ICANN gives Verisign’s .com contract the nod

ICANN’s board of directors has approved Verisign’s .com registry agreement for another six years.
In a closed meeting on Saturday, the results of which have just been published, the board decided against making any of the changes that had been suggested by the community.
There had been a small uproar over the fact that Verisign will retain the right to increase its .com registry fee by 7% in four out of the next seven years.
The new contract also rejiggers the fees Verisign pays ICANN to bring them more into line with other registry agreements. As a result, ICANN will net millions more in revenue.
Other parties had also asked for improved rights protection, such as a mandatory Uniform Rapid Suspension system, and for the current restrictions on single-character domain names to be lifted.
But the board decided that “no revisions to the proposed .COM renewal Registry Agreement are necessitated after taking into account the thoughtful and carefully considered comments received.”
The agreement will now be forward to the US government for approval. Unlike most registry contracts, the Department of Commerce has the right to review the .com deal.
The current contract expires November 30.

ICANN may renew Verisign’s .com deal this weekend

ICANN’s board of directors is set to vote on Verisign’s .com registry agreement at a meeting in Prague this Saturday.
The meeting is scheduled for June 23, the day before ICANN 44 officially kicks off. Read the agenda here.
The contract has been controversial because it will continue to allow Verisign to raise prices by 7% in four out of the six years of its duration.
Opportunistic intellectual property interests have also called for Verisign to be obliged to follow new rights protection mechanisms such as the Uniform Rapid Suspension policy.
But I’m not predicting any big changes from the draft version of the agreement that was published in March.
If and when the ICANN board approves the contract, it will be sent off to the US Department of Commerce for, I believe, another round of public comment and eventual ratification.
If Verisign is to run into any problems with renewal, it’s in Washington DC where it’s most likely to happen.

Verisign selected for 220 new gTLDs

Verisign is the appointed back-end registry operator for 220 new generic top-level domain applications, according to the company.
Verisign itself has applied to ICANN for 14 new gTLDs, 12 of which are transliterations — ie, internationalized domain names — of .com and .net.
During its first-quarter 2012 earnings conference call, ongoing right now, CEO Jim Bidzos disclosed the numbers, saying:

VeriSign applied directly for 14 new gTLDs. Twelve of these 14 are transliterations of .com and .net. Also, applicants for approximately 220 new gTLDs selected Verisign to provide back-end registry services.

Many of these are dot-brands, Bidzos said.
Neustar, which also reported earnings yesterday, did not disclose how many applications it is involved in, other than to say that it has not applied for any as a front-end operator.

Verisign Hashlinks – a bid to keep domains sexy?

Verisign has quietly announced a new URL shortening service with an interesting spin.
Domain Hashlinks, which The Domains noticed earlier today, is an effort to bring short vanity URLs, with all the associated benefits, to companies’ existing domain names.
A Hashlink looks like this: example.com#hashlink
Notice the absence of a slash.
Hashlinks, which will compete against services such as X.co and Bit.ly, will allow companies to “remain faithful to your brand”, Verisign says.
The service, which is aimed at marketing departments, will have the usual metrics-tracking baggage that we’ve come to expect from URL shorteners.
It can also be plugged into Google Analytics, according to Verisign.
This is not a “registry service” in the sense that it’s running off of the .com registry. That kind of thing requires ICANN approval, but it’s not what Verisign is doing.
It seems that Domain Hashlinks is actually going to be Javascript-driven, meaning it will work regardless of which TLD your site uses. You don’t need to be Verisign to offer this kind of service.
But will anyone use it?
I had to spend a few minutes reading through the service’s web site to convince myself that it wasn’t simply an April Fools’ Day joke I’d missed.
The choice of stock muzak in the pitch vid seems to be comically evocative of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, which screams motifs of youth and change… if you’re in your late 30s or early 40s.

But then I got it.
I can see how Domain Hashlinks would appeal to marketing folks. At least, I can see why Verisign would think it would appeal to marketing folks.
There’s a worry in the domain name industry, which goes right to the top at Verisign, that domain names are becoming less relevant as social media navigation becomes more popular.
You’re now just as likely to see a Twitter hashtag on your TV screen as a domain name.
Domain Hashlinks are a blatant attempt to buy into that buzz and keep domain names relevant in marketing.
I haven’t seen the Javascript yet – it hasn’t been released – but as far as I can tell there’s absolutely no reason the same functionality couldn’t be achieved with the humble slash.
I think Verisign is using the # symbol quite simply because it’s far sexier, as punctuation goes, than /.
The concept is either utter genius (think Justin Bieber planking with a LOLcat) or hopelessly embarrassing (think Verisign veep Pat Kane moshing to Nirvana at a wedding reception).
But that’s for the kids to decide.

Timing of .com contract renewal is telling

The timing of the publication of the renegotiated .com registry contract may give Verisign and ICANN the chance to duck some criticism about its price-raising powers.
According to ICANN’s announcement last night, the draft contract is up for public comment until April 26, a week before we find out how much new gTLD business Verisign has won.
Verisign is expected to have secured a large share of the burgeoning market for new gTLD back-end registry services.
It is whispered that a great many North American brands planning to apply for their own dot-brand gTLDs prefer Verisign as their registry provider, due to its reputation for stability.
That up-time is of course provided by a robust, distributed infrastructure paid for over the years by the same .com registrants now facing four more years of price increases.
It’s debatable whether Verisign can continue to make a convincing public interest case for .com price hikes if it’s also profiting by hosting dot-brands on the same boxes and pipes.
But because the public comment period closes April 26 and ICANN does not plan to publish the new gTLD applications until May 2, the argument that Verisign is using .com buyers to subsidize its dot-brand business will have to be made without hard data to back it up.
I doubt such arguments would be heard anyway, frankly. ICANN pretty much has its hands bound by the 2006 contract when it comes to messing around with pricing controls.
For those opposed to price increases, a more effective lobbying strategy might head straight to Washington DC, where the Departments of Commerce and Justice will both study the deal from September.

