The recommendation was contained in a preliminary Staff Report on the selection of a new registry operator to replace current operator VeriSign from 1st January 2003.
ICANN had already decided that VeriSign, which also controls the .net and .com registries, should relinquish control of .org upon the expiry of its current contract. The report is subject to public comment and has yet to be approved by the ICANN board of directors.
ISOC, which was formed in 1991, is an international non-profit organisation of over 6,000 individual and 150 organisational members in over 100 countries. It is the home of internet-standards setting bodies Internet Engineering Task Force and Internet Architecture Board.
In its application, ISOC said that it will co-operate with Aflias, another non-profit registry that recently launched the .info top-level domain.
ICANN, which manages internet domains under an agreement with the US government, received applications from 11 entities wanting to operate .org. The domain accounts for more than 2.3 million web addresses. Stuart Lynn, president of the ICANN said: “We received 11 very strong and thoughtful proposals… The ISOC proposal was the only one that received top ranking from all three evaluation teams.”