The Philippine government, thru its designated regulatory agency, has come up with guidelines which should settle, once and for all, the controversy on the administration of the '.ph' domain name.

Joel Disini will remain as the administrator of the Philippine country-code top-level domain or ".ph", and the duly authorized administrator of the domain name, according to the new draft guidelines on the administration of ".ph". The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), with help from an advisory group, released the new government guideline on the controversial ".ph" Internet domain Tuesday after several months of deliberations. The NTC, which was tasked by Malacanang to come out with new rules and regulations related to the administration of the Internet domain, is also set to conduct a public consultation on February 17,2004.

According to the new rules, the administrator of the ".ph" domain needs to secure recognition from the Philippine government as the legitimate delegatee. This policy is consistent with the previous position of the local Internet community that the ".ph" domain is a national patrimony, and therefore the domain should be the country domain for the Philippines, just as ".sg" is for Singapore or ".jp" for Japan.

Disini is expected to submit to the government agency a set of policies in relation to the administration of the ".ph" domain in compliance with the new government rules. However, three months after the guideline is out, government is expecting Disini to choose to relinquish one of his roles, either of being the administrator of the domain name or being the owner of a registrar of the ".ph" domain in the country. Disini currently controls the ".ph" registry thru dotPH Inc.

Disini, the current administrator of the ".ph" Internet domain, had tried marketing the domain to stand for the word "phone". He, however, faced stiff opposition from local parties so he eventually dropped the idea for the meantime.

The new rules also stressed that there should only be one registry, but multiple "registrars" would be encouraged to facilitate competition. It also it states that all new policies that the domain administrator wants to implement should first go through a public consultation, and should then submitted to the proper government authority 30 days before it is enforced.

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