Companies, nonprofit organizations and individuals fearful of losing control over their Internet addresses can lock them down for 100 years under a new service being offered by the world's largest retailer of domain names.

For a lump payment of $1,000 per name, Herndon, Va.-based Network Solutions says it will make sure a customer's Internet address registration stays active and within their control for a full century.

"We've had a number of customers who have allowed high-value domain names to lapse," said Network Solutions chief executive Champ Mitchell, citing two high-profile incidents in which Microsoft accidentally failed to renew its Passport.com address in 1999 and The Washington Post Co. temporarily let its washpost.com domain name lapse earlier this year.

Simple oversights like failing to update information about an expiring credit card or not checking an old e-mail in-box can cause a company to fail to renew key domain names, Mitchell said. "Many of these large customers have thousands of domain names. It's easy to do."
Mitchell conceded that most domain name owners will not want to pay $1,000 up-front for a service that costs less than $40 a year under normal circumstances. But he predicted that there might be up to 10,000 potential customers, including several thousand large companies.

Network Solutions manages roughly 8 million names for approximately 4.5 million customers, classifying 550,000 as "power users." Those are the users Network Solutions is targeting with the new service, Mitchell said.

More than a dozen customers have signed up for the service, but the company declined to identify them.

Internet addresses in popular "domains" like dot-com, dot-org and dot-info can be registered for a maximum of 10 years at a time, according to rules established by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Marina del Rey, Calif.-based nonprofit organization that oversees the global domain name system under a contract with the U.S. government.

Retail "registrars" such as Network Solutions register names on behalf of their customers. Registrars, in turn, contract with wholesale "registries" such as VeriSign Inc., which maintains the master list of names ending in dot-com and dot-net.

When a customer signs up for the 100 Year Domain Service, Network Solutions will register the address with the appropriate registry for 10 years and put a note in its system to automatically renew that registration when the initial term expires, Mitchell said.

Jonathan Weinberg, a law professor at Wayne State University and an expert in Internet policy, said there's nothing to prevent Network Solutions or any other domain name seller from offering such a service, but he said it could be a bad deal for customers.

"Just as you wouldn't want to be locked into your phone company for the next hundred years, even if they offered you a really good deal on a phone, it doesn't make a lot of sense to be locked in with a domain registration company for the next hundred years," Weinberg said.

The viability of the 100-year offering is also contingent on Network Solutions staying in business for the next hundred years, Weinberg said. "If Network Solutions should go bankrupt 30 years from now or 70 years from now, you're up a creek."

Network Solutions's Mitchell said that if the company were bought out or went bankrupt sometime in the next hundred years, the 100-year registrations would be counted as a liability that the new buyer or bankruptcy court would have to honor.

University of Miami law professor Michael Froomkin said the service could have a "mild anticompetitive effect," but added that competitors would be free to offer a similar service.

New York-based Register.com -- one of Network Solutions's largest competitors -- will not follow Network Solutions's lead, said spokeswoman Stephanie Marks.

"We think our customers are smart enough to know that nobody can guarantee a hundred-year registration, and we simply care too much about our reputation to offer something like that," she said.

Weinberg said the other thing people should ask themselves when they consider buying the service is whether Internet addresses will be relevant 50 years down the road. "The entire [domain name system] as we know it today is less than 20 years old, so the odds that 100 years from now that we're going to find Internet resources this way are slim."

But even if the domain name system is no longer in place, Mitchell said that the 100-year registrations will still appeal to the small segment of the market Network Solutions is targeting.

"This is not going to be for everybody or for every name owned by everybody," Mitchell said. But he predicted companies with high-profile domain names will view the fee as a small cost to avoid the potentially debilitating hassles of losing a high-profile address. "Once that happens, even if they realize it quickly and they can reclaim the name, it is really disruptive to their business."