ICANN announced the renewal in late March, and an independent report by reviewing body Telcordia revealed that VeriSign, which was always the frontrunner in consideratipon because it already owned the name, had narrowly beaten Sentan, Affilias, Denic and Core++.
The Internet’s de-facto governing authority, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) granted VeriSign (formerly Network Solutions) a six-year renewal on its management of .net, despite concerns from losing bidders that VeriSign had an unfair advantage.
British technology news site TheRegister.com conducted what it termed an “in-depth investigation” of the Telcordia report and said it had found that ICANN had made a number of questionable decisions during the selection process.
According to The Register, ICANN added or altered selection criteria at VeriSign’s request, avoided judging criteria that was potentially detrimental to VeriSign and effectively ignored complaints of bias and incompetence.
Also raising some eyebrows was the fact that VeriSign is currently in litigation over several lawsuits with ICANN and had threatened a lawsuit regarding the .net selection process.
The latter company has publicly said that the court costs related to the VeriSign suits are hindering its business, capping employees’ salaries and freezing new hires.
Various of the losing contenders also pointed out that Telcordia shared board members with current and past incarnations of VeriSign and related companies.
VeriSign and ICANN have both denied impropriety in the renewal of .net, calling all procedures “open and transparent.” Still, each of the unsuccessful bidders as well as ICANN’s At-Large-Advisory-Committee (ALAC) have levied criticisms that Telcordia’s report was “unreasonably evaluated” if not “seriously flawed.”
The renewal takes effect in July and continues to June 30, 2011.