The explosion in available dotcoms recently has forced VeriSign to restrict the bandwidth available to registrars for its Shared Registration Service (SRS).

In a sense, we have hit the two-year birthday of the Internet's great success - when the world+dog registered any domain that came into their heads in the hope of making their fortune on the Net. Those crazy days have past and now people are thinking twice about coughing up a renewal charge.

The huge number of newly available domains has seen VeriSign struggling to cope with demand and so it has sent an email to all ICANN-approved registrars, informing them that their bandwidth is to be restricted to enable everyone to get equal access to the data.

More insidious than this however, VeriSign alludes to possible dodgy practices by registrars, attempting to cut out opposition by flooding SRS with requests. The email reads: "During these daily 'land rushes' some registrars acquire unnecessarily large numbers of RRP sessions, making it difficult for other registrars to acquire the minimal number needed to conduct normal business. Whether this is due to inefficient registrar systems, or a conscious desire to block competition by monopolizing RRP connections, it is a behavior that cannot be supported or condoned."

It looks as though not everyone is playing fair and so VeriSign is forcing them to. From tomorrow, all registrars will be limited to 256K bandwidth and 250 simultaneous RRP connections. ®