04-February-03

“Public Interest Registry Association” (PIR) was selected for renewing the .org management in last September. It began its function on January 1st 2003. Actually, 2,6 million domain name owners, until then administered by VeriSign, were waiting for this. The first step into this transition was developed on January 25 and 26. During these two days, the filing cabinet “line area” which has the domain name index in the area, was transferred from VeriSign servers to AFILIAS servers, .info Register gives to PIR the technical infrastructure that the .org management needs.

The technical transference passed well and PIR could register a dominion name each six seconds later. It showed some difficulties for .org “historical” users. In first place, because stability reasons, the transference, renewing, suppression or modification operations of a dominion name into .org were forbidden until January 31. Apart of the last time incident, users had to be again in right conditions to do these operations today. In return, a domain name suppression into the standard term of inscription isn’t done automatically at all, and even it is delayed for two or three months! Will we have to give a time to PIR in order to establish a new suppression system? But, who states the problem to internets if they try to be free or to recover an useless dominion name?

Even domain names in.org is working in a clear way for users, not all is under rule between PIR and VeriSign. As you remember, between others, VeriSign has the compromise of paying five million dollars to the selection process winner into the renewing of .org if this was a non governmental organization, is that the PIR case? However, even the transition got home, VeriSing will only pay to PIR the amount in last February. Over all, and it is the most surprising thing, accented domains aren’t supported by the new Register, nowadays. Then, owners still can’t use them since they paid for a year, not even they suspect the technical changes that come!

See http://www.pir.org/

JCV & SB