, they will be completely segregated from any registrar responsibilities at Register.com in order to comply with OCI and other ICANN requirements.
The following specific people have been identified to assist Registry Advantage in the transition of the .org registry:
Michael Islek, Director of Architecture, has 15 years in software and system engineering and architecture. Co-inventor of WebSiteNOW!(TM), server based easy to use web authoring tool. Over 8 years of experience building, maintaining and supporting, complete ISPs enterprise networks. 12 years of experience as President, CEO and CTO of various small emerging companies. 10 years of experience in embedded systems development. Mr. Islek has been among the pioneers in synchronous Packet Assembler Disassembler (PAD) technology. He also has extensive knowledge and expertise in high speed communication systems development and deployment as well as large suite of communication protocols such as ATM, X.25, Frame Relay, XXX Asyc, XXX Fax, SNA/SDLC, BSC, Burroughs, Honeywell, DEC DMCP, TCP/IP, OSPF, RIP, BGP and NetBIOS.
Kyaw (Joe) Khine, Network Engineer, has 10 years in Network Engineering and Software development. His 7 years of network engineering include 2 years building a nationwide WAN infrastructure. He has been working with TCP/IP networks for 5 years and specializing in BGP, OSPF, QoS and VPN technologies. For last 3 recent years, he involved in design, implementation of operations for Internet data centers. He holds industrial certifications from Cisco, Microsoft and Novell. He has a Masters degree in Computer Technology from Institute of Computer Scinece and Technology, Burma.
David Berk, Director Enterprise Engineering Register.com. David has over ten years of experience building and managing large, high profile, high availability Internet infrastructures. David is a former Manager of Systems Development at Sony Online Entertainment the maker of EverQuest, the worlds largest online persistent universe video game and Director of Technology at Paramount Digital Entertainment responsible for managing Paramount Pictures Internet properties including StarTrek.com. Most recently, before coming to Register.com in 2002, he helped successfully fortify CBSNEWS.com and CBS.com for the 2000 Presidential Elections.
Anu Vajjalla, Manager of Corporate Engineering, has 7 years in IT with a Masters in Computer Engineering from India. Anu has been working with register.com for 4 years, having worked with the company in the early stages of applying to become a registrar. Anu has particular expertise in transition and registry-registrar protocol implementation, having added most of the TLDs to the Register.com site.
Weiyi Cheng, Sr. Database Administrator, has 15 years in database administration. His 19 years of Information technology includes 4 years in the Internet industry. Weiyi has been a database architect, database administrator and a developer of database applications.
Jae Gangemi is the Lead Architect for Register.com's core engineering team. He is responsible for providing architectural oversight for all of system modifications and major upgrades. Jae has three years of experience in the domain name registration and management industry, and personally supervised the launch of retail sales of the ".biz" and ".info" gTLDs.
The Global Name Registry, Limited
a. The Global Name Registry, Limited (“Global Name Registry”) has submitted its .org application for consideration by ICANN. Global Name Registry is the current operator of the .name top-level-domain.
b. Global Name Registry is the Registry Operator of the .name Registry pursuant to its 1 August 2001 agreement with ICANN. Global Name Registry is not a registrar, nor does it operate, or is it affiliated with, a registrar.
c1. Global Name Registry operates the DNS registry for the .name TLD, which launched operations on December 12, 2001. As of August 8, 2002, the .name registry contains roughly 370,000 registered thick registry objects, including roughly 144,000 .name registrations. These objects are similar to the thin domain name objects in the .org Registry.
The registered objects break down as follows:
1. 197,000 contacts
2. 83,000 third level domain registrations
3. 61,000 .name email registrations
4. 22,000 second level domains supporting the third level registrations and email
5. 7000 hosts
6. 79 registrarsDuring Land Rush, there were 53 ICANN-Accredited Registrars accredited for operations in .name. There are currently 36 ICANN Accredited Registrars accredited for operations in the .name SRS. The Global Name Registry Customer Services Team continues to accredit registrars for their suitability to sell .name.
c2. Not applicable.
d. Global Name Registry uses EPP for communications with the Registrars. As discussed in Question E below, Global Name Registry plans to support both EPP and RRP for the .org registry to allow for a smooth transition for registrars who have not built their systems out to support EPP.
e. Global Name Registry has implemented EPP according to the Provreg specification 05/03 and has implemented a set of additional mappings. These mappings have been implemented to allow for operations on the .name-specific objects, including Defensive Registrations, .name Email registrations, NameWatch and .name Dual Registrations. The following table is an illustration of the EPP mappings needed for .name and for .org:
EPP-mapping .name .org epp/eppcom X X contact X X domain X X host X X defReg X emailFwd X nameWatch X persReg X Global Name Registry also proposes to support RRP, in parallel with EPP, for use with the .org Registry. This means that the registrars can connect either using RRP, as they do today, or with EPP, as they do for .name.
Transitioning a registry from RRP to EPP would result in a “hard” transition date. Such a hard changeover date could be difficult for registrars utilizing different systems, processes and methods for fulfilling the customer experience. A hard changeover date is therefore likely to result in some confusion and instability in the marketplace.
Global Name Registry proposes to avoid hard changeover dates by softly migrating communications between registrars and the .org registry from RRP to EPP by simultaneously supporting both protocols during a longer period, lasting up to 18 months. This will allow registrars to transition when their systems and personnel are ready to do so.
The entire Global Name Registry system is built on an extensible protocol independent internal API, which in principle is a super-set of the functionality offered by RRP and EPP (and possibly other protocols in the future). Thus, Global Name Registry will be able to handle a robust and stable transition to EPP for all registrars, with the very significant advantage of not having any “sudden death” period. The figure below illustrates the layered structure of a protocol dependent layer (which effectively holds the EPP and RRP servers), and a non-protocol dependent layer (which interfaces the data structure in the database and creates appropriate responses).
With EPP, Global Name Registry currently supports creation of “thick” objects in the registry. The business logic will support EPP transactions to operate on objects that have “thin” characteristics (no contacts associated), or objects with “thick” characteristics (contacts associated).
Global Name Registry will commence its transition of the .org registry from a thin to thick registry with its conversion of the .org registry to EPP. The transition to a thick registry will occur simply by adding contacts and contact information into the existing registry. It should be noted that this conversion will not be mandatory for all registrars since some registrars may face resource and support limitations; however, registrars who wish to utilize the thick registry feature from day one of EPP support will be able to do so. An informal survey of registrars has made it clear that certain registrars would prefer use of a thick registry.
Objects will also be transferable between a registrar using RRP and another registrar using EPP. Such a move will result in contact data being deleted if an RRP registrar gains an object where contact details are stored. This, however, is consistent with how objects are transferred under RRP today. Contact information is always re-created by the gaining registrar.
However, after a period of parallel support of both RRP and EPP, the registry will discontinue support for RRP and only allow EPP operations. This effectively will mark the start of a growth phase for the thick registry, since object contact information no longer will be deleted and therefore will be constant or growing.
At this time, the registry will introduce rules to convert all objects in the registry to thick objects. The two following rules will apply to registry operations:
- For the Create command: contact references must be included when creating a registered name. Otherwise the creation will fail.
- For the Renew command: contact references must be present in the object when renewing a registered name. Otherwise the renewal will fail.
These two rules will ensure that registrars who are creating or renewing a registered name on behalf of a registrant will have to set contact information for the operation to succeed. The figure below shows the timeline and different phases of the move from the thin registry to the thick registry.
If the registry were to enforce at any point that all objects in the registry should be thick, this would pose a tremendous problem for registrars. Some registered names have expiry dates far in the future, and the registrar may not be in a position to add contacts to existing registered names where the registrant is not properly informed. Therefore, Global Name Registry has chosen the approach where only new or renewed objects are required to contain contact information.
The timeline for the protocol transition and the thin/thick transition is shown in the figure above. The phases and timelines will be the following:
- Phase I: Support of RRP as VeriSign does today. This phase would last six months after the transition from VeriSign to Global Name Registry is completed.
- Phase II: Introduces EPP support with the option for the registrar to remain on RRP. However, Global Name Registry will recommend that registrars commence migration to EPP at this time, although they will have 12 months to complete the transition. During this period, RRP and EPP will co-exist in the registry, with the full functionality of both RRP and EPP used.
- Phase III: At the beginning of Phase III, all registrars must be migrated from RRP. The registry will discontinue support for RRP. However, objects may still be created, modified or renewed as thin objects. Phase III will last six months.
- Phase IV: During this phase, all objects will naturally be converted from thin to thick. The registry recognizes that a full and complete conversion may take as long as the longest registration period available, 10 years; however, it is the intent of Global Name Registry to move the transition along as quickly as possible. Upon termination of this time period, all objects will be converted. The registry will commence enforcing contact creation rules when EPP objects are Created or Renewed.
f. Global Name Registry is responsible for all of the operations of the .name Registry. Assuming a winning bid, Global Name Registry will equally be responsible for the operations of the .org Registry.
Global Name Registry will dedicate its key management who were instrumental in creating, building and launching .name to transition the .org TLD from VeriSign. These key employees will ensure that the transition progresses smoothly and efficiently. They will be part of an organisational structure within Global Name Registry that is separate from the .name operations. Internal promotions and recruiting will fill up vacant positions in .name day-to-day operations while this team transitions .org.
