ICANN And VeriSign Vie For Key Role In DNS Upgrade

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration branch of the United States Department of Commerce began seeking comments last week on who should operate a new more secure version of the Internet's Domain Name System, a role both commercial domain registrar VeriSign and the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have expressed interest in playing.

ICANN is the Marina del Rey, California-based international nonprofit organization that coordinates the Internet's domain name system, or DNS, in order to ensure its stability and security. The organization reports to the U.S. Commerce Department. Mountain View, California-based VeriSign was founded in 1995, and operates two of the Internet's 13 so-called root nameservers.

The possibility that a key DNS management role in the next generation system, called DNSSEC for DNS Security Extensions, could be awarded to a commercial firm has sparked a backlash among a number of Internet luminaries, including search engine leader Google's company evangelist Vinton Cerf. Cerf, the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocol that underlies the Internet, joined others in urging the Commerce Department to award the administration of signing new more secure root server files to ICANN. Comments on the matter will be open to submission until November 24.

- SearchEngineWorld.com