pgMedia Comments on the Failure of the NSI-Controlled DNS System
press release from 07-18-97
(New York, New York) The breakdown of the Internet's Domain Name System ("DNS") yesterday, purportedly caused by human error at Network Solutions, Inc. ("NSI") as well as NSI's antiquated hardware, brought internet traffic to a crawl. This and other recent troubles that NSI has experienced in its operation of the Internet's Domain Name System are textbook examples of a monopolist's inertia in developing new and more secure systems to preserve and protect the integrity of the central facilitator of the Internet. The end-users of the Internet demand and deserve better. In NSI's desire to protect its monopoly profits, particularly in view of its stated intention to offer public stock based on that artificially inflated cashflow, NSI has placed the entire Internet at risk. NSI's intransigence to the change demanded by PGMedia, Inc. d/b/a name.space in the antitrust litigation commenced in Federal Court in New York has also led to the recently reported investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for NSI's alleged antitrust violations.
PGMedia, through its name.space service (http://namespace.pgmedia.net), has developed and implemented a rationalized Top-Level-Domain system that allows for registration under unlimited TLDs such as ".art" "news" ".cameras", ".inc" ".sports" and ".weather". The name.space service is housed on a state of the art network with thirteen root servers located in five countries. The name.space system has been fully operational since August 1996, and was not affected by the "human error" which ground NSI's system to a halt yesterday. If end-users of the Internet wish to secure for their own use, and at no cost, a far more reliable DNS system, all they need do is access the above-referenced URL and follow the simple steps therein to redirect their default TCP name server addresses to the name.space network.
In addition, PGMedia believes that the name.space shared product and service oriented TLDs, when fully resolvable, will open up the Internet to far greater commercialization and render the wealth of information on the Internet far more accessible to the end-user. PGMedia's demand for access to the central root zone file exclusively controlled by NSI which would render PGMedia's TLD's and the domain names registered thereunder universally resolvable is currently pending consideration by The Honorable Robert P. Patterson, Jr., U.S.D.J., in Federal Court in New York. PGMedia also wishes to stress that it has no affiliation with and does not support the anticompetitive approach propounded by the loose group of purported registrars known as "eDNS."
For more information, please contact the pgMedia, Inc. legal counsel at:
mjd@pgmedia.net