The team members responsible for the .org operations are intended to be the following:
Andrew Tsai (CEO)
Mr. Tsai is Chief Executive Officer and Director of Global Name Registry. Prior to joining Global Name Registry, Mr. Tsai was President and Director of Urbanfetch Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Urbanfetch Inc., where he had responsibility for all international operations. Before Urbanfetch, Mr. Tsai was a co-founder, principal and Chief Investment Officer for Integrity Capital Management, L.L.C., an asset management company with $300mm in assets and over $5B in invested positions across the worlds' equity, fixed-income, currency and commodity markets. Prior to Integrity, Mr. Tsai was a Vice President and head of the German government fixed-income trading operations at Lehman Brothers International (London). Mr. Tsai has been widely quoted in the press as a reference on the personal namespace and a visionary on digital identity issues. Time magazine recently named Mr. Tsai one of Europe’s Top 25 Technology Leaders. Mr. Tsai graduated from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in Economics and a concentration in finance and entrepreneurial management.
Geir Rasmussen (CTO) - Role in.org operations: Plan and oversee the entire transition and operation of .org, including SRS, Whois, and DNS. Lead the engineering team for .org.
Mr. Rasmussen is a co-founder of Global Name Registry and is the Chief Technology Officer. Prior to co-founding Global Name Registry, Mr. Rasmussen co-founded Nameplanet, Ltd. where he served as CTO. Before Nameplanet, Mr. Rasmussen was a co-founder of Imaker AS, a web content management systems provider. Prior to Imaker, Mr. Rasmussen was a founding investor in ScreenMedia AS, a manufacturer of wireless web pad devices. Mr. Rasmussen designed and implemented the technical architecture and operational processes for the .name TLD. He currently manages the different technology groups within the .name registry infrastructure, including: operations, development & QA with over 30 team members. Mr. Rasumussen is a frequent guest speaker at industry events as an expert on topics including security, DNS infrastructure, and digital identity.
Hakon Haugnes (VP Product Management) - Role in.org operations: Management of the .org product, establishing of the .orgcentre and the Causeway Community Foundation; Documentation and training.
Mr. Haugnes is a co-founder and Director of Global Name Registry and Vice President of Product Management. Under his direction and leadership, Global Name Registry applied to ICANN for, and was awarded, the .name gTLD. Prior to co-founding Global Name Registry, Mr. Haugnes was a co-founder of Nameplanet, Ltd. where he built up the domain name infrastructure of its operations. Before Nameplanet, Mr. Haugnes worked at the Norwegian Defense HQ as an information technology strategist and project coordinator. Mr. Haugnes also worked at Alcatel Telecom in business development for wireless services. Mr. Haugnes graduated with an M.Sc in Cybernetics (Honors) from a joint program at Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTNU) and Institut National des Sciences Appliquees de Toulouse (INSA) France.
Mr. Haugnes spearheaded the successful .name task force committee that was responsible for creating the successful application to ICANN in November 2000. This included ownership of the complete ICANN application and management of technical, marketing, financial, research and forecasting sub-committee teams. Mr. Haugnes is a frequent guest speaker at industry events on topics including the .name Registry function, creation of .name and .name product management. Mr. Haugnes currently spearheads the .org re-delegation initiative on behalf of Global Name Registry.
Vidar Hokstad (Head of Development) - Role in.org operations: Lead architecture design and development for .org operations and transition.
Mr Hokstad is the Head of Development for Global Name Registry, and has day-to-day responsibility for the software development. Prior to managing the design and development of the .name landrush system and resolution services, Mr. Hokstad wrote the prototype of the Nameplanet.com mail system and managed the further development of this web based e-mail solution which at its peak handled close to two million user accounts. Before working on the Nameplanet.com system, Mr. Hokstad was Technical Director at Screen Media AS, where he headed the development of the software for Screen Media's wireless Webpad from scratch. Mr. Hokstad has extensive development experience from a wide range of consultancies, and development manager roles, and has spent the last 7 years working almost exclusively with Internet related technologies.
Karen Elizaga (Head of Policy) - Role in.org operations: Manage policy team and recruiting of additional policy team members; Develop and coordinate policies for .orgcentre, Causeway Community Foundation. Establish .org Steering Committee and coordinate .org policy with ICANN community.
Ms. Elizaga is Vice President Policy of Global Name Registry. Prior to joining Global Name Registry, Ms. Elizaga served as Executive Director of Urbanfetch, Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Urbanfetch, Inc. As one of the company's initial employees who helped to set up the company's London operations, Ms. Elizaga also headed up two of Urbanfetch's business teams (Business Development and Product Management) and was a member of the executive management team. Before Urbanfetch, Ms. Elizaga was an attorney with the New York office of Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue, primarily practicing in the area of general securities and corporate law, with a focus on investment funds. Ms. Elizaga obtained her law degree from American University, Washington College of Law in Washington, DC and a degree in English literature from Columbia University, Barnard College in New York City.
Ms. Elizaga currently sits on the gTLD Registry Constituency and is an active participant in numerous ICANN policy groups, including the Whois Task Force and the Accountability Task Force on Evolution and Reform of ICANN. She is currently the driving force behind new Whois initiatives that are critical to balance privacy, data protection, intellectual property and law enforcement issues. She has been featured as a speaker on Whois and other ICANN issues.
Simon Hirst (Head of Technical Operations) - Role in.org operations: Manage operational side of transition and set up of operational environment for .org within the Global Name Registry facilities and server parks; Design and deploy infrastructure needed for the .org operations.
Mr. Hirst has extensive experience with operations of large scale, mission critical IT solutions. Mr. Hirst is currently responsible for managing the day-to-day live operations for Global Name Registry, internal IT services, the Norwegian disaster recovery team and IT purchasing. He has in-depth knowledge of the IT systems powering the Internet and the world-wide-web, from both hardware and software points of view from 20 years IT experience working for Daily Mail Group, Fish4, AltaVista and Haymarket Group. Mr. Hirst started www.fish4.co.uk as a development project in 1996. This site became the focal point for 95% of newspaper online classified advertising in the UK within two years. He also won several development awards for innovative use of new technology within the print industry, both on and off line. When Mr. Hirst headed the operational side of AltaVista's expansion into Europe and the Far East, he was responsible for building and consolidating data centers and teams, which resulted in successfully launching search in 15 extra countries within 6 months. Prior to Altavista, Mr. Hirst built a group wide online system for Haymarket Publishing (UK's largest privately owned publishing company) and migrated all groups on-line titles to new central system.
Simon Sheard (Financial Controller) - Role in.org operations: Control financial build-up of .org operations.
Mr. Sheard is the Financial Controller for Global Name Registry and has day-to-day responsibility for finance and commercial activities. Prior to joining Global Name Registry, Mr. Sheard was Financial Controller of QXL.com plc. While at QXL, he was responsible for preparing the company for its NASDAQ and LSE floatation and for putting in place the financial controls necessary to expand the business into 14 countries in two years. Before QXL, Mr. Sheard was financial controller for The Prince's Trust, and was responsible for all accounts, including four trading subsidiaries. Mr. Sheard was also a chartered accountant for Baker Tilly and served as audit manager. Mr. Sheard graduated from Kingston Polytechnic with a B.A. (Hons) in Accountancy and Finance and has been a qualified Chartered Accountant since 1991.
Zeeshan Zafar (Main Database Administrator) - Role in.org operations: Responsible for the .org database environment; Design and implement the .org database on the Global Name Registry Oracle platform.
Mr. Zafar is a professional database administrator with extensive experience on Oracle design and operations, in particular on IBM AIX. He has designed and is the main Database Administrator for the .name Oracle databases and is responsible for their synchronous (between main and QA db) and asynchronous mirroring (between Main and Disaster Recovery Sites). Mr. Zafar was previously Database Administrator of ComputaCenter UK, and responsible for the administration of the automated warehouse databases, one of the largest IT warehouses in Europe. This included monitoring, backup, and capacity planning, among other roles. Prior to this, he was lead DBA and Database Designer for the operational transaction system of Systematic Data Solutions, UK. Prior to Systematic, Mr. Zafar was a professional Oracle consultant and instructor specializing in Oracle crash recovery and troubleshooting.
Asbjorn Steira (Registry EPP/RRP Manager) - Role in.org operations: Head development of the .org RRP/EPP business logic and the protocol independent layers.
Mr. Steira has been an active participant in EPP standards development and wrote the C++ version of the .name and .info EPP toolkit that is currently in use for .name and for .info. He also wrote the .name-specific C++ EPP toolkit add-ons (which are both available on Sourceforge). Mr. Steira has comprehensive experience as a thorough programmer at the development level debugging and QA. Mr. Steira has previously worked on the development of military grade C++ projects, as well as banking transactions systems in Cobol. He graduated with a M.Sc in Computer Science (honors).
Aage Strand (Messaging Developer) - Role in.org operations: Ensure that all update handling and messaging systems based on MQ integrate with .org.
Mr. Strand has core knowledge and competence on MQ series platform for messaging between key Registry systems. This includes all XML based middleware such as the protocol independent layer in the SRS. Mr. Strand is extremely experienced with XML, DOM and XML-schemas. He has developed and quality-assured the messaging systems that currently allows .name to update Whois and MX services in near-real time. Propagation time from registration in the SRS to successful insertion in Whois and MX is only few seconds thanks to Mr. Strand’s designs for the .name systems and processes. Mr. Strand previously has worked with mission-critical telecommunications infrastructure and monitoring software for NERA.
