The .ORG registry operator, Public Interest Registry (PIR) has sent a letter to ICANN announcing their intention to increase their registration fees by 10% as of November 9th, 2008. The price increase brings the price for registrars up to $6.75 from $6.15 after last year’s price increase by 2.5%. The letter did not cite a reason. This follows VeriSign’s recent announcement that they will increase .COM & .NET prices.

[via AP/Google/Dan]

As part of VeriSign’s (VRSN) 2001 purchase of eNic Corporation (operator of the .CC registry) the company became the owner of a patent application, which has now been granted on March 4th of this year under patent number 7,337,910 b2.

While the original patent application, at the time written by eNic’s CEO Brian Cartmell and eNic’s CTO Jothan Frakes, was used in order to resolve and offer non-existent domain names for registration, it would also cover Verisign’s Sitefinder application, implemented in September of 2003, causing any unregistered .COM/.NET domain to resolve to a parked page. VeriSign, was ordered by ICANN to cease the practice shortly after they introduced it.

The patent could potentially be used in order to request licensing fees from the operators of the .CM wildcard or DNS providers and ISPs whose nameservers respond to failed DNS queries.

In an announcement sent to registrars today, Verisign announced that they will again be raising prices on both .com and .net domain names.  The price increase, effective October 1, 2008, will raise the registry fee to $6.86 for .com and $4.23 for .net domains. (*Note these are registry prices, ie what registrars pay to the registry)  You should therefore expect all registrars to be increasing their retail prices in October.

This news comes as no surprise as the ICANN and Verisign revised agreement allows for Verisign to raise rates by 7% every year of their new contract and grants them a presumptive renewal of that contract.  It’s interesting how the cost of every other technological commodity such as bandwidth and server space has decreased in price, yet Verisign somehow can increase it’s prices.

Domain Name News advice - buy Verisign stock. ;)  and renew your domains before October

The note sent to all registrars can be seen after the jump.

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Afilias, a worldwide provider of registry services, announced that they will now offer .INFO domains with Spanish characters (á, é, í, ñ, ó, ú, and ü). This announcement only solidifies the importance of including Spanish-friendly registry services, as Spanish is the third most popular language on the internet.

“With over 100 million Spanish-speaking Internet users today, 13 million of which are in the United States alone, we believe that the introduction of Spanish IDNs represents an important addition for .INFO and for the growing base of Spanish-speaking users on the internet,” said Roland LaPlante, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Afilias. “As the only truly global Internet extension, .INFO Web sites are a natural way for individuals, organizations, and institutions to convey information in their local, native Spanish language.”

.INFO has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to accepting standards-compliant registrations and Afilias has helped to pave the way for a much more intimate experience for internet users that prefer to use their own language.

By adding these characters to their offering, Afilias has allowed Spanish-speakers to establish websites using words that are commonly used in their language, such as película.info, teléfono.info, Piñata.info, and others.

Afilias now offers ten different languages including Spanish, German, Polish, Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Korean.

Today .mobi announced on their blog that they are postponing the controversial auction re-run, originally scheduled for January 23rd, 2008. According to the registry the auction was postponed in order also collect further suggestions and comments, which are to be emailed to premium@mtld.mobi.

The registry announcement also states, that “it may be possible to allocate [some] registration tokens without an auction (and without substantial controversy)“.

This might refer to one of the winners in the extended auction, who went public with a video, screenshot evidence and a site called “Eight Magic Words“. The site has since been taken down and replaced by a one page statement.

The creators of the site had won the extended auction for the domain name “tequila.mobi”. By the time the registry decided to nullify the auction, the winners of this name had already paid for the name, received the name and set up a .mobi compliant website.

At no point in time did the registry communicate directly with the recipients of the domain name, who found out about the change of heart via a press release and multiple failed transfer attempts away from their registrar GoDaddy. The registry then finally changed the registrar directly in their backend, without involving registrar.

