Shared Registry System
SRS is the abbreviation for Shared Registry System. It came into existence in October, 1998 when the United Sates Department of Commerce (DOC) and Network Solutions Inc or NSI amended their Co-operative agreement. Under this agreement, the NSI was the sole registrar and registry administrator for top-level domains such as .net, .org, .com, etc. The amendment made to the agreement required the establishment of the Shared Registry System. [1]
What is included in SRS?
In the Shared Registry System, an unlimited number of registrars compete for the domain name registration business by using one shared registry.[1] It is a cooperative effort between the NSI and U.S. Government to introduce stiff competition in the arena of the registration of the second-level domain or SLDs in the .net, .com, .org top level domains or TLDs. [2]
SRS and ICANN
The US Department of Commerce appointed the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to look after the transition to completion under the SRS. The main responsibilities of ICANN included formulating and implementing a procedure for the sake of registrar accreditation which will help in a competitive domain name registration system that would ensure a continued domain-name durability and Internet stability.
In March 1999, ICANN started accepting applications from several companies who were interested to participate in the one of the five domain name registrars of the SRS Testbed Program, which was prescribed in the Amendment 11 of the DOC’s cooperative agreement with the NSI.
Since April 1999, ICANN was in charge of accepting the applications for registrar accreditation for the post-testbed period of the SRS and accredited more than 160 businesses coupled with the five testbed program participants.
From the year 2001 to 2009, ICANN adopted Registrar Accreditation Agreement or RAA for all the accredited registrars. In May 2009, ICANN Board approved a total 17 amendments to RAA.[1]
Problems in the allocation of SRS
In the year 2001, there were reports about some registrars experiencing difficulties in evaluating the .com, .net, .org SRS in the hours wherein the expiring names are deleted. After investigations, it was found that substantial amounts of the bandwidth were being used in the wee hours by some registries which made large amounts of queries to expire. ICANN took notice of this matter and stated to keep the community informed about finding a remedy. ICANN then came up with a solution of equitable allocation of Shared Registry System wherein every ICANN accredited registrar was limited to use 256K of bandwidth and 250 simultaneous RRP connections. [3]
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