Domain Names Registered Globally Now Over 138 Million

VeriSign has published its second quarter 2007 Domain Name Industry Brief where it reports that the number of new domain name registrations have hit an all time high in the second quarter of 2007 with 14.5 million new registrations, exceeding the previous high mark hit in the fourth quarter of 2006. From the report: "At the midpoint of 2007, the total base of domain name registrations worldwide was 138 million across all of the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs). This represents a 31 percent increase over the same quarter last year and an eight percent increase over the first quarter 2007..." more»

BMW Goes After BMW.cat

In one of the first (if not the first) UDRP cases for .cat, the auto giant BMW appears to have filed a WIPO case over the BMW.cat domain name. Other prospective new TLD operators have tried to suggest in ICANN meetings that these new TLDs do not cause problems with cybersquatting or defensive registrations... Obviously, given the above WIPO case, that statement is false. more»

New Law Will Prevent Domain Registration of Another Living Person

A domain name bill by New York State Senator, Betty Little, will be taking effect in 120 days aimed at preventing any individual from registering a domain name - with the intent to profit - that resembles another living person or business. From the press release: "The law provides for a civil penalty of up to $1,000 for each day the violation occurs. In addition, the New York State Attorney General is enabled to apply to the Supreme Court for an injunction, including forfeiture or cancellation of the domain name..." more»

Experts Believe Domain Industry to Reach $4 Billion by 2010

Domain names are snagging substantial amounts of money. These are boom times in an estimated $2 billion industry that involves the buying and selling of domain names and pay-per-click advertising revenue for the owners of the names. At the end of first quarter 2007, at least 128 million domain names had been registered worldwide, a 31 percent increase over the previous year, according to VeriSign, a company that tracks the industry. more»

Google Buys VeriSign (not really)

No that's not really happening, Google is not buying VeriSign. But given Google's ravenous appetite for data, it might find VeriSign quite attractive. VeriSign has both root domain name servers and servers for the .com and .net top level domains (TLDs). VeriSign could data mine the queries coming into those servers and produce a very valuable real-time stream of what users on the net are doing... Google just bought Postini -- and one would have to be fairly naive to believe that Google does not intend to dredge through all... more»

.berlin TLD Awared the German Internet Award 2007

Just to inform the people who are interested in news about the prospective TLD candidate dotBERLIN: At the ceremonial awards for the eco Internet Awards, dotBERLIN GmbH & Co. KG won the special award of the German Internet industry. dotBERLIN aims to create a new domain ending .berlin (a top-level domain), which will result in a local identity for Berliners in the Internet, providing an alternative to addresses such as .de and .com. .berlin has become a trailblazer, setting a trend which has since been followed by other large cities such as New York and Paris. more»

Discussion at the Internet Governance Forum in Geneva

While travelling home from Geneva, I was thinking quite a lot on the relationship between a ccTLD (registry) and a Country. This is because many countries are starting to talk louder and louder about the responsibilities Countries have on critical infrastructure, or (possibly more important) the management of the critical infrastructure. Will for example any (none?) of ccTLD operators (servers) sustain a denial of service attack of a scale similar to the attack on the root servers? What can ccTLD operators do to resist the malicious attacks? Should this be discussed? more»

Dot Asia: First TLD Awarded to a Transnational Entity Without Formal Government Structure

In a story at SFGate, Jeff Yang has written a report on the upcoming role out of the recently approved top-level domain name .asia. The ceremony of .asia's approval by ICANN last year in Brazil was largely ignored. But Jeff points out that as the "fall launch of this new domain approaches, it raises some interesting, perhaps even historic, implications". more»

VeriSign Announces Increase in .Com and .Net Domain Name Fees

VeriSign has announced that as of Oct. 15, 2007, the registry fee for .com domain names will increase from $6.00 to $6.42 and that the registry fee for .net domain names will increase, from $3.50 to $3.85. This will be VeriSign's first registry fee increase for .com and .net since the fee structure was put in place by ICANN in 1999. more»

Putting Some Circuit Breakers Into DNS to Protect The Net

There are a lot of bad, but smart, people out there on the net. They are quick to find and capitalize on vulnerabilities, particularly those vulnerabilities in mass market software. These bad folks are quite creative when it comes to making it hard to locate and shutdown the computers involved. For example, a virus that takes over a victim's computer might communicate with its control point, or send its captured/stolen information, by looking up a domain name. Normally domain names are somewhat static - the addresses they map to don't change very frequently - typically changes occur over periods measured in months or longer. more»

ICANN Asked to Adopt Specific TLD for Banks

Security watchers are calling on net governance body ICANN to adopt a new top level domain name to be used exclusively by registered banks and financial organisations.

If ICANN introduced a .safe domain (or .sure or .bank), which could only be used by registered financial institutions, it would allow security providers to create better software to protect the public. more»

More Top-Level Domain Wildcards

With all of the recent excitement about *.cm, the Cameroonian wildcard that someone is using to collect vast numbers of mistyped .com addresses, I wondered how many other wildcards there were at the DNS top level. There's a total of 13. Half of the wildcards are harmless. The *.museum wildcard leads to a registry page that helps guess what you might have been looking for. ...The .mp page also claims that .mp is for Mobile Phone rather than for the Marianas Islands, but they're hardly the only small poor island to try to cash in on their ccTLD, and they at least run it themselves. more»

Nation of Cameroon Typo-Squats the Entire .com Space

The .cm (Cameroon) ccTLD operators have discovered that since their TLD is simply one omitted letter away from .com, that there is a gold mine in the typo traffic that comes their way. Accordingly, Cameroon has now wild-carded its ccTLD and is monetizing the traffic. The upshot is that, if the Neiman Marcus / Dotster lawsuit over 27 domain names was properly characterized as "massive", then the Cameroonians are now going well beyond massive... more»

Domain Name Prices Going Up This Year

The annual price of a .com or .net domain name will almost certainly rise this year, according to Stratton Sclavos, chief executive of VeriSign Inc, which runs the two namespaces.

The increases per-domain will be tiny in dollar terms, and will most obviously impact only those with very large domain name portfolios. But the aggregate positive impact for VeriSign will be substantial. more»

Internet Zombies

Today on Dave Farber's IP list, someone revived the ancient argument that ICANN imposes limits on the number of top level domains (TLDs) because to have more than a few will cause DNS to wobble and cause the internet to collapse. Although long discredited, that argument hangs around like a zombie. ICANN has never been able to adduce a shred of proof that there is anything to support that assertion... more»