New .com contract revealed: Verisign gets to raise prices, ICANN makes millions more

ICANN and Verisign both stand to make oodles of cash from their renewed .com registry contract.
A proposed draft of the next .com Registry Agreement was published by ICANN late this evening.
It would enable Verisign to carry on raising its .com registry fee by 7%, in four of the next six years. This provision, which was in the 2006 agreement also, was not unexpected.
But the deal will also see Verisign pay ICANN millions of dollars more in transaction fees.
Instead of a quarterly lump sum, which is capped at $4.5 million in the current contract, ICANN will instead get a $0.25 fee for every year of a .com registered, renewed or transferred.
According to my quick-and-dirty calculations, that would have brought ICANN approximately $6 million in extra revenue — roughly $24 million in total — from .com domains last year.
(The most recent .com registry reports show billable transactions per month worth about $2 million to ICANN, using the new agreement’s calculation. However, under the current agreement ICANN can only collect $18 million per year, according to its last approved budget.)
The revised contract contains several other changes also. I’ll have more coverage of those tomorrow.
The deal, which is not expected to come into effect until the end of November, is now open for public comment until April 26.
It needs to be approved by the ICANN board of directors, the Verisign board and the US Department of Commerce before it is finally signed.

O.co loses 61% of its traffic to O.com

Overstock.com’s decision to rebrand itself O.co had a disastrous effect on the internet retailer’s traffic, according to its CEO.
Patrick Byrne told financial analysts yesterday that “O.co was my bad call” and that “about eight out of 13 people who were trying to visit us through O.co, eight were typing O.com”
It’s not clear what the source of the data is, or why the measurement given was out of 13, but it works out to 61%.
Byrne noted that people may have typed o.co instead after figuring out that o.com doesn’t work – it’s currently reserved, alongside most other single-letter .com domains, by Verisign.
His comments came as Overstock reported 2011 revenue down 3% to $1.05 billion and fourth-quarter revenue down 10% to $314 million.
Byrne said on a conference call with analysts:

There were some bad decisions for which I take responsibility in marketing O.co. O.co was odd in that it worked on one level. It did get out there into people’s heads, but what we discovered, and we turned it up slowly and we actually had nice adoption from the beginning of last year, gradually people shifting to O.co and then, but we got into the Christmas season and it worked terribly for people who were not familiar with us. There was a tremendous amount of traffic diverting to O.com and I think we’ve figured out that it was about eight out of 13 people who were trying to visit us through O.co, eight were typing O.com. Now some of them may have come, trying anyway.

The company bought o.co from registry .CO Internet for $350,000 in July 2010, during the .co relaunch. It later said it would rebrand the company on its new domain.
It even bought the naming rights to the Oakland Coliseum, which is now known as the O.co Coliseum.
Until quite recently, Overstock was an important .CO Internet reference customer. Now, I’m guessing, not so much.
Overstock has “slowed” its rebranding, reverting to referring to o.co as a “shortcut” rather than its primary address, which remains overstock.com.
The company bought o.info last year and this week launched the site as an information portal for its products. It also operates o.biz as a business-to-business site.

Thick .com Whois policy delayed

ICANN’s GNSO Council has deferred a decision on whether Verisign should have to thicken up the Whois database for .com and its other gTLDs.
A motion to begin an official Policy Development Process on thick Whois was kicked down the road by councilors this afternoon at the request of the Non-Commercial Users Constituency.
It will now be discussed at the Council’s face-to-face meeting in Costa Rica in March. But there were also calls from registries to delay a decision for up to a year, calling the PDP a “distraction”.
Verisign’s .com registry contract and the standard Registrar Accreditation Agreement are currently being renegotiated by ICANN, both of which could address Whois in some way.
Today, all contracted gTLD registries have to operate a thick Whois, except Verisign with its .com, .net, .jobs, etc, where the registrars manage the bulk of the Whois data.

Verisign: our DNS was not hacked

Verisign today reiterated that the recently revealed 2010 security breaches on its corporate network did not affect its production domain name system services.
In a statement, Verisign said:

After a thorough analysis of the attacks, Verisign stated in 2011, and reaffirms, that we do not believe that the operational integrity of the Domain Name System (DNS) was compromised.
We have a number of security mechanisms deployed in our network to ensure the integrity of the zone files we publish. In 2005, Verisign engineered real-time validation systems that were designed to detect and mitigate both internal and external attacks that might attempt to compromise the integrity of the DNS.

The statement followed several news reports that covered the hacks and speculated about the mayhem that could ensue if Verisign’s root or .com zone systems were ever breached.
The information the company has released so far suggests that the attacks were probably against back-office targets, such as user desktops, rather than its sensitive network operations centers.

.com passed 100 million mark in October

Verisign’s .com registry passed the 100 million domains under management milestone in October, the company’s monthly ICANN registry report revealed today.
The exact number of domains under management in .com on October 31 was 100,540,971, having increased by a net 690,243 registrations over the course of the month.
That’s a pretty big deal, but for some reason Verisign didn’t make any announcements about it at the time.
ICANN registry reports, which all contracted gTLDs must submit, are filed three months after the fact, for competitive reasons.
The number of domains in the .com zone file – which is what most people track to follow the fortunes of TLD operators — differs from the total number in the registry.
Domains which do not have name servers or are in special registry status codes such as Pending Delete do not show up in the zone file.
Today, RegistrarStats reports 100,052,046 domains in the .com zone, while HosterStats’ count yesterday was 100,045,666. The registry is likely to have about 1.5 million more, however.