Endre Fehn (.org Systems and Data Transition Manager) - Role in.org operations: Will oversee both conceptual and actual transitioning of the .org registry.
Mr. Fehn is a seasoned and high level developer and system designer, having implemented large scale, multi-user, high performance tools that are currently powering large Internet newspapers and Internet publishers. Mr. Fehn has extensive experience with most Internet aspects of systems, including DNS, XML, security, databases, and high-performance services.
Mr. Fehn designed and implemented the .name consent system that allows holders of Defensive Registrations to securely give their consent to end users wishing to register a conflicting .name.
Eivind Kvedalen (Head of Whois Development) - Role in.org operations: Implement the changes to the .name Whois software necessary to deploy .org Whois service; Consider and plan eventual Whois Forwarding implementation as described in application.
Mr. Kvedalen has extensive and world class knowledge of custom databases, both in design and implementation. Mr. Kvedalen and his team developed the .name Whois system from scratch. Mr. Kvedalen also has had significant experience in the development of a high performance scalable object-oriented database system optimized for a real time updated Whois system that can easily be distributed over multiple servers, and is entirely independent of our core SRS database. Also has great experience with queuing policies and software, in particular MQ series, including transaction management and queue management.
Ketil Froyn (Head of DNS network) - Role in.org operations: Responsible for DNS consistency at all times. Develop software to support all .org DNS operations, including software for additional consistency checking/scrubbingand rollback possibilities during Transition.
Mr. Froyn is currently Head of the DNS Network for Global Name Registry. Mr. Froyn has co-developed and audited the BIND and DNS software powering .name. He was previously the Head DNS developer for NamePlanet.com, where he designed and implemented the DNS systems and DNS synchronisation systems supporting an email service that serviced 2 million users. Mr. Froyn has extensive experience in auditing Bind and DNS software, and solid knowledge of the DNS protocol and management of a DNS network.
Keith Rogers (Transition program manager) - Role in.org operations: Will own the transition plan timelines and the project management of the Transition.
Mr. Rogers has been the project manager for the build-up and launch of the .name Live SRS. He has extensive experience with project management, risk and issue management and change management. Among others, the change control processes of Global Name Registry are maintained by Mr. Rogers, which processes have been smooth, stable and well documented during the entire .name launch. Previously, Mr. Rogers was project manager for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young where he was responsible for project management of internet and web technology projects.
One of Mr. Rogers projects was a successfully planned and completed 1500 man-day data conversion project of Barclays Bank, migrating data on over 2 million customers from its IBM Cobol platform.
Jeremy Curtis (Reporting Manager) - Role in.org operations: Will oversee the reporting and data collection infrastructure for .org
Mr. Curtis has designed and built large parts of the reporting infrastructure for .name to support the comprehensive ICANN and registrar reporting required for the .name TLD. This design involved development of report generation software and design and implementation of the reporting database. Mr. Curtis has previously worked as a C++ specialist for IBM working on client-server, online trading systems, large website backends and military projects. Mr. Curtis has five years experience in design and development of real-time systems in the defense and manufacturing industries.
He has also worked on data acquisition projects for Brill engineering and has previously developed systems for mission critical reactor control software for Nuclear Electric Limited.
Internet Multicasting Service, Inc. and Internet Software Consortium, Inc.
a. We wish to have considered a single registry operation, the .org is a public trust registry as described in our proposal to ICANN.
b. This is a registry. As stated in C20: Provisions for Equivalent Access by Accredited Registrars of our proposal, we do not and will not operate a registrar.
c1. As of the 8/8/2002 submission date of this response our production registry contains 2,348,156 delegations, 5,112,317 nameserver records, and 50,159 glue (A) records and is based on serial number 2002080800 of the VeriSign zone file. Data that are not provided as part of our live mirror (e.g., registrar for an assigned object) are simulated as test data until VeriSign can start providing us full data feeds.
Our test registry, which is an identical hardware platform to our production registry, currently contains 5 million fully-populated objects. Extensive testing on this environment has been conducted up to the level of 8 million fully-populated objects.
Our current production and test systems are both HP AlphaServer ES40s, each with 16 GBytes of RAM and four EV6 processors. Our network infrastructure is based in two major telco hotels and IP exchange points. We have gigabit-speed public peering connections as well as diverse OC3 (155Mbit/sec) private transit arrangements. We peer with more than 80 networks, of which several are global carriers.
Our registry software, currently named OpenReg pending suggestions from our users on a better name, has several key components as detailed in C17.1: General Description of Proposed Facilities and Systems. The core database server handles bulk loading, registry-to-registry replication, generation of Whois and DNS files, and the RRP/EPP based transactions with registrars. Our Whois server is a separate software module. The DNS files generated by the core database server is used to feed a series of primary and secondary DNS servers, as detailed in C17.5 Zone File Distribution and Publication.
We are currently entering our beta test period on the RRP, Whois, and DNS components of our system:
- On 8/19/2002, we enter beta test with registrars. Beginning 9/2/2002, daily statistics on this test environment will be published for the public to examine using the metrics established in C17.13: System Reliability of the proposal. Beginning 10/1/2002, we will be supporting all ICANN-accredited registrars when our formal OT&E program opens.
- The Whois component of our system is currently operational with test data. As soon as VeriSign is able to provide real data, we are prepared to make this service available for general public testing. In addition, we will begin publishing test data measurements on 9/2/2002 for the public to examine.
- The DNS component of our system is currently operational with the VeriSign zone file in both BIND8 and BIND9. On 8/25/2002, we will begin deployment of the zone file and will open that environment up for public testing on 9/1/2002. The public will be able to compare resolution of .org names in our mirrored proxy and compare that to the live data in the real registry. A group of testers will run scripts in a globally distributed environment to compare metrics such as query resolution times for our .org proxy as well as live .org data in the VeriSign registry.
In addition continuing deployment of our operational systems for RRP, DNS, and Whois, we are also beginning deployment of our community support through a variety of mechanisms. The beginnings of a .org community can be found at http://not.invisible.net/signals/ where (as of 8/8/2002) 267 web sites have participated in our spread the dot and 443 individuals have voiced their support. Additional community efforts include the distributed testing environment we are releasing to the public on 9/1/2002 and an effort to support the ccTLD Secretariat in 2003 with nameserver training and OpenReg software.
c2. Not applicable. See response to question 1b above.
d. Our registry uses RRP version 1.1 as the external interface to registrars as this is the version that VeriSign currently uses in production. Our core implementation includes all RRP 2.0 and EPP objects as specified in C17.12: Compliance With Specifications of our proposal. As specified, we are prepared to go live with RRP 2.0 and/or EPP support as part of our OT&E and registrar testbed if VeriSign puts those protocols into production. If they do not put those protocols in production, we propose to use the phased-in approach detailed in 3.18.1.5: RRP/EPP and Thin/Thick Transition of our proposal.
e. There are no differences. However, we are carefully tracking the deployment of EPP and RRP 2.0 and are comparing implementations and specifications with our own code. We note that not all implementations of EPP are currently interoperable. We intend to provide the community with EPP test suites and interoperability testing as a contribution to the IETF standardization process.
f. The IMS/ISC team is providing all of the functions of the registry. We do not outsource any of the core functions. This is an integrated team with a single point of accountability. Please see our Joint Statement of Authoirity and C11: Statement of Capabilities for more on the single point of accountability and Appendix E: Biographies of Key Personnel for the names of the people who are accountable for making this work.
For the deliverables detailed above in Supplemental Question No. 1, several of the team members listed in our proposal are taking a lead role. The OpenReg core server is under the program management of Suzanne Woolf, with key roles being played by Joe Abley, Michael Graff, and Rick Wesson. That team has been joined by Olafur Gudmundsson. Olafur, formerly of Neustar and Network Associates Laboratories, is a well-known DNS and DNSSEC expert who presently co-chairs the IETF DNS Extensions (DNSEXT) working group and has contributed to a number of DNS-related RFC's.
The DNS deployment and testing component is under the program management of Paul Vixie. Our newest team member, Mark K. Lottor, will be helping to oversee the public testing components. Mark, a veteran staffer of the SRI NIC, is best known as the author of the Internet Domain Survey and of RFC 1033: The Domain Administrators Operations Guide.
a. The Internet Society (ISOC) proposes to form a not-for-profit corporation, referred to in our proposal as “Public Interest Registry” or PIR. PIR will be solely controlled by ISOC, will enter into the registry management agreement with ICANN, and will carry out the registry functions. ISOC has entered into a letter of intent with Afilias, Limited; this letter provides that PIR and Afilias will negotiate a contract under which Afilias will provide a full range of back-end registry services for .ORG as a subcontractor to PIR.
b. PIR will act solely as a registry, using Afilias to provide all back-end registry services. Afilias is also engaged in the registry services business.
c1. PIR will rely on Afilias to provide all back-end registry services. Afilias is the registry operator for the .INFO top level domain. Additionally, Afilias provides back-end registry services for the .VC (St. Vincent and the Grenadines) TLD, for a total of over 925,000 names under management.