Here are their suggestions to the registry and Sedo on how to best proceed:

1. Return previously transferred domain Tequila.mobi to the Rightful Owner
2. Cancel the Re-Auction of these 100 Premium .mobi Domains scheduled for January 23, 2008
3. Any Domains awarded to the SAME Bidder in Auction 1 (Cancelled) and Auction 2 (Extended), should be honoured and awarded to the common successful Bidder
4. Any Domains awarded in Auction 2 (Extended) where the Reserve price was NOT met in Auction 1, should be honoured and awarded to the Auction 2 successful Bidder
5. SEDO and dotMobi mTLD must work diligently and quickly with all other successful Bidders (Those Awarded SEDO Invoices) to come up with a realistic and fair compromise and equitable resolution

According to sources, Verisign, the operator of the generic TLDs .COM & .NET registry, is considering selling access to selected root dns server lookup data to registrars. The root servers are what make domain names work on the Internet, meaning that many domain queries hit these servers on their way to a site or an email recipient.

Why is this data so interesting? It contains the majority of failed lookups, meaning the Verisign nameservers will be hit and log the query, when someone enters a domain name that does not exist. While many domain-tasters have obtained this information directly from ISPs, getting this directly from Verisign would be a step up the chain, since Verisign manages two of the 13 root name servers.

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Apparently the .PL registry has introduced a traffic tasting service allowing registrants to register a name for up to five days in order to see if there is any traffic on it. The registry writes:

Thanks to New Domain Name Tasting (DNT) service you can check profits and possibilities which an own domain gives as well to test the traffic before registration. Please, contact with the Registrar offering DNT service, choose the domain and let start with the test for 5 days! Please contact with the Registrar offering DNT service for more informations.

You will find a listing of the current .PL registrars here.

[via DomainNews]

GoDaddy and Afilias just announced a joint venture, The Domain Name Alliance Registry, LLC, which submitted a proposal for running the .US ccTLD yesterday in response to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s request for quotation.

“Today, the usTLD ranks 9th among the world’s country code domains, despite America’s leadership of the Internet and the most robust domain growth market in history. Now is the time to change usTLD leadership and put it on a growth track,” said Roland LaPlante, Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer for Afilias. Added Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s President and Chief Operating Officer, “We believe Alliance Registry pools the strengths of its partners, Go Daddy and Afilias, to offer usTLD superior technology, enhanced marketing, and focused administration to improve this critical national resource.”

Key improvements according to the press release would be:

1. Reduced pricing for usTLD registrations to make them more affordable and deliver greater value to the usTLD community
2. Greater volume, growth, and usage of the usTLD stimulated by registry enhancements and marketing programs that have been proven to work by Alliance Registry’s joint owners
3. Enhanced Locality space support to enable every city and town in America to have its own dedicated space within the usTLD (e.g. anytown.us)
4. World class stability and security of the registry platform and DNS services supporting the domain
5. Expanded administration services to facilitate oversight and provide better counsel for the DoC
6. Enhancing kids.us so it becomes the feature-rich, safe online environment for America’s children it was envisioned to be

Especially point #3 caught my attention here, since I am not sure if this means that cities would be given specific rights to their own .US domain before anyone else.

Since it’s re-launch in 2002 the .US domain has experienced significant slower growth compared to other ccTLDs. Mostly this is probably since .COM has become the equivalent to a US based site to most US Internet users. GoDaddy is the largest domain name registrar today and Afilias operates the .INFO and .ORG TLDs amongst others and is owned by several registrars.

State of the domain: usTLD (from the Alliance Registry Site)

usTLD overall registration volume is weak

Despite a promising start, the volume performance of usTLD has failed to move usTLD into the vanguard of country codes worldwide. The .us domain ranks 9th of all country codes in number of registrations, behind domains from the Netherlands (.NL), China (.CN), and Argentina (.AR). This situation exists despite the fact that the base of Internet users in these individual countries is significantly smaller then the U.S. Also, while it takes time to develop a domain, it is interesting to note that .EU, which conducted its public launch in April, 2006, currently has nearly twice as many registrations as usTLD, which had a 4 year head start.

usTLD registration volume trend is lagging leaders

When viewed relative to the leading ccTLDs (Germany and the UK) shown below, usTLD appears flat, whereas the leaders are not only significantly larger, but growing faster as well.

usTLD market share declining

usTLD market share has been declining in the face of an overall domain market that has been growing briskly, tracing to 1) Internet expansion worldwide; 2) increasing functionality of the Internet (e.g. e-commerce); and 3) increasing availability and awareness of domain ownership options. Within its segment (ccTLDs), usTLD has been on a long term share decline trend, as shown below:

[Press Release, Background Information]