It seems that the registry realized that they would lose out on a lot of money if they were to let today’s .info drop happen normally. Hence they decided to hold the drop. Now we just need to wait for the registry announcement about the premium .info auctions, .mobi style.

From an email from Pool.com:

As you may know, today’s .INFO drop was expected to be quite large with great domains becoming available for public registration. Please be informed that the .INFO registry, Afilias, has placed a hold on selected domains. Consequently, most of the more popular .INFO domains expected to delete today will not be released in today’s drop. Please note we will keep you updated on the status of these domains as we receive new information from Afilias.

[Update]: As it turns out some of the two word domains did drop today and I also I see some in the SnapNames auctions – for example WesternTravel.info.

[Via SevenMile]

Today is going to be a big day for all .info lovers. The drop includes names such as bank.info. If you remember back the .INFO sunrise period where trademark owners were allowed to process early domain registrations related to trademarks they own, you might remember the disaster it turned out to be.

While some registrants filled in invalid trademark registrations, in other cases the registrar took care of providing false information. After 6 years some of the names become available again to the “general public”. Which basically means that they’ll be auctioned off by our favourite drop-catchers.

Here’s a selected list of some of the names – happy bidding.

• airline.info
• americanism.info
• auction.info
• bank.info
• bonds.info
• briefmarken.info
• coins.info
• cruise.info
• cyberscape.info
• fashion.info
• flight.info
• florida.info
• gifts.info
• healthcare.info
• immigration.info
• investment.info
• investments.info
• legal.info
• medical.info
• nursinghome.info
• orlando.info
• retirement.info
• securities.info
• sehablaespanol.info
• shipping.info
• soccer.info
• stamps.info
• usa.info
• vacation.info

From the Verisign Press Release:

VeriSign, Inc. (Nasdaq: VRSN), [...] today announced that its Board of Directors has elected William A. Roper, Jr. as President and Chief Executive Officer. He has served as the Board’s lead independent Director and replaces Stratton D. Sclavos, who resigned from the company. The Board also elected Edward A. Mueller as Chairman of the Board. 

So just like that Mr. Sclavos resigned from the board. There must be more to the story – but no additional information was made public. It’s a big change for a company that influences so many domain owners. Kinda makes you think that this company is even more “public” than just being traded on the stock market. ICANN, are you watching?

[via ValleyWag]

As reported before, the .travel registry might be going bankrupt and here’s one of the reasons: The amount of effort needed in order to review every application. A friend of mine has applied for a .travel domain. Here’s an excerpt of the ensuing email exchange – attention: some humor involved.

From the registry:

I am in the process of reviewing your **.travel **application and need some more information about your business “____” before I can continue with the authentication process. Please provide us with documentation for your business, as well as a clear indication of its travel-related service in the form of a brochure, an annual report, a promotion package, a business license, a registration document, anything that is a public document* *demonstrating the use of whatever domain names for which you are applying. URLs being used as support must be active and display the travel related business with which you are involved.

Additionally, if you are unable to procure these documents because your company is not yet up and running, you may send us a business proposal outlining what you plan to do with your company and how your requested names will function. This is only on the condition that the company is up and running and the names are in full use within 60 days of submitting the proposal to the *.travel *registry.

So my friend sent them a link to a site that is similar to the one he would like to create. The site is a non-English language website.

From the registry:

Can we receive an English version of your site as we are having trouble trying to translate the site so we can see exactly what is on the site. Thank you for you time and patience on this matter.

Now keep in mind that the site is about 200 pages, so my friend responded:

Yes of course, I will hire a translator to translate the 200 pages into English for you.

Please wait a week and don’t go out of business in the meantime. Thanks again.

Response from the registry:

I just need the first page not the whole site.

After the Registerfly disaster, ICANN is now finally starting to look for someone to provide registrar data escrow services. But wait, just as they start thinking about this problem, the next problem appears on the Horizon: According to recent filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission the company behind Tralliance, TheGlobe.com Inc., will run out of cash later this month.

[via DomainNews]

As we all knew Verisign went ahead and confirmed that they are planning to increase the registration cost for COM/NET domains by the maximum permitted amount of 7%. The new prices (which are paid by the registrars) go in effect on October 15th, 2007. The annual price for .COM registrations increase from $6.00 to $6.42 and .NET registrations will increase from $3.50 to $3.85. We can be sure that the majority of the registrars will pass them on to us.