Afilias supports over 100 ICANN accredited registrars. These registrars account for over 99% of current .ORG registrations.
c2. Not Applicable. PIR will be a registry only, as is its back-end registry services contractor, Afilias.
d. Afilias uses EPP, and currently supports the 100+ ICANN accredited registrars on this system. Of all registry operators, Afilias has the most experience in operating a stable and reliable EPP-based registry system.
In addition, Afilias has planned an RRP to EPP proxy service that allows the registry to accept RRP commands and process them in an EPP environment. This will ensure a safe, secure, and non-disruptive transition of all .ORG domains, and eliminate registry downtime for registrars and end-users.
e. PIR intends to use EPP, and as its contractor, Afilias has more experience with operating an EPP-based registry system than any other registry. When the final EPP draft is approved as an Internet standard by the IETF, PIR will migrate to that standard in an expeditious and timely fashion.
f. The ISOC board will appoint a board of directors to govern PIR. The PIR board will be comprised of 5 - 7 members drawn from experts in the field with broad geographic, public policy, business and technical expertise. The PIR board, which will be established within 60 days of the appointment of PIR as the registry operator, will in turn hire the officers of PIR. PIR will enter into the registry management agreement with ICANN, and will carry out the registry functions.
ISOC's Membership pillar shows the Society's deep commitment to non-commercial Internet users. Free individual membership at the central level coupled with acceptance of other interested communities creates an open, inclusive and broadly representative forum. PIR will not only tap this experience, but also establish additional input mechanisms to ensure a clear voice for the non-commercial community in the management of the domain.
In addition, PIR will establish a special .ORG Advisory Council to focus solely on .ORG issues. These issues may range from policy to the introduction of new services, and the Council will serve as an ombudsman-type resource for management as it seeks to incorporate the broadest possible input for important decisions.
The Council will be made up of leadership from the broad spectrum of the non-commercial world. Members will be available to provide feedback on specific issues as well as valuable advice to the .ORG management team.
Afilias will be responsible for all back-end registry services for the .ORG domain. As the current registry operator of the .INFO top level domain, Afilias has a proven technology and operations base, with offices in Ireland, United Kingdom, Canada and the US. In addition, Afilias’ 24/7 operations provides support to over 100 registrars worldwide.
Afilias' technology and operations team combines many years of experience in designing, building, and maintaining stable, highly scalable, distributed and networked transaction-based systems. The team is led by: Ram Mohan - VP of Business Operations and CTO, Howard Eland - Senior Technology Architect, Michael Young - Director of Information Technology, and Andrew Sullivan - Senior Database Architect.
Afilias' technical workforce numbers over 20, and includes key personnel in database administration, systems architecture, quality assurance, technical support, documentation, database analysis, financial systems, and billing support, as well as front-line customer support.
Afilias has contracted with industry-leading vendors (IBM, UltraDNS, DSI Technology Escrow Services) for data center operations, managed DNS services, and data escrow services for the domains it currently manages, and intends to utilize these vendors to provide similar services for the .ORG domain.
Section III, C17.11 of our proposal describes in further detail key technical personnel who will help the .ORG registry establish the highest standards of customer service and problem resolution.
a. NeuStar, both by itself and through our joint venture NeuLevel (referred to here collectively as “NeuStar”), operates the global Internet registry for the .biz gTLD and the .us ccTLD. Start-up services for the .biz gTLD were commenced in the spring of 2001, and live registration began later that fall. The .us ccTLD was awarded in the fall of 2001, and seamlessly transitioned by year-end. The .org gTLD would be operated on this existing, proven registry infrastructure.
b. NeuStar is solely a registry operator. NeuStar abides by a strict Code of Conduct that prohibits us from providing services as both a registry and registrar. Thus, we have no competing interest or potential conflicts in offering our registry services in a fair and even-handed manner.
NeuStar was founded under the principle of providing advanced registry services in a neutral and even-handed manner that promotes competition. The company adopted a trusted, neutral third party business model to achieve this mission, a structure where the registry operator does not operate as a registrar in the domain name market. A neutral third party business model most effectively promotes competition because:
- All registrars have equal access to registry services, technology, support, and resources;
- Competitively sensitive information is not available to a single registrar or select group of registrars;
- No registrar receives disproportionate pricing or promotional advantages by virtue of serving as both the registry and registrar in the same TLD space;
- No conflicts of interests arise with respect to uniformly enforcing polices designed to combat anti-competitive behavior, and;
- There is no risk of predatory marketing practices by the registry operator because the registry is not engaged in soliciting registrations or renewals directly from registrants.
More specific information regarding this business model, its advantages and comparisons to other business models is detailed in Section C31 of NeuStar’s Application for Reassignment of .org.
The neutral third party business model is reflected in a strict Code of Conduct that includes restrictions on registrar ownership by the registry operator as well as a requirement that we treat all registrars in an equivalent manner. In its operation of the .org registry, NeuStar would abide by a similar Code of Conduct. This Code of Conduct can be found in Section 21 of NeuStar’s Application for Reassignment of .org.
c1. As a registry operator, we have over 1,000,000 names under management and have been offering real-time registration services for almost one year. The paid domain name registration information provided below states the registration activity as of 31 July 2002:
.biz .us Domain Name Registrations 735,908 302,419 The .biz domain name registrations are sold exclusively through ICANN-accredited registrars, who represent 90% of the current .org registrars and which account for over 99% of the total .org domain name registrations. In addition, NeuStar also supports other registrars that operate exclusively in the .us ccTLD. If awarded the .org TLD contract, NeuStar will only sell .org domain names through ICANN-Accredited Registrars. The number of registrars for each top-level domain, also as of 31 July 2002 are:
.biz .us Accredited Registrars 90 70 c2. NeuStar does not offer services as a registrar.
d. Continuing NeuStar’s long-standing tradition of supporting open industry standards, NeuStar has deployed EPP as the registry-registrar protocol for its .biz and .us registries. NeuStar has been an active contributor to the EPP standard development process and is among the first to implement and deploy the emerging IETF standard. Our registry platform performed the first ever real-time landrush process for the .us domain that successfully managed approximately five million transactions in the first twenty-four hours of operations.
NeuStar’s registry uses EPP for registry-registrar communications. EPP is a collection of draft IETF specifications that are on schedule to become a formal standard before the end of the year. We will update our registry platform to be fully compatible with the formal standard once it is approved by the IETF. NeuStar’s implementation of the EPP protocol is fully compatible with current versions of the specifications as outlined in the table below.
EPP Specification NeuStar’s Implementation EPP Base Protocol Version - 04 EPP Domain Object Mapping Version - 02 EPP Contact Object Mapping Version - 02 EPP Host Object Mapping Version - 02 EPP TCP Transport Mapping Version - 02 For .us, NeuStar has also implemented domain object extensions for EPP in order to collect qualifying information for domain registrations as required by the .us registry policy. NeuStar developed an Internet Draft for these extensions to the IETF Provreg WG, draft-liu-epp-ustld-00.txt.
NeuStar has built its existing registry so that the back-end systems (i.e., application servers and database) are flexible enough to be compatible with other interface protocols such as RRP. See the answer to Question E for more detail.
e. NeuStar will initially deploy RRP for the .org registry for the purposes of ensuring a smooth transition from the existing registry to the new registry. We will deploy the version of RRP that is in place with the registrars at the time of transition. Once the registry is transitioned and stable we will begin to work with the .org stakeholders to plan a migration from RRP to EPP.
NeuStar has built its existing registry so that the back-end systems (i.e., application servers and database) are flexible enough to be compatible with other interface protocols such as RRP. Since RRP is functionally a subset of EPP, we will be able to deploy a compatible RRP front-end for .org registrars while reusing most of our existing registry infrastructure.
NeuStar's decision to use RRP for the .org transition is based on the practical considerations of stability and equal access during and after the .org transition. While it is tempting to simultaneously offer both RRP and EPP to registrars at the start of the transition, such a proposition is ill-advised due to technical issues such as EPP's lack of support for legacy "thin" registries like .org and the difficulty of supporting domain name transfers between an EPP-based registrar and an RRP-based registrar.
Some applicants have proposed implementing a modified version of RRP, while others have proposed an RRP-to-EPP protocol translator. Implementing modifications to RRP will require development efforts by each of the ICANN-Accredited Registrars prior to the transition, and thus puts them in the critical path with regard to transitioning the registry. Implementing a protocol translator (as well as modifying the RRP interface) runs the risk of corrupting the data in the .org database. If such a corruption occurs it will be unclear as to whether this was caused by the transition or the interface change and will make problem resolution more difficult. Since either approach will interject an unnecessary element of risk to the transition, it is important to utilize the version of RRP that the registrars will be using when the registry is transitioned.
NeuStar also believes that is important to ultimately migrate the registry to an EPP interface. This should be done only after the new registry is stabilized and the technical issues related to the differences of RRP and EPP have been evaluated and resolved to the satisfaction of the .org stakeholders.
The primary differences between EPP and RRP are:
1. EPP has strictly structured syntax defined by XML as opposed to plain text name-value pairs in RRP. This allows better error checking at the protocol front-end.
2. EPP allows for a "thick" registry model. This means it can collect contact/registrant information from the registrars so that this data can be stored in the authoritative TLD database and Whois information can be generated and presented from a single source. RRP does not have support for contact information collection.
