.Net report was fudged

Telcordia's dealings with the first and second-place bidders have already raised a number of questions about its independence that the company has so far failed to respond to.

Telcordia was, until very recently, owned by SAIC, which also had a significant interest in VeriSign until 2003. Telcordia and VeriSign, working under the same umbrella company, also worked very closely together on an Enum project in 2000/2001, giving joint presentations to governments and international organisations around the world on their combined vision. The two even formed a partnership, Enum World, to make the most of their co-operation.

Much has been made of the fact that Telcordia has now been bought by private equity firms Providence Equity Partners and Warburg Pincus giving it a connection to second-place bidder Sentan. Such a connection is, however, a red herring.

Warburg Pincus and Providence Equity each own half of Telcordia. Warburg Pincus has a 67 percent share in Neustar. Neustar owns 90 percent of NeuLevel. And NeuLevel owns 70 percent of Sentan.

However, when it comes to Telcordia, the company that decided who would run .net, and NeuStar, the majority owner of second-placed Sentan, there is a long and bitter history.

NeuStar became rich on the back of contracts it fought bitterly for against Telcordia. With the split-up of AT&T in 1984, a company called Bellcore, jointly owned by all the "Baby Bells", took over the task of telephone numbering across the US. Bellcore was subsequently bought by SAIC and became Telcordia.

In 1996, it was decided that this increasingly profitable business should be opened up and a neutral third party take over telephone number administration.

As such, each US state held a selection process for a phone number adminstrator and in nearly every case it was NeuLevel pitched against Telcordia for the contract.

With millions of dollars at stake each time, the battle between the two became increasingly heated, with NeuStar at one point formally accusing Telcordia of plagiarising its presentations. After a series of clashes, NeuStar came out on top, winning double the number of contracts.

NeuStar also beat Telcordia to the contract for the North American Numbering Plan Administration (NANPA), which provides overall telephone administration for all of North America. NeuStar won the contract in 1997 and then again in 2003.

The bitter acrimony between NeuStar and Telcordia, combined with Telcordia's previous close relationship with VeriSign, is not in itself enough to dismiss the company's conclusions over .net - for which it received up to $400,000.

However, the accusations levelled at it by one of the five bidders, and by the chairman of a committee that formed the report's parameters, combined with the introduction of a specious criterium, incompetently added to the report, gives pause for thought. The .net registry contract ends on 30 June 2005. Currently the registry comprises over five million domains, representing the third-largest directory on the Internet. An estimated 20 percent of all Internet servers use the .net registry as their entry point into the international computer network.

Related link

Final GNSO report on.net criteria [pdf]

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