Recent Posts
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Could Verisign lose $3.3m .gov deal?
Kevin Murphy,
March 17, 2015, 17:57:06 (UTC),
Domain Registries
The US government has put its feelers out for information about a possible successor to Verisign as manager of the .gov TLD.
A formal Request For Information — potentially a precursor to a Request For Proposals — was was issued by the General Services Administration on March 9.
The GSA, which is the sponsor of the .gov gTLD, seems to be looking for information about all aspects of running a registry back-end and the secure dotgov.gov registrar front-end.
Those functions have been carried out by Verisign since it took them over from the GSA itself in December 2010.
Its five-year contract expires in September this year.
Because it’s restricted to US government entities, .gov is not a large gTLD — the RFI says it has about 5,000 domains and grows at about 5% a year — but it does carry a certain prestige.
It also carries a not inconsiderable fee. According to the September 2010 award page, the deal is worth $3,325,000 to Verisign.
It’s quite possible that the RFI is just a case of the US government going through the necessary motions prescribed by its procurement policies; Verisign may well be a shoo-in.
But the company’s record with .gov isn’t as great as its record with .com and .net.
In August 2013, Verisign screwed up a DNSSEC key rollover in the .gov zone, causing resolution failures on the small number of networks that rigorously enforce DNSSEC.
The deadline for RFI responses is March 23.
They’ should ask Hillary Clinton, she seems to know secure alternatives.
someone should suggest that they ditch .gov and use .US — after all it is the UNITED STATES government
When Hillary becomes president, they’ll switch to XYZ.