3. EPP has codified better mechanism to support the registrar transfer process. Specifically, the transfer notification to losing registrar is supported in-band in EPP via the <poll> mechanism. In RRP, on the other hand, such notification has to be done using out-of-band methods, resulting in delay and human-error in the process. RFC2832 defines RRP version 1.1.0, which does not support transfer cancellation and IPv6 addressing. These two problems are fixed in RRP version 2.0.0 (planned deployment 3Q02).
4. EPP has a provision for <authInfo>, which is a mandatory parameter for domain name registration as an authentication token for the registrant of a domain. The main use of this parameter is in domain transfer. In EPP, it is required that the gaining registrars submit the correct registrant <authInfo> in any transfer request, or the server will reject the request. This provides extra protection to the registrant in the transfer process. No such mechanism is defined for RRP, even in version 2.0.0.
5. EPP is designed to support the "thick" registry model and in principle can also support the "thin" registry model, while RRP only supports the "thin" registry model. We say "in principle" for EPP because <authInfo> is required for domain registration when EPP is used for the "thin" registry model. In other words, the "thin" model in the context of EPP will have to be enhanced because existing "thin" registries do not store <authInfo>. To migrate an existing interface from RRP to EPP would mean either; associating unique <authInfo> to each existing domain name and notifying the registrars and registrants, or modifying the existing EPP protocol with regard to its requirement for and treatment of <authInfo>. Neither task is trivial.
f. NeuStar will be responsible for every aspect of its next-generation, global Internet registry.
NeuStar has a long history of developing, transitioning, implementing and operating complex, mission-critical public resources. To provide these high standards of operational excellence, it solely manages all aspects of the registry service offering.
Although taking on partners may seem like a logical approach to bringing additional resources to bear on the transition of .org, NeuStar believes that the need to coordinate the activities of multiple partners and outside vendors would introduce unnecessary risks and potential delays to the transition.
NeuStar’s .org proposal relies upon existing proven infrastructure, our over 300 highly capable employees, existing financial resources and our existing operational relationships with over 90% of the existing .org registrars and which account for over 99% of the total .org domain name registrations. The use of NeuStar resources and the associated additional degree of control, will allow NeuStar to focus on the complex task of working with VeriSign and the registrars to facilitate a seamless transition. In addition, this approach will result in a higher degree of responsiveness to the registrars on an ongoing basis.
Thank you for the opportunity for The .Org Foundation to highlight some of the many reasons why we selected eNom, Inc. to be the .org registry service provider. eNom is a market leader and the fastest growing registrar among ICANN accredited domain name registrars. eNom is also one of the world's largest DNS providers and is known for the superior techology back-end services it delivers to almost 3,000 active resellers and approximately 1.2 million domain holders.
eNom was the first to include DNS services, real time DNS updates, email forwarding and URL redirection with a domain name purchase. eNom, Inc. also offers ccTLD registrations, international domain names, secure server IDs, and other services.
As you can see, selecting eNom to be the .org registry service provider was a wise choice. As further evidence, a support letter from F5 Networks, Inc. is attached to this email which states that "F5 Networks has reviewed and fully supports eNom's proposed architecture to build a scalable, highly available DNS infrastructure and registry". The letter in full is also posted on our website at: http://www.theorgfoundation.org/supporters.htm.
a. eNom, Inc.
16771 NE 80th Street, Suite 100
Redmond, WA 98052
Phone: 425-883-8860b. eNom, Inc. is an ICANN accredited domain name registrar.
c1. Not Applicable
c2. The following statistics are as of 8/6/2002.
eNom currently supports 1,187,450 paid-for second-level names. The TLD registries it interacts with are detailed in the following table:
TLD Registry Company Protocol Version Comments .com Verisign-GRS RRP 1.1.0 eNom also registers IDN (“multilingual”) .com, .net and .org names using RRP, with about 20,000 IDN registrations. .net Verisign-GRS RRP 1.1.0 .org Verisign-GRS RRP 1.1.0 .info Afilias EPP Draft 2 Not using the latest version of the draft in production. Uses standard XML parser. .biz NeuLevel EPP Draft 6 Uses standard XML parser. .us NeuStar EPP Draft 6 Uses standard XML parser. .cc eNIC, now Verisign-GRS RRP 1.1.0 eNom originally interfaced directly to eNIC using eNIC’s version of RRP, now eNIC is owned by Verisign. eNom continues to use the original eNIC RRP interface, and connects to eNIC’s original hosts. .bz Verisign-GRS RRP 1.1.0 Verisign hosts this TLD. .nu Verisign-GRS RRP 1.1.0 Verisign hosts this TLD. .tv .tv corporation, now Verisign-GRS. RRP 1.4.0 ENom is using Verisign’s RRP interface, not the original interface developed by .tv. .ws World Site RRP 1.1.0 Same protocol as Verisign’s. .name GNR EPP Draft 6 Uses SAX XML parser. Table 1. TLDs, Registry Companies, and Interface Protocols
This number of names registered does not include names that have expired but are within the 45-day grace period (i.e. not currently “paid-for” names). If those names were taken into account the total number would be over 1.2 million currently registered names. eNom has performed approximately 1.5 million total second-level domain name registrations (of which the above 1.2 million are still active) since the day the company was formed, for a total of approximately 2.0 million domain-years since day-one. It currently performs on average 4,500 second-level domain-years per day, in renewals, transfers and new registrations.
eNom also provides complete back-end (and in some cases front-end) registration services for a number of other ICANN accredited registrars, and interacts with the above registries on behalf of these other registrars. Due to confidentiality agreements eNom cannot release the number of names it has registered as a registrar service provider for these other ICANN accredited registrars.
Since eNom offers name server services with each name, and though it does not consider itself a “registry”, eNom also currently supports an additional 1,872,360 third-level names under 642,341 of the second-level names (or an average of about 3 third-level names for each second-level name), with the largest second-level name having hundreds of sub-domains. The count of all second-level and third-level names eNom currently supports at all registries and in its own DNS totals 3,059,810
Similar to registries providing registration services to accredited registrars, eNom supports registration services via its API to 2,796 active resellers (defined as a reseller who performed an API registration or maintenance transaction within the last 3 months).
d. eNom uses both EPP and RRP communications.
See Table 1 above for which registry communications employ each protocol.
Ninety percent of the second-level names registered have been registered via the RRP protocol. Approximately 25% of eNom’s current production registry-registrar communications traffic is via EPP.
Protocol TLD registry Checks Adds Status Updates Deletes Total RRP .com/.net/.org 260,000 3,000 57,000 24,000 625 345,000 .bz/.cc/.IDN/.nu/.tv/.ws 88,000 100 1,300 1,000 6 90,000 EPP .info/.biz/.us/.name 100,000 250 3,000 2,500 0 106,000 Both Total 448,000 3,350 61,300 27,500 631 541,000 Table 2. Average Daily Protocol Transactions
Notes:
1) “IDN” means .com .net and .org International Domain Names (about 100 IDN transactions per day).
2) These traffic numbers vary day-to-day by 20% (plus or minus) of the above totals.
3) The traffic numbers do not count traffic generated by eNom’s re-registering of deleted names service, which on average currently performs approximately 150,000 RRP transactions per hour, and has had peaks of 5 million RRP v1.1.0 transactions per hour.
e. eNom uses RRP, EPP, TPP (register.com’s ccTLD interface protocol) as well as a protocol that is derived from EPP. Different flavors of RRP and EPP are used depending on the implementation of the registry.
eNom has implemented, and uses in production, the standard 1.1.0 version RRP (RFC2832) for typical communications for .com, .net, .org, .cc, .ws, .bz and .nu registrations (other communications, specifically from the registry regarding transfers, are via an email interface). The company also implemented, and uses in production, version 1.4.0 of the RRP protocol to support the .tv ccTLD. Another production RRP implementation has been developed to support Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) for .com, .net, and .org. eNom’s production implementation provides the additional information necessary to support IDNs as well as providing the encoding and decoding that is necessary to switch between UTF-8 and ASCII versions. The RRP implementation was developed in-house to provide tightly integrated support with eNom’s other systems.
Though not live, eNom also has an implementation of register.com’s TPP gateway protocol for eNom’s systems to provide the following additional ccTLDs: am, as, be, ca, ch, co.il, co.nz, co.uk, co.za, com.do, com.ph, com.ro, cx, de, dk, fm, gs, jp, ky, kz, li, lt, md, ms, net.do, net.nz, org.do, org.il, org.nz, org.uk, ph, ro, st, tc, tf, to, vg, vu.
The EPP protocol is still in draft form and most registries that supports EPP each have a slightly different implementation. For instance the .info registry implementation is slightly different than the .biz/.us implementation. The .name implementation uses a SAX parser which requires a slightly different approach as well. eNom has developed its own EPP communications to provide agnostic support for each of these different implementations. Besides these various versions of EPP, the eNom client-side also transparently supports the RRP (versions 1.1.0 and 1.4.0, and we are working on 2.0.0, even though Verisign has not released it yet) and TPP as well, so the internal systems don't concern themselves with protocol specifics.
eNom is also implementing the INONE API which is based on EPP but does not follow the draft in a strict sense. This will provide registration services for .ac, .sh and .io ccTLDs. This implementation is still in development but will feature the same protocol transparency to our backend systems.
