By Polly Raymond, 18 January 1999 18:05
NEWS Network Solutions - the US group responsible for managing the world's top-level domain names - has admitted its registration process has become plagued with delays. It used to take only a few hours to register popular domain names ending in .com, .net and .org, but now the wait is more like days. According to a US newswire, some companies have complained their application has been lost or delayed so long that the domain name they were chasing was poached by another organisation. The same report mentioned that Network Solutions was blaming the problems on a record number of registrations and a plague of fraudulent emails. But Daniel Bealer, analyst at research group Ovum, said the fault lies in the system: "It's a complete mess - it is totally illogical that .com is used rather than more country specific endings. "It's only going to get worse because the demand for .com domain names is set to rise exponentially this year and the current system will be really pushed to handle it", he added. The upshot will apparently be a drought of available .com domain names and companies will have to resort to non-intuitive, nonsense names involving abbreviations and other creations. Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) - the larger, global organisation - is due to take over responsibility for domain names from Network Associates in late 1999. Many observers believe that that amount of administration necessary for the changeover makes this date very optimistic.
In order to post a comment you need to be registered and logged in.
Log in or create your silicon.com account below