ICANN Publishes Telcordia Report on .NET Rankings

VeriSign was evaluated with the highest marks in the ICANN Telcordia Report. In the document are compared the firms competing to maintain the .net top-level domain (TLD). , and appears likely to keep the lucrative registry deal for another six years.

The report by Telcordia is influential in the decision on the future of .net. ICANN indicated it would "promptly enter negotiations with the top-ranked applicant."

The Telcordia report consists of four sections: an executive summary of the findings, a description of the procedures that were used to evaluate the responses, the findings by RFP section, and the overall evaluation.

A team of technical experts from Asia, Europe and North America provided technical advice to Telcordia concerning operational aspects of the DNS during this process. ICANN has now received the evaluators' final report and rankings.

The Telcordia report noted the following: "The evaluators find that all the vendors have the capabilities to run the .NET registry". Telcordia concluded that the "distinguishing characteristics are largely difference in experience, risk and price". The final scoring result gave a slight advantage to VeriSign over Sentan, who were in order followed by Afilias, Denic and CORE++.

The Internet community is now invited to review the report. ICANN will promptly enter negotiations with the top-ranked applicant to reach a mutually acceptable registry agreement.

The Request for Proposals concerning the successor .NET registry operator was posted on 10 December 2004. An open question period for applicants was conducted through 7 January 2005. On 20 January 2005, ICANN announced the receipt of five applications. On 7 February 2005, ICANN announced that Telcordia Technologies, Inc. had been retained to conduct the independent evaluation of the applications.