On June 18, 2002, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed the bidding to both nonprofit and collaborative applicants that represent the future management of the .org Internet namespace. As mentioned in a March 18, 2002 NPTalk Internet domain registration giant VeriSign agreed to give up its decade-long exclusive hold on .org registrations, in exchange for a advantageous arrangement to manage .com and .net registrations. Under the terms of a May 2001 agreement with ICANN and the U.S. Commerce Department, VeriSign will operate the .org registry until December 2002. The January 17, 2002 recommendations of ICANN's Domain Name Supporting Organization Names Council (DNSO) suggested that .org be kept exclusive for formally recognized nonprofit and public interest groups, as well as any noncommercial interest in communications, cultural, educational, political, collaborative or community focused entities. It also stressed that the future operator of the .org registry should itself be a well-regarded nonprofit entity, yet all current ICANN-affiliated registrars could continue to register .org domain names -- currently a $10 million revenue generator numbering nearly 3 million registrations -- as well. While agreeing with the bulk of the DNSO report, the ICANN board did not promise to give exclusive consideration of the registry management to a nonprofit group. On June 18, 2002, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed the bidding to some 11 entities expressing serious interest in managing the .org domain name registry. In addition to domain name registry firms, the pool of contenders is an eclectic mix of nonprofit and for-profit collaborators, including:

• Global Name Registry, manager of the new .name domain in a joint bid with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies;
• the nonprofit Internet Society (coordinating body of the Internet Engineering Taskforce standards group) and Afilias Global Registry Services, current managing entity of the .info domain registry in a joint bid with IBM and a DNS hosting service;
• the Internet Multicasting Service (the force behind the first Internet radio station) and the Internet Software Consortium (developer of open-source critical information infrastructure software for the Internet), the combination of which has pledged to make publicly available for free the database toolset that would power the registry (Incidentally, the founder of IMS played a major role in developing the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system of publicly-available corporate filings under the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the ISC founder also co-founded the anti-spam Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS));
• the nonprofit clearinghouse Union of International Associations and current .org domain registry owner VeriSign
• Unity Registry, a joint effort consisting of the manager of the .coop domain (Poptel) and the .au country-code top-level domain for Australia (AusRegistry);
• two nonprofit applicants established especially for the application process, the DotOrg Foundation and the .Org Foundation.

A final decision is expected by the end of August 2002. More information on the bidders, including their proposals, are located online: http://www.icann.org/tlds/org/applications-received-18jun02.htm