This fall, Verisign will be switching .org from RRP 1.1.0 to RRP 2.0.0, if this occurs as planned, the new .org registry operated by eNom will utilize RRP version 2.0.0. The differences between 1.1.0 and 2.0.0 are slight. They are:
- The hostnames for IDN and non-IDN registrations will be combined
- The one-line “encoding-type” attribute will be removed
- TLDs of name server names will be validated
- The response code for name server registration will be changed
- The greeting and describe command will indicate version 2.0.0
The only differences (though not protocol differences) registrars will see at the time of switching from Verisign to eNom are:
- A different host name to connect to,
- An SSL certificate common name change that indicate a connection to eNom’s servers rather than Verisign’s,
- The RRP greeting returned will indicate that eNom is providing registration services.
- Reports will be generated to a different Registrar FTP URL
There are no differences between the protocol eNom is currently using for its com/net/org/cc/bz/nu/ws registry transactions (which represent the majority of the production transaction volume it performs) and the current protocol used for the .org registry. There are only very slight differences between RRP 1.1.0 and RRP 2.0.0.
After the transition from Verisign to eNom, a transition to an EPP protocol is also proposed. The EPP implementation for .org, will be complete in Q4 2002 and will be available for general registrar development and testing by Q1 2003. Production rollout and transition from RRP to EPP will be targeted for Q2 2003, or within 180 days of the IETF finalizing the EPP technical standard.
eNom is actively building the proposed .org registry system and is engaging a third-party firm to validate the functionality of its .org registry system. This test will compare the protocol inputs and outputs that are currently being performed in production at the current .org registry with the newly built .org registry system (among other tests) to validate the protocol implementation functionality. Some stress tests may also be performed, though the hardware will not be of production type. Production hardware is on-order. A link to the third-party report will be posted to the ICANN website the week of August 19th.
f. eNom, Inc. is the applicant member responsible for the operation of the proposed registry, including the DNS.
Team members include the following people:
Person Role Robert Duffy Oversight (IT Director of The .Org Foundation) Paul Stahura Management (CEO of eNom) Jim Beaver Overall Technical Operations (VP of Operations at eNom) Matt Stearn Registrar Relations (VP of eNom) Chris Cowherd Architecture and Protocol (Chief Architect at eNom) Sean Muller Database, Reports and PM Chris Kopp DNS operations
Table 3. Team Members and Roles Additional Pertinent Information:
First, we think that an important statistic is not just how many names are registered, but the volume of DNS queries that are currently supported. Since most of the names eNom has registered are actively being used, eNom’s name servers currently perform 50-100 million lookups per day, while simultaneously performing 85,000 real-time updates (changes to a DNS record) per day.
Second, eNom’s current capacity is at least 300 million lookups per day, and the registry proposed architecture (DNS and other), some of which is currently deployed, can scale to many times the required maximum load for the .org registry. This is confirmed in the attached letter in which F5 Networks endorses The .Org Foundation’s DNS and registry architecture and capacity. The letter in full can also be found on our website at: http://www.theorgfoundation.org/supporters.htm. In addition, we have scheduled a system audit by a third-party firm to verify eNom’s demonstrated ability to operate the .org TLD registry with a high degree of service responsiveness and reliability.
a. The two registry operations Organic Names wishes ICANN to consider when evaluating its proposal against the criterion for relevant registry experience, are as follows:
- CentralNic Ltd, further details of which are provided under Organic Names' response to C.13.
- Nominet UK Ltd, further details of which are provided under Exhibit 1.
The remaining questions have been answered in respect of each of these, in turn.
b.
- CentralNic is a registry.
- Nominet UK is a registry.
c1. CentralNic's registry comprises a database of approximately 1.5 million domain names. There are 955 registrars on the CentralNic database as of 5th August 2002.
Nominet UK's registry comprises a database of approximately 3.5 million domain names. Nominet UK has approximately 2,600 Tagholders, which are, in Nominet's model, the equivalent of Registrars.
Because both Nominet and CentralNic operate in a different contractual framework from ICANN, not all of the above registrars are ICANN accredited. Organic Names recognises that in relation to .org, only ICANN accredited registrars will be able to register. In Organic Names' proposal (under C.31) and presentation it has made reference to the possibility of offering services to non-ICANN accredited registrars, in particular those excluded from accreditation on cost grounds, but it has also made it clear that any change in this area would only occur with the wholehearted agreement and support of ICANN.
c2. If it is a registrar, state the number of domain names supported by the registrar, and state what registries it interacts with.
As detailed in the proposal under C.31, Organic Names is independent of registrars. Neither Organic Names, nor its bid partner CentralNic, nor any of their shareholders or directors, holds any material interest in any ICANN accredited registrar.
Nominet is not a registrar.
Organic Names believes that mixing the functions of registry and registrar, (even in a supposed "arms length" fashion such as VeriSign) leads to conflicts of interest, and potential conflicts with the Registrar channel that are best avoided.
Organic Names believes that award of the contract to a body independent of registrars will enhance competition at the registrar level.
d. Organic Names will be using CentralNic's technology to deploy its systems, as detailed in the proposal.
CentralNic currently uses EPP version 6, Domain/Contact/Host version 4, and TCP Transport version 4. CentralNic has deployed RRP on a test bed basis and will have it fully available to provide backwards compatibility with the VeriSign system by end September 2002.
Both implementations allow domain name registration, contact registration and modification, and host modification, giving identical functionality in the first instance. Following a successful smooth transition Organic Names expects CentralNic to deploy additional improved functionality within the EPP system. Changes to the RRP protocol are likely to be limited to bug fixes and compatibility with the VeriSign system.
Nominet UK uses an email-based automaton for interaction with its tagholders (registrars), and does not currently support EPP or RRP.
e. In respect of the Organic Names/CentralNic system, there are no differences.
This question is not applicable to Nominet UK, as Nominet's protocols will not be used within Organic Names proposed systems.
f. CentralNic is responsible for the entire operation of its own registry function - this is not outsourced to any third party. All CentralNic's systems have been specified, developed, and tested in-house.
CentralNic is Organic Names' bid partner in this application, and as per C.12, operational aspects of the registry function will be outsourced by Organic Names to CentralNic. Thus CentralNic will be responsible for all aspects the operation of Organic Names' registry system, which is the system CentralNic currently uses. The full management and staff of CentralNic - see section C8 of the proposal for details of management - will form the core of the staff for the Organic Names Registry. Steve Dyer, chairman, director and a substantial shareholder in CentralNic Ltd, is co-founder and co-owner of Organic Names.
Nominet UK is responsible for the entire operation of its own registry function - this is not outsourced to any third party. All Nominet's systems have been specified, developed, and tested in-house.
As detailed at the head of Exhibit 1, Nominet UK is not itself a party to this application, and indeed its tightly defined memorandum and articles would prevent it from running such a top level domain, or applying, or forming part of an application to do so. However, Organic Names considers that the extensive involvement of the promoters of this application with Nominet UK, and the experience they gained thereby, are relevant to ICANN's assessment of Organic Names' proposal under this criterion. Relevant information on members of the bid team in respect of Nominet UK is thus given below:
- Alex Bligh director, co-founder and co-owner of Organic Names, is a founding non-executive director of Nominet UK. Alex played a large part in forming the original company, in the financial modelling mechanisms and the determination of charges, and in the legal structure and contracts. Nominet UK has since become an internationally respected model for other country-code domain registrars. Alex also sits on Nominet UKs Policy Advisory Board.
- Steve Dyer, director, co-founder and co-owner of Organic Names, is a long-serving director of Nominet UK, and also a member of it's Policy Advisory Board.
- Rob Blokzijl, director of Organic Names, is a long-serving director of Nominet UK.
- Richard Almeida, director of Organic Names, was a founding director of Nominet UK, and chaired its Policy Advisory Board. Dr Willie Black, Chairman of Nominet UK, has been invited to join Organic Names' Policy Advisory Board.
As far as the operation of Organic Names' registry is concerned, as stated above, this will be performed by entirely by CentralNic.
However, Organic Names' Board of Directors, listed in section C15.iii is a true operating Board designed to give Organic Names suitable direction and appropriate financial, legal and registry experience. This Board's sole interest is Organic Names and .org and it has no other divisions or registrars to oversee.
Specifically, Joel Rowbottom, CTO of CentralNic whose background is detailed under C.15, has ultimate responsibility for the operation of the CentralNic registry system, and will do so in respect of Organic Names' system too.
The members of Organic Names' Advisory Board have considerable registry experience, but also bring the registrar constituency to the table. As envisaged in the proposal, others currently involved in other bids may wish to join the Advisory Board and Organic Names will welcome all organisations (including, it is hoped, ICANN, once the selection process is complete) with a legitimate interest in the development of registry policy in relation to .org.
a. Register Organization’s technical services will be provided by Registry Advantage (RA), a division of Register.com. RA operates independently of Register.com in terms of management, staff, information sharing, and the relevant technical and non-technical facilities, while meeting all Organizational Conflict of Interest polices and procedures. RA has had the benefit of drawing upon Register.com’s expertise and experience, particularly for its architecture, database schema, and core software set. To a large extent, Register.com’s operations mirror or exceed the requirements of operating a DNS registry.
Register Organization requests that ICANN consider both:a) Its experience as a registry outsource provider to ccTLDs and .pro; and
b) Register.com’s experience as the first competitive registrar and manager of the largest number of domains on its domain name system.
b. Registry Advantage is a registry outsource provider. Register.com is a registrar.
c1. Registry Advantage has agreements with 8 registries, which have over 15,000 domain names registered in them, and 19 registrars.
