In
Jan 1992, after a competitive-bid process, the
U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) tapped
NSI through a Cooperative Agreement to take on
the risks and responsibilities of building and
maintaining a domain registration process for
the .com, .net and .of top-level domains. NSI
also took on responsibility for the Internet Registry,
the master file of domain name registrations in
these top-level domains as well as the Internet
Root Zone, the Internet's database of the 250
top-level domain name locations. At that time
there was a rudimentary system of only 7,000 domain
names in existence.
NSI
launched its registration services in 1993 with
an employee base of 10 people. Today, NSI is the
world's leading Registrar with over 12 million
net registrations as of June 2000. |