Staying ahead of the pack

A big focus for NSI in the future will be improving service. But in the past the company has come under fire for not being forthcoming about technical snafus, such as when Web sites are inaccessible or when there are performance problems in processing registrations. How will this change?
I would be the first to admit that we have problems. No business goes from the tiny little business we had in 1995 to the monstrous business that we are now without difficulties. Of course, part of the privatization issue is to get some legitimate mechanism that's legally binding that will allow us to develop a policy that we can hang our hat on.

I think that there's a tendency, because we're so visible and because the domain name is so visible, for people to connect almost every problem on the Internet to the domain name registration process. It reminds me of AOL's problem with content being associated with provisioning. Well, this is the second step in that natural or unnatural progression.

Some say your company is managing a public resource. In that case, do you need to be more accountable for your actions?
Well I wouldn't use the term "public resource." That's a debate that lawyers will have for the rest of their lives and that will no doubt put a lot of kids through Harvard. I won't get into that. But, we don't see it as an accountability [issue] as much as [an issue of] responsibility for good service. Just like any other company that provides a service--a broad service globally--we think we have a responsibility to continually improve that service and to make sure that service is always available and always reliable.

Is the pressure on to improve your technology in order to stay competitive?
Actually, I think the pressure is better now because we've improved our service. The pressure was pretty bad when we were poorly understood in the first year or two. It was a pretty ugly situation. When we started, we knew we had a tremendous growth curve and we had no billing system, no customer care system--we had no people to do that. There were only a few engineers running the system. At that time most people thought that [the chances for] making money in the Internet were pretty bad, and they didn't understand that the fee-based service was required in order to grow the quality of service.

Over time, people have exploited [our system] for what we think are some pretty illegitimate uses. Speculators [who try to register lucrative names so they can resell them] basically have automated robots pounding our system to the tune of millions of hits per month on our directory. We are in the process of trying to develop an approach that still meets customer needs, but puts the kibosh on the speculator community [in which people can hold names without paying for them for up to 60 days].

We took a kid's soapbox and we built a jet plane while going a thousand miles an hour. I mean, that's the difference in quality--in capability--between the original Internet and Network Solutions' current offering. And you know what? We need a Concorde, the way we're going. So we're building new systems.

What are some of your strategies to grow Network Solutions' business beyond ".com" registrations?
We recognized that there was no way for NSI to deliver alone all the services that needed to be delivered in conjunction with an identity. So what we have tried to do is really get good at our knitting and to partner with other players for two purposes: one, to employ their channels, like the ISP community; and two, to package services with NSI so that we bring a richer offering to our customer base. For example the American Express deal [to cross-promote services,] is that kind of a deal. Recently, we had gone in with the Yahoo and Netscape deals, which basically give us much greater visibility.

Centraal [which allows Web users to type in simple keywords instead of long domain names] is a perfect example. Most people, when Centraal came out, said, "Oh, Centraal, that will take all of the registrations. Domain name and URL registrations will disappear." Well, obviously, from the minute Centraal came out, we were having discussions. We bought a significant share of the company, and we've got partnering relationships to the point where the success of Centraal was in NSI's best interest. We own some of the channels that they have, and we get a bit of every dollar that they make. And conversely, we have relationships that induce us to make Centraal a success. So what people need to understand is that NSI is going to be a visionary in the new technologies that are coming out, and we're going to invest in them in a way that is both good for the Internet and obviously good to grow this market segment.

What specific revenue streams do you see?
The second leg is to basically decide what we need to have a well-founded, well-situated business. Obvious packagings would include the email, the directory offering that basically would allow a small business, with a very simple one-stop call, to get best-of-breed in the basic services that are required to put a presence up on the Net and to operate on the Net in a very low-cost, efficient way. Our ".com" mail, for example, is Web-based mail. It comes as part of your domain name. It's a really trivial, scalable system that is a very, very low-cost initial entry point for small businesses and grows with you as you move.