Verisign Launched its WhoWas Product today. When I first heard about the product it sounded like a DomainTools.com killer. But now that the product has launched, I think DomainTools.com doesn't have much to worry about. Here's how Verisign's described the service when it made its request to ICANN for product approval: (pdf) "VeriSign periodically receives requests for historical … [Read more...]
Tell The World HowDoYou.com & Win $10K
At the ICANN meeting, VeriSign had the cameras running to capture attendees answers to how .com changed their life. Its part of VeriSign year long celebration of the 25th anniversary of the 1st .com registration. The campaign is called, HowDoYou.com. Basically VeriSign is looking for you to tell how .com changed your life and is putting up a prizes of $10,000, $5,ooo, $2,500 plus they … [Read more...]
VeriSign 4th Quarter State Of The Industry Domain Report: 192 Million Domains; Up 11 Million
According to the new VeriSign released its State Of The Industry Report for the 4th Quarter today, (pdf) the Internet added 11 million domain name registrations in the 4th quarter of 2009 and wound up the year at more than 192 Million domains. New registrations in the 4th quarter of 2009 came in at around 3.7 million domain name registrations per month, to total approximately 11 million new … [Read more...]
WSJ: Covers VeriSign, The No Bid Contract To Run The .Com Registry & What Happens After 2012
The Wall Street Journal had an article discussing VeriSign today and its contract to run the .com registry "The domain name business remains the subject of a lawsuit originally filed in 2005, by a group calling itself the Coalition for ICANN Transparency - arguing that VeriSign's deal with ICANN violates antitrust laws, while artificially inflating prices." ""The lawsuit had been dismissed, … [Read more...]
VeriSign: Domain Registrations and Renewals Rates Down: Price Increase to Come?
According to VeriSign's Earnings call report for the 4th quater of 2008, new domain registrations (.com's & .net's) were down 15% in the 4th quarter of 2008 compared to the 4th quarter of 2007. In 2008 there were 6.3 million new domain name registrations, compared with 7.5 million names during 4Q 07. There are a lot in interesting information in the report including these … [Read more...]
Michael Mann On Domain Hoarding By Registrars and The WLS
This is a guest post by Michael Mann, who is responsible for this content. Michael started and later sold, BuyDomains.com, and was a pioneer in the domain industry. Michael more recently started a charitable organization GrassRoots.org whose banners frequent appear across networks of parked pages: """"In this case the illegal hoarding of domains by registrars, started by NSI, in cahoots … [Read more...]