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Technology Stocks : VeriSign (VRSN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 10K a day who wrote (1202)	5/14/2001 9:06:07 PM
From: jhg_in_kc	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1285

is this good news or bad, .org not included ?Internet Names Deal Nearly Done By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer NEW YORK (AP) - The Commerce Department (news - web sites) expressed confidence Monday that it could grant a California company extended rights to manage the most popular Internet addresses. The deal could mean millions of dollars in revenues for VeriSign Inc., which now gets $6 annually for every domain name registered and entered into its master directories. Officials from Commerce, VeriSign and the oversight board for Internet names met for several hours Monday to discuss the details. In a statement, Commerce Department general counsel Ted Kassinger said officials ``are pleased with the progress and are confident an agreement can be reached in the near term.'' He did not say when the department would rule or what conditions, if any, it might attach as part of approval. Brian O'Shaughnessy, a VeriSign spokesman, said Commerce suggested some minor changes, but nothing that would break the deal or change it fundamentally. Although VeriSign must give up ''.org'' by next year, it would keep ''.net'' until 2006 and ''.com'' until 2007. VeriSign would get favorable renewal options for ''.com,'' the most popular and recognizable suffix. Dot-com accounts for three-quarters of the 28 million ''.com,'' ''.net'' and ''.org'' names in use. The company believes such stability would give it the incentive to spend $200 million on research and improvements to its registry databases. Internet users who need to find a Web site or send an e-mail under one of those suffixes touch on the databases in some fashion. The deal won't directly change how people navigate the Internet, but it could affect such things as prices for domain names. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, created by the U.S. government in 1998 to oversee Net naming policies, already approved the deal. The Commerce Department was the final hurdle. Some competitors and Internet users termed the proposal a windfall for a large company and complained that it was negotiated in secret with almost no community input. An ICANN (news - web sites) subcommittee, the Names Council, favored either requiring additional conditions or keeping the current contract terms, which would have required VeriSign to sell part of its business to continue running the databases beyond 2003. The new arrangement leaves in question the future of ''.org.'' ICANN officials have suggested that ''.org'' might eventually be restricted to nonprofit organizations, but they have not specified what would happen to names already registered by companies and individuals not organized as non-profits. No final decisions on ''.org'' are likely until next year. -