CircleID

There's an important distinction being missed by this article. Where it says "Core++ is ISC, Telfonica, and .br, with participation from Core, Nida (.kr), and .zaDNA (.za)", it's important to note that ISC is not a member of CORE or of CORE++, but is rather a potential provider of DNS related services to CORE++ in support of .NET.

Thanks for the clarification, Paul!

Also, there is a little more information on the NWFusion and on Brett Fausett's Blog.

It has been a given that VGRS will submit a defensive bid, with or without partners, and that Afilias and NeuStar would submit bids, also with and without, for .org and .net. The only things interesting is whether the bid process (ICANN side) is improved over time, the bid eval process (ICANN outsource) is better than the .org mess, and whether anyone is left outside the V/A/N set who, after the .org mess is willing to risk the six figures it minimally takes to file a credible binder.

There were a lot of ... suckers in the last round. We're down to two now out of a universe of more than a dozen capable potential operators. This is better than I thought six months ago.

If I may, these are _not_ "all strong players", and ranking them is the bottom line. Again, if I may, "how this unfolds" will be either ultra-pragmatic (the ICANN market can't sustain more than two generic operators currently), or pragmatic (the ICANN market can sustain three generic operators), or "competitive" in the usual sense of the word.

Please note that ICANN could have automatically promoted the .org bids, redacted the portions not .net specific, and informed those bid authors that their bids were also being considered. It did not do so, and no .org bidder other than the V/A/N set is present in the .net round.

Finally, I'm surprised the weeks-old ICANN advisory on the current multi-year registration fees hasn't gotten much attention. It sure got mine.

My original (and accurate… yay!) identification of the contenders preceded any official ICANN announcement of the actual list of applicants by almost 24 hours.

In the days since, there have been many articles, op-ed, and press releases about the process.

ICANN, as promised, has posted the submissions (minus any confdential components) on their website, should anyone desire to review them.

Afilias | CORE++ | DENIC | Sentan | VeriSign

I encourage the general public, in addition to registrars and other stakeholders to review these applications, as there are key differences to each.

I'd suspect that the strengths and weaknesses of each is subjective to the reader, and I reserve my opinion from here in the interests of remaining as publicly agnostic and objective as possible on this matter.