Verisign adds to patent war chest.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted Verisign patent number 8,656,209 for “Recovery of a Failed Registry”.
I wrote about the patent application in 2012.
Verisign describes the system as one that “enables a registry recovery service to retrieve zone files from a target registry, archive the zone files, publish the zone files to a managed DNS server, reconcile ownership of the zone files, and publish the zone files to a provisioning DNS server. The registry recovery service may also implement a WHOIS server for the zone and ownership information and may also implement zone specific features particular to the target registry’s TLD.”
It will be interesting to see what actually happens when some new TLD registries fail. Most will likely be absorbed by their existing back-end registry providers.
Verisign has told investors that it plans to begin “monetizing” its intellectual property. So far it hasn’t disclosed how it plans to do this.
John Poole says
Thanks Andrew for following this patent application — forward-thinking Verisign is obviously preparing for “clean-up” of the ICANN created mess in flooding the market with hundreds of new gTLDs. I wonder which registry will fail first?
YouDeeArePee says
Too Funny.. ICANN so selfish. New additional TLDs are all meant for re-sale, not actual use. It’s like a WallStreet mentality now with ICANN.