As a little remedy (yeah right), ICANN has retroactively (from July 1st, 2006 onwards) lowered their ICANN fee to registrars (some registrars, such as GoDaddy, charge this fee separately for endusers) their fee from $0.25 to $0.22.

Meanwhile Jay from DomainTools lets us know that former ICANN Board Member Karl Auerbach told him that Verisign spends $0.14 on maintaining a domain name for a year. I guess their expenses are going to increase a lot, since infrastructure, bandwidth, hardware and storage are getter cheaper more expensive all the time. Oh the irony. But they are going to build us a much safer DNS infrastructure over the next 3 years, and they are going to need all of our money to do so. And then there was this item about increasing their own company value, so their shareholders are happy.

And yes, Jay is right. Verisign has yet to complain about the Domain Tasting and the load it puts on their servers. My guess is they make too much money from the kept names to care about it. And how come the .ORG registry PIR complained about it and was able to push through a resolution that allows them to charge for “excessive” deletions? My take would be that the “keep-rate” of tasted domains in the .ORG namespace is quite a bit lower than the rate for COM/NET domains.

In order to keep things safe, the US Department of Homeland security would also like to participate somehow. How about giving them the private key to the Root servers (thanks Tia), that make our domain names work. After all, how could we implement the new DNSSec without their help. And let’s not forget, that the US government still reserves the right to oversee ICANN/IANA.

Meanwhile ICANN is considering to seek immunity from US laws (thanks Tia). Maybe this is about tax laws? Lawsuits about Registerfly and the like? And what exactly is ICANN doing again, and who are they representing? Who is financing them again?

I’d go along with Frank Schilling here and say: Advance Renew your domains. The good ones, at least. You can save 7% erm, make that 6.5% now (with the ICANN fee being 3 cents lower).

The Polish registry, NASK, has announced new registration rules for the TLD .PL as of March 18th, and is currently asking registrars to send notices to the registrants. Please make sure to confirm the email from your registrar, since you might otherwise risk losing your .PL domain.

The .BE registry, DNS.BE, which mostly grew by offering free .BE registrations for a limited time has changed their terms and conditions as well (back on February 14th). You should pay particular attention to the section about domain disputes – basically the person who loses the domain has to pay 50% of the fee for the dispute process, thus lowering the cost for the complainant. Read the new rules here (pay special attention to #10, 3 k).

VeriSign announces their intention to increase COM/NET pricing (Feb 2nd) at the registry level, then there’s a DNS root server denial of service attack (Feb 7th) and then VeriSign launches project “Titan” (Feb 8th) which includes DNS infrastructure improvements. A good build-up of counter-arguments in case someone objects the price increase. However I think that the decrease in the cost of buying equipment, storage and bandwidth should be considered as well, when discussing price increases.

ICANN will meet on November 22nd 2006 to discuss the revised ORG/BIZ/INFO agreements, so if you would like to comment, you should submit your comments as quickly as possible. Despite previous objections, the minor revision did not remove the year over year price increases (10%) and other controversial items remain untouched as well.  I just do not understand how operating a registry would be getting more and more expensive over time, with the declining hardware and storage cost.

• ICANN “revised” ORG/INFO/BIZ agreements
  
• ICANN comments page (submit your comments to revised-biz-info-org-agreements@icann.org)
• Comments by Phil Corwin of the Internet Commerce Association
• Letter from Bob Martin of iREIT/Internet Commerce Association

As reported earlier PIR has submitted a proposal to ICANN that looks to charge a $0.05 fee for Traffic Testing (also known by some as Traffic Tasting)within the .ORG TLD if the deletions exceed 90% of the registrar’s regular registration volume.

(For an explanation what Traffic testing is, please read: How does traffic testing/tasting work?).
The registry for .ORG, PIR, claims a significant overhead due to the volume of the traffic testing. Depending on the setup of the registry, the traffic testing will of course take up database space (since registrations are billable transactions, they cannot just be deleted even when the charged amount is refunded at the time of the domain deletion) and some system resources during creation and deletion.

It would in general be very interesting and helpful to see a detailed breakdown of the registry operating cost that further explains how traffic testing affects the registries.

Peter Ejtel comments:

With the Direct Navigation market significantly increasing year over year, today’s domains that don’t pass mustard may become profitable in the future, and IMHO the registries may just be shooting future business in the foot with this strategy.

[via Peter Ejtel's ClickToHit]