Independent Domain Registries

Over the years in various countries alternative domain registries have been established to allocate domains under domain hierarchies (typically second-level domains) which compete with official gTLDs and ccTLDs.

Independent Domain Registries are not accredited by ICANN. They get their name space from a gTLD or ccTLD registry by registering a domain which resembles an official hierarchy. An example of this would be to register UK.COM with Network solutions which would allow you to allocate domains like example.uk.com. This domain resembles the equivalent issued by Nominet, eg, example.co.uk.

Most of the Independent Domain registries operate due to having a domain which starts with a ISO 3166-1 and then is in a gTLD hierarchy such as .COM

One of the factors that has permitted these Independent Domain Registrues being established is that ccTLD registries in many countries are very restrictive and do not answer the needs of the market they are meant to serve. Some entrepreneur acquires a domain which looks suitable and then starts allocating domains for which it delegates authority, in the same way an official registry does.

These registries will operate both the Registry and Registrar. In most cases they will use two companies to perform the Registry and Registrar function. The Registry will be a company which sole purpose will be to hold the data and the ownership of the top level domain. The Registrar will the company that is used for operations etc. The separation of the two gives protection to the domain registrants in such events that Registrar goes into bankruptcy, it is sued or what ever not to affect the continuity of the domains.

Technical Operation

Independent registries operate at a technical level identically to official domain registries. They add two types of records to their domain hierarchies:

"Delegation records"

They are used to delegate authority for a domain to another set of name servers. The following is an example of the records that would be added to their DNS zone:

example IN NS ns1.example.com. IN NS ns2.example.com.

"Glue Records"

In the case of the NS being delegated to are within the hierarchy the registrar manages additional records will be added. Assuming the hierarchy is .example.com the records added to

ns1.domain.example.com IN A 4.4.4.4 ns2.domain.example.com IN A 5.5.5.5 domain IN NS ns1.domain.example.com. IN NS ns2.domain.example.com.

WHOIS service

To be able to check who is the registrant of a domain registries operate a service called WHOIS which allows a person on the internet to look up a domain registration. Independent Domain Registries may or may not provide a WHOIS service. Independent Domain Registries may or may not be part of the whois server hierarchy provided by [http://www.whois-servers.net/ Centergate] . Some are registered in [http://whois.bw.org/ bw-whois]

History

The idea for an independent global domain name registry stems from a series of conversations between one of CentralNic's original founders and the late Jon Postel, one of the founding fathers of the modern Internet. Postel suggested the use of .UK.COM to compete with .CO.UK, at a time when the proposed price of the latter was about $300.

After the use of UK.COM other ISO Country codes ending in .COM were also established such as AU.COM (Australia) and HK.COM (Hong Kong) and many other countries.

See also

Domain Registrar

Domain Registry

ICANN