Group wants to assume control of ".edu" domains.

A group representing college network administrators is jumping into the Internet deregulation game, hoping to gain control of domain names reserved for universities. For the past six years, Herndon, Virginia-based Network Solutions has issued the university addresses, which end in ".edu," for free under a cooperative agreement awarded by the federal government. The arrangement also gave the registrar a monopoly in the more lucrative registration of names that end in ".com," ".net," and ".org," which account for an estimated 75 percent of the world_s Internet addresses. For the past year a very public and frequently contentious effort has been underway to open up the registration of ".com," ".net," and ".org" domains, which have generated millions of dollars in revenue for NSI. But so far, efforts by a nonprofit company called Educause to take over the ".edu" space have largely gone unnoticed. Educause, which represents the information technology interests of about 1,600 universities, has ties to the nonprofit organization tapped by the Commerce Department to take over many of the Net_s critical underpinnings. Mike Roberts, interim president of that organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), formerly managed Educom, which merged with another nonprofit last year to form Educause. Mark Luker, vice president of Educause, said it only makes sense for his organization to take control of the domain given the current move to privatize the Internet.