Several of the different registries supported by Registry Advantage require different types of information (e.g. thin versus thick). Consequently, while Registry Advantage's stable of domain names may be small in comparison to some registry operators, its experience with different transitions, registry policies and data requirements provide it with a breadth of experience unmatched by most other applicants.
c2. Register.com supports approximately 3.4 million domain names, for many of which it provides DNS services simultaneously. This requires a greater amount of social data, variety of resource records and often a much larger number of resource records per domain name under management than in a comparably sized registry operation. This represents the largest collection of names administered by a single provider of authoritative DNS services.
Register.com interacts with all of the legacy gTLDs (.com, .net, and .org), the new unsponsored gTLDs that have been launched (.biz, .info, and .name), and all of the ccTLDs that may be offered through a non-local registrar.
It may also be of interest to the reviewers that, much like a registry operation, Register.com’s Third Party Protocol (TPP) provides its reseller partners with the capability of performing automated registrations through an SRS-like interface. In addition to providing registration-related features, TPP also allows resellers to perform additional functionality such as updating the authoritative zone file information (such as A, MX or CNAME resource records) for each of their domain names.
d. Registry Advantage currently supports its registry operations by allowing for registry-registrar communications through various mechanisms, including EPP and its own proprietary protocol, SRP (Simple Registration Protocol). EPP and SRP are supported in a true multi-protocol environment: both protocols provide access to the same registry database, and registrars have the option of selecting either protocol for their registry-registrar communications.
Registry Advantage has already begun the process of adding the RRP protocol to its existing suite of registry-registrar protocols, leveraging the existing SRP software to facilitate a rapid implementation. Requirements specifications and project plans have been formulated to add RRP by the end of September. This product addition is planned regardless of whether Registry Advantage must do so or not to support the .org registry. RRP support will be in place well before the mid November deadline in our transition plan. This will enable registrars to start testing EPP as well as RRP connections to our Shared Registration System well in advance of January 1, 2003.
Register.com makes use of both the RRP and EPP protocols in order to perform its registrar function. The company has a lengthy history with the RRP, and was the first registrar to begin using the protocol, beginning in June of 1999. Since that time, Register.com has used the RRP to perform millions of successful registrations, modifications, deletions and transfers, as well as literally billions of check commands. Register.com also has extensive experience with various versions of the EPP protocol, which it uses to perform registrar activities in a number of new gTLDs (.info, .biz, and .name) as well as the .us ccTLD. Moreover, EPP is supported for the .pro gTLD.
e. Registry Advantage’s EPP implementation is based on the most current versions of the EPP Internet-Drafts, version 06/04. It is anticipated that this will be the same version initially used for the .org registry. A slight implementation difference will exist: currently, Registry Advantage operates thick registries, which allow for the use of contact objects; initially, the .org registry will be operated as a thin registry, so the use of contact objects will be prohibited. This behavior is only a temporary step, however. As the registry is migrated to thick operations, the use of the contact object will be restored. Please see the migration schedule in sections C18.1 and C22 of the original application for further details.
Registry Advantage has also implemented its own SRP protocol for registry-registrar communications. While this protocol is not directly related to the RRP, it is a simple text-based protocol with many similarities to RRP. Full details of Registry Advantage’s registry-registrar protocols are provided in Attachment P to the original application.
Register.com implements the current version of the RRP used by VeriSign to support the .com, .net and .org registries. In order to facilitate an easy transition for .org registrars, however, it is extremely important that the new registry operator implement the same version of the RRP in place at the time of the change of operators. To that end, Registry Advantage may implement either the current version of the RRP, or the new 2.0.0 version of the RRP currently proposed by VeriSign. A further discussion of the differences between the RRP versions is made in Section C22 of the original application, although a new version of the Internet Draft describing the proposed 2.0.0 version of the RRP has been released subsequent to the original application timeframe.
Finally, Register.com currently implements a number of different EPP versions to perform its registrar function for various registries.
f. Register Organization will manage the policies pertaining to the operation of the registry and oversee compliance by Registry Advantage with the registry contract, the service level agreement, and all relevant ICANN requirements. We have identified a highly competent and experienced management team with direct relevant experience in successfully managing similarly complex projects of this scope and size. Their experience covers financial planning, operations, communications, channel management, systems development and deployment, and resource management. Register Organization will also rely on its directors and advisors with the relevant technical and industry expertise to assist in the management operation of the registry.
Registry Advantage will rely on its current staff, described below, as well as additional staff as outlined in the application.
Business Personnel
Jonathan Wales will be the President of Register Oraganization. Mr. Wales is the Chief Financial Officer of Virtual Internet plc, London, which was acquired by Register.com in 2002. He has been advising Internet service companies for over 15 years, largely in the United Kingdom. His specializations are corporate finance and non-profit management. Through his work, he has traveled extensively through Europe, Asia, and North America. Previously, he was a senior Partner at Wise and Co., a leading firm of Chartered Accountants based in Surrey, England.
David Palmieri will be the Vice President of Marketing and Product Development. Mr. Palmieri joined Register.com as the Managing Director of Product Director in 2001. He has a dozen years of experience in business consulting and project management for Internet and telecommunications ventures, and has worked for Barnes & Noble.com, Mondera.com, Bell Atlantic, and Andersen Consulting. He has his MBA from Harvard University, and graduated magna cum laude from Franklin & Marshall College.
Garrett M. Herbert will be the Vice President of Financial Operations. Mr. Herbert became Register.com’s Director of Finance in 2001. He has a decade of accounting and acquisitions experience from working at companies such as Deloitte & Touche and Mentmore Holdings Corporation. Of note is his management of the acquisition of Virtual Internet plc by Register.com in February 2002. Most recently, he was the Corporate Controller at Stellex Technologies, Inc., a quarter-billion-dollar manufacturer of commercial and defense electronics and aerostructure components. Mr. Herbert has a B.A. in Economics/Accounting from the College of the Holy Cross, MA, and is a New York State Certified Public Accountant.
Kevin Polakoff will be the Vice President of Register Relations and Customer Service. Mr. Polakoff has been Register.com’s Director of Customer Service since 1999, the year that Register.com became an ICANN-Accredited Registrar. Mr. Polakoff has been a vital part of building and managing the customer-service function of Register.com during its period of rapid growth. He is responsible for the general supervision of a 100-plus customer-service staff. Mr. Polakoff earned a B.A in Business from Skidmore College.
Technical Personnel
Richard Webby, General Manager, Technology and Operations, has over a dozen years of experience in software development and project management, including particular expertise in building and operating mission critical software systems in the Internet and telecommunications industries. He recently joined the company from a leading wireless applications service provider where he was Vice President of Technology. Richard has a Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Richard would direct the technical aspects of Registry Advantage’s services to Register Organization.
Jordyn Buchanan, Director of Technology, has 10 years in systems management and architecture. His six years of technology management include three years leading the technology department for a regional ISP. Jordyn has been working with the DNS for over eight years, and has been featured as a guest speaker on DNS related issues at fora such as RIPE-DNR, AfriNIC, and ISPCON. He has extensive experience working within technology and policy fora, and is a member of ICANN's Names Council. Jordyn was one of the key architects of the transition plans and service level commitments and, as such, will be one of the key experts at Registry Advantage in managing registry services.
Richard Roberto, Director of Operations, has 14 years in mission-critical enterprise operations management. Notably, he was the Chief Technology Consultant on the purchase and sale agreement of a major equity derivatives company between two of the world’s largest financial institutions. He is also the former Head of Information Services at the Japan-based satellite office of a leading U.S. brokerage house. Richard has been managing mission critical global DNS services for over 10 years, and was a leading member of the global DNS steering committee for one of the world’s largest banks. Richard Roberto will be responsible for ensuring that Registry Advantage achieves the service level commitments for Register Organization.
Charles Sun, Lead Software Engineer, has spent a dozen years developing software for the Internet, telecommunications, and data-communications industries. He also has eight years of software project-management experience. He spent two years studying in the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at New York University. Charlie will be responsible for leading new software development initiatives as required by Register Organization.
Patrick Power, Unix System Administrator, has two years of professional experience and three years non-professional experience with Linux/Unix system administration. He was lead system administrator for a company developing and deploying artificially intelligent sales agents. He has a BS in Mathematics from the University of Georgia. Patrick will work to maintain and upgrade the systems for the .org registry.Daniel Leng, Software Developer, has two years experience in Internet software development and consulting. He holds a dual Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Art History from Duke University in North Carolina. Dan will work on software development and maintenance initiatives, with particular focus on our Account Management Interface.
Lei Yang, Software Developer, has several years experience in the scientific computing and Internet software development. He has a M.S. in Computational Mechanics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China and a M.S. in Computer Science at New York University. Lei will work on software development and maintenance initiatives, with particular emphasis on RRP/EPP server improvements.
Jeff Leong, Junior Software Programmer, is a recent Computer Science graduate from Columbia University. He focuses on the development and maintenance of Registry Advantage’s backend software systems.Additional Personnel
In addition to the members of the team currently within Registry Advantage, Register.com has over 500 personnel with extensive experience in all aspects of registration operations. We will draw upon the experience and expertise of selected personnel from Register.com should ICANN award the .org registry to Register Organization. To the extent that specific personnel work on .org and have insight into confidential or sensitive registry information, they will be completely segregated from any registrar responsibilities at Register.com in order to comply with OCI and other ICANN requirements.
