VeriSign Inc., the company that currently manages the registry of addresses for noncommercial organizations, struck a deal with ICANN last year, giving up control of the .org designation in exchange for an extension of its management of the .com and .net addresses. VeriSign also pledged $5 million to assist in the transition.

Though the management of the .org domain was originally intended to go to a nonprofit organization, the competition has reportedly attracted a number of profit-focused businesses lately.

Industry observers have expressed concerns that some of the organizations bidding for the responsibility are commercial organizations that have associated themselves with nonprofit organizations to improve their appearance to the ICANN committee, and their chances at what analysts expect will be a $10-million-per-year business.

Supporters of ICANN say the process is designed to identify the organization that will best manage the .org designation database.

Poptel, the British manager of the new .coop domain and AusRegistry, the Austrialian .au domain manager have formed a partnership called the Unity Registry to bid for the .org domain.

Another reported partnership involves Global Name Registry, the British company responsible for the .name domain, and the International Red Cross.

Manager of the .info domain, Afilias Global Registry Services, also plans to submit a bid along with the Internet Society, which oversees the Internet Engineering Taskforce.

A partnership of Internet pioneers Carl Malamud and Paul Vixie reportedly has a plan to run the .org domain as a nonprofit organization, using an open source database project to manage it.

There is also some speculation that VeriSign is preparing a bid of its own, even after arranging to release the domain.