>So...correct me if I'm wrong here...does this mean that the registry services >operations and the GTLD maintenance operations for .com/.net will be owned by >different companies?
Yep. And it means that Verisign business is no longer based so much on serving customers but more on leveraging various monopoly rights that they have such as ownership of .com and ownership of the main root CAs whose certificates are bundled with Microsoft's OS. >Isn't that what we wanted all along? Uhhh... sort of, but I guess most folks really just wanted the whole domain name business to be handled in an open honest and fair manner. This latest move by Verisign doesn't make any substantial advance in that direction. The fact is that we have created Verisign's .COM monopoly by treating .com domains as the cool thing to have and we are sustaining Verisign's .COM monopoly by not educating our customers and our friends about the alternative domains that are available. As technically skilled people we could also help by developing detailled transition plans to help people shift to a new TLD and then turn off the old one. This isn't as straightforward as just slapping an extra zone into DNS and an alias onto Apache. If you want to get rid of the .com domain name then you need some way of identifying which traffic still uses the old .com domain name and then you need some means of notifying the users to change their own records or address books. --Michael Dillon