The following specific people have been identified to assist Registry Advantage in the transition of the .org registry:
Michael Islek, Director of Architecture, has 15 years in software and system engineering and architecture. Co-inventor of WebSiteNOW!(TM), server based easy to use web authoring tool. Over 8 years of experience building, maintaining and supporting, complete ISPs enterprise networks. 12 years of experience as President, CEO and CTO of various small emerging companies. 10 years of experience in embedded systems development. Mr. Islek has been among the pioneers in synchronous Packet Assembler Disassembler (PAD) technology. He also has extensive knowledge and expertise in high speed communication systems development and deployment as well as large suite of communication protocols such as ATM, X.25, Frame Relay, XXX Asyc, XXX Fax, SNA/SDLC, BSC, Burroughs, Honeywell, DEC DMCP, TCP/IP, OSPF, RIP, BGP and NetBIOS.
Kyaw (Joe) Khine, Network Engineer, has 10 years in Network Engineering and Software development. His 7 years of network engineering include 2 years building a nationwide WAN infrastructure. He has been working with TCP/IP networks for 5 years and specializing in BGP, OSPF, QoS and VPN technologies. For last 3 recent years, he involved in design, implementation of operations for Internet data centers. He holds industrial certifications from Cisco, Microsoft and Novell. He has a Masters degree in Computer Technology from Institute of Computer Scinece and Technology, Burma.
David Berk, Director Enterprise Engineering Register.com. David has over ten years of experience building and managing large, high profile, high availability Internet infrastructures. David is a former Manager of Systems Development at Sony Online Entertainment the maker of EverQuest, the worlds largest online persistent universe video game and Director of Technology at Paramount Digital Entertainment responsible for managing Paramount Pictures Internet properties including StarTrek.com. Most recently, before coming to Register.com in 2002, he helped successfully fortify CBSNEWS.com and CBS.com for the 2000 Presidential Elections.
Anu Vajjalla, Manager of Corporate Engineering, has 7 years in IT with a Masters in Computer Engineering from India. Anu has been working with register.com for 4 years, having worked with the company in the early stages of applying to become a registrar. Anu has particular expertise in transition and registry-registrar protocol implementation, having added most of the TLDs to the Register.com site.
Weiyi Cheng, Sr. Database Administrator, has 15 years in database administration. His 19 years of Information technology includes 4 years in the Internet industry. Weiyi has been a database architect, database administrator and a developer of database applications.
Jae Gangemi is the Lead Architect for Register.com's core engineering team. He is responsible for providing architectural oversight for all of system modifications and major upgrades. Jae has three years of experience in the domain name registration and management industry, and personally supervised the launch of retail sales of the ".biz" and ".info" gTLDs.
SWITCH Swiss Academic and Research Network
a. (a) Registry operation for CH and LI TLD's; (b) Registrar operation for CH and LI TLD's.
b. Both.
c1. CH/LI: total number of registered names by registry operation = 484'047; CH/LI: total number of registrars = 45
c2. Total number of registered names by registrar operation = ca. 300'000; Registry: SWITCH (CH and LI)
d. Both registry and registrars use a SWITCH proprietary pre-EPP-type of protocol based on XML formatted e-mails with authentication.
e. The ORG registry will support an enhanced RRP protocol based on
- RFC-2832 and
- RFC-2832bis (draft-hollenbeck-rfc2832bis-02.txt) and
- a proposal submitted by CORE registrars to SWITCH Tue, 11 Jun 2002 00:45:23 +0200
and the EPP protocol with TCP as transport layer, secured by SSL, as defined in Internet-Draft 'Generic Registry-Registrar Protocol Requirements' and several Internet-Drafts from the Provisioning Registry Protocol Working Group.
f. SWITCH is responsible for both registry and registrar as outlined above. For ORG SWITCH will be responsible as registry.
SWITCH will both be responsible as sponsoring organization and registry for ORG.
Union of International Associations
Definitions:
VGRS: VeriSign Global Registry Services (VGRS) is a division of VeriSign Inc, is based in the USA, and currently operates the ICANN-regulated registries: .com, .net, and .org.
UIA / Diversitas: Union of International Associations (UIA) is an international nonprofit organization based in Belgium. Diversitas would be established, initially, as a subsidiary of UIA and would be the .org operator as signatory to the new .org registry agreement.
a. When awarded the .org contract by ICANN, Diversitas would become a new ICANN-regulated registry as the operator of .org. Diversitas would use VGRS for backend registry services for the first three years of the six year contract with ICANN. VGRS may then be replaced by another subcontractor, identity unknown, in an open bidding process.
UIA has, for over 30 years, managed a “non-ICANN” electronic registry of international nonprofit organizations in the form of a Yearbook of International Organizations; other registries electronically integrated with it by the UIA include: World Problems; Strategies; International Meetings; Biography (organization executives). These registries have been accessible over the internet since 2000.
b. Diversitas’ backend services provider for .org would be VGRS. VGRS is a registry only.
UIA’s operation of the Yearbook of International Organizations as a registry is formally acknowledged by a UN/ECOSOC Resolution. It is not a registrar in the ICANN sense of the term.
c1. Diversitas’ proposed backend service operator, VGRS, supports a total of 31,431,472 domains (.com, .net, and .org) as of 31 March 2002 and a total of109 operational Registrars as of 5 August 2002.
UIA’s integrated electronic registry operation (Organizations, Problems, Strategies, etc) covers 384,000 registry objects, of which the organization entities point to an additional 352,970 unregistered organizational entities; the integration within (and between) these registries involves registration of over 1.5 million link objects. Of the non-profit organizations registered, 10,080 have .org domains and 6,241 are registered in other TLDs.
c2. Not applicable.
Neither UIA / Diversitas nor its subcontractor VGRS is a registrar.
d. RRP is the protocol VGRS currently uses for .org registry-registrar communications. VGRS plans to switch to EPP for .org following the release of approved IETF standards. VGRS has successfully deployed EPP in support of several other products.
e. VGRS is the current registry operator for .org and will be providing backend registry services as subcontractor to Diversitas. The RRP, as currently used by VGRS and the registrars, will continue to be the protocol for the .org registry operations. This will provide stability, reliability and error-free performance with this implementation of RRP for .org.
EPP is not yet an IETF proposed standard. Once these standards have been approved and published through the IETF, EPP transition plans will be finalized. In preparation for the approval, VGRS has already begun development efforts. EPP protocol will be deployed in a carefully planned transition period in an effort to have minimal impact on the registrars.
f. Diversitas would subcontract to VGRS the responsibility for the technical operation of the .org registry. VGRS has developed all software and interfaces and has integrated within its facilities the registry functions, including domain name registration and associated administrative functions, maintenance of the shared registry systems and the associated user/customer interfaces, main database functions, business logic and other administrative and contractual functions for managing the central repository for the registry information; DNS servers; and the WHOIS service.
a. AusRegistry Poptel RegistrarsAsia b. Registry - .au Registry (Australia) Registry Operator - .coop gTLD Registrar – ICANN accredited c1. Approximately 300,000 domain names and 14 registrars using EPP version 6 and AusRegistry custom toolkits and admistration website. Approximately 6,300 domain names.
The terms of the ICANN contract state that the .coop registry would operate without registrars for the first 6 months of operation, due to the complexities of implementing the .coop verification procedure.
We are now in the process of approving registrars using EPP version 6
N/A c2. N/A N/A Aproximately 10,000 names with the following registries.
Afilias .INFO registry, Neulevel .BIZ registry, GNR .name registry and Verisign .com .net and .orgd. EPP version 6 EPP version 6 with extensions registrant for verification Afilias EPPv2
GNR – EPPv5/v3 Contact, Domain and Host mappings
Neulevel - EPPv4
Verisign RRP
e. We propose to use EPP version 6 for the .org registry as well as supporting the existing RRP protocol. We will be restricting the set of EPP commands able to be used on the ‘Thin’ model EPP as well as running EPP 'thick' registry model. We will be running the AusRegistry system Protocol changes between all these versions of EPP significantly depending on the version implemented by the registry. We will support he latest version of RRP, since we recently developed our RRP interfaces to Verisign, we are using the latest version of the protocol in use
f. AusRegistry – Registry Operator.
CEO - Simon Delzoppo
GM Sales & Marketing - Adrian Kinderis
CTO - Chris Wright
DBA - Adrian Plunket
We designed, built and currently operate the .au EPP registry and nameservers for Australia.
AusRegistry is responsible for code updates, maintenance, debugging, registrar technical and marketing support, toolkits, improvements etcPoptel – Registry Operator
CTO – Stuart Marsden
Sales & marketing – Mark Crocker
Registry/Registrar Operations Manager – Lynn Davis
Technical manager – Pete Moore
We designed, built and currently operate the registry for .coop.
We have written our own implementation of EPP with .coop specific extensions for the verification process. When we have active registrars, we will provide technical and marketing support, toolkits, upgrades etc.
RegistrarsAsia is the parent company of AusRegistry and closely aligned.
CEO - Simon Delzoppo
GM Sales & Marketing - Adrian Kinderis
CTO - Chris Wright
DBA - Adrian Plunket
should be sent to webmaster@icann.org.
Page updated
09-Sep-2002
©2002 The Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers. All rights reserved.