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VeriSign’s .net contract renewed

Kevin Murphy, June 24, 2011, 08:30:00 (UTC), Domain Registries

VeriSign has been given the nod to continue to run the .net domain registry after a vote by ICANN’s board of directors today.
The vote was 14-0, with director Bertrand De La Chappelle abstaining without explanation.
The renewal is hardly surprising – nobody thought for a second that VeriSign would fail to retain the contract – but the deal was controversial anyway, due to a Boing-Boing misunderstanding.
The contract still allows VeriSign to carry on raising prices, by up to 10% in any given year, and it still calls for ICANN to receive $0.75 per domain, which currently adds up to over $10 million a year.
The money is still ostensibly earmarked for special projects including extending ICANN’s outreach into developing nations and DNS security, and the resolution passed by the board today says:

ICANN commits to provide annual reporting on the use of these funds from .NET transaction fees.

This is presumably designed to address criticisms that it basically ignored its commitment under the 2006 .net agreement to set up two “special restricted funds” to manage .net cash, as I reported on here.

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Comments (1)

  1. As noted in your prior story on this matter, ICA called for such an accounting in our comment letter on the .net renewal as we believe that the ICANN community, particularly the registrants who fund this, deserve to know how their $ is being spent.
    We are pleased to see that ICANN took our request seriously and is now implementing an annual accounting in response.
    We are also pleased that ICANN did not implement the overreaching suggestion of the Intellectual Property Constituency that the .Net registry be required to implement the thoroughly untested URS procedure as a supplement to the UDRP.

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