Domain registrations hit another milestone.

Today VeriSign released its third quarter Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf) and confirmed something I suspected already — there are now more than 200 million domain names registered worldwide.

By VeriSign’s count, there were more than 201.8 million domain names registered at the end of September, an increase of 3.8 million over the end of June. (The company must have revised its June number up, as it previously reported there were 196.3 million registered at the end of June.) .Com and .Net — which are managed by VeriSign — combine for 103 million domain names. ccTLDs account for 79.2 million of the total.

The numbers are impressive. Equally as impressive is that nearly a quarter of all domain names are registered at GoDaddy. It will be interesting to see if this dynamic changes with new top level domain names that aren’t subject to registry/registrar separation.

Olympics say they’ll sue ICANN, but they were supposed to meet with ICANN earlier this year to hash our their differences.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has again informed ICANN that it will file a lawsuit if its trademarks are not added to a restrictions list for new domain names and if other protections aren’t instituted.

Back in April 2009 the IOC first threatened to sue ICANN over the introduction of new top level domain names. In March of this year it requested a special meeting with ICANN to discuss the issue. At the time I wrote:

Get in line, guys. Just about every Fortune 500 has trademarks “protected around the world in many different ways”. ICANN should politely decline this meeting and invite IOC to attend the next ICANN meeting in Brussels.

To my great surprise, ICANN responded and invited (pdf) the IOC to a face-to-face meeting.

So what happened? Did the IOC not take ICANN up on its offer? Or did the meeting just not go the way IOC wanted it to?

Good thing ICANN is setting aside 1/3 of application fees to fight legal challenges.

Company known for acquisitions starts pushing domain names for sale.

Intellectual Property firm Marksmen is starting to play both sides of the field.

The company has long been known in the domain name industry as a stealth domain name acquisition company. It works on behalf of large companies “who want to keep their identity and costs on the down low.”

Now the company is getting into the sales side as well, launching a site called Name Quiver. The company is currently marketing some big money domains including Social.com, Juice.com, WorldClock.com, and BasketballDraft.com.

It looks like Juice.com was acquired from Microsoft earlier this year.

Marksmen has been somewhat controversial in the domain name community for some of its tactics. For example, it tried to acquire the domain name Oasis.com on behalf of a client. When it was unsuccessful the client filed a UDRP and used a sworn affidavit from Marksmen attesting to the domain owner’s price demands.

They serve a purpose but could potentially splinter the web.

Over the long holiday weekend the U.S. government seized a number of domain names that were allegedly being used for piracy.

Both Michael Berkens and Elliot Silver have given their thoughts on the seizures. They had somewhat different opinions. And I agree with both.

I tend to agree with Elliot that there’s not much for the typical domain name owner to worry about. If you’re not doing anything illegal you shouldn’t worry. Your domain names are not at risk.

But here’s the rub. What’s legal in one place isn’t necessary legal in another. And what the U.S. government is doing could eventually fracture the web, which would put all domains at risk.

How can we tell China not to censor the web? They can point to the U.S. and say we’re doing the same thing.

Should Australia go ahead with its internet firewall? How different is that from seizing domain names?

Should Middle Eastern countries block adult sites?

It’s true that these other locations would have a tough time seizing domain names. It’s easier for the U.S. government given the location of the .com registry and many of the registrars. But they can take other approaches. These various approaches could end up fracturing the domain name system at its core.

I’m not saying it’s wrong for these web sites to be shut down. My worry is the message this sends to the rest of the world.

New escrow service coming in December.

Cybertonic, the company behind Domaining.com, is readying a new domain name escrow service at eCOP.com. The service appears to be only for domain names sold for $5,000 or less and will charge a flat $25 fee.

eCOP will not take ownership of the domain name and will only be an intermediary to hold the money until the domain name is transferred. Focusing only on smaller domain name transactions is an interesting idea and I’ll be curious to see how this plays out.

Cybertonic’s Francois Carrillo is certainly a busy guy right now. Within the past couple weeks he has launched two new marketplaces: MatureNames.com for adult domain names and LocationDomains.com for geographic location domains.