Company suggests ICANN is only posting letters that “will advance its positions”.

Verisign has sent a letter to ICANN questioning why it isn’t publishing certain correspondence on the ICANN.org web site.

ICANN has a section on its web site where it publishes many letters it receives and sends.

But Verisign says ICANN hasn’t published three prior letters the company sent regarding the proposed new domain registry agreement. The company says it is aware of other letters sent to ICANN regarding the registry contract that have not been published.

Verisign’s latest letter has been “published” because the company submitted it to the comment board about the contract.

The new letter includes three previous letters the company sent to Verisign’s general counsel dated February 20, February 15, and January 30. Verisign did not receive a response to the letters, nor were they published.

The February 20th letter criticizes ICANN for what it says is a lack of transparency and selective disclosure of correspondence related to the new TLD program. Verisign points out that ICANN published the Verisigns’s January 8 letter declining to participate in ICANN’s contractual compliance audit (which was negative for Verisign) but hasn’t published Verisign’s recent letters about the registry agreement.

“Because ICANN has published no criteria on how it decides to make letters public, we are left to conclude that ICANN posts only those letters it believes will advance its positions and withholds those thought to be critical,” the company wrote.

A quick look at the correspondence page shows that ICANN does publish critical letters, but it’s also true that none of Verisign’s letters included in the post have been published.

I have reached out to ICANN for clarification on what its rules are (if any) for publishing correspondence on its web site.

Many new TLD applicants will take a less-than-ideal contract if it means a faster time to market.

When it comes to the new top level domain registry agreement, what you have to gain or lose from new TLDs being introduced will greatly shape your opion.

Verisign has submitted two separate comments on the agreement, both of which blast ICANN for dumping the bottom up process and adding a unilateral right to amend the contract.

From Verisign’s perspective, a delay in new TLDs doesn’t hurt it. It might even help.

Donuts, the largest new TLD applicant, submitted comments that can be summarized like this: it was wrong of you to change the contract at this point in the game, and the process stunk, but let’s get the show on the road.

Donuts is willing to forgo a perfect contract to get its new TLDs to market.

New gTLDs were scheduled to be delegated at least four months ago, in January 2013. The program has been delayed for far too long, and at great harm to applicants and to the anticipated benefits the program will bring, as well as to the program itself. ICANN has permitted this delay to be caused, in part, by those who never supported the program in the first place and are using delay tactics as a strategy. As such, we support adoption of this new agreement and look forward to signing it forthwith.

The third sentence in the above paragraph could be read as a jab at Verisign.

New TLD applicants are certainly between a rock and a hard place. If ICANN is to follow its bottom up process, and it’s dedicated to a unilateral right to amend, it could be next year before the first new TLD is delegated.

But if you’re the typical new TLD company that has no revenue stream other than the future sale of new TLDs, and you’re not sitting on a pile of cash, you can’t afford to wait long to get it “just right”.

Interestingly, Verisign may be the reason that ICANN is insisting on rights to amend the registry contract. Site Finder is remembered all to well in the halls of ICANN.

.Com registry awarded patent for using registry data to trigger web crawling.

With Verisign analyzing how to profit from its patent portfolio, competitors should pay close attention to the company’s new patents.

Today Verisign was awarded U.S. Patent 8,433,700 (pdf) for “Method and system for triggering web crawling based on registry data”.

The patent describes ways in which a registry can provide data to other companies, such as search engines, that may help them determine when to crawl a domain name’s content.

For example, a registry can provide information about new domain registrations, registrar transfers, and deletions that can be used by search engines to initiate crawling. A domain transfer may indicate a change in ownership and a site’s use, and thus a need to recrawl the domain.

The service could also use resolution request data to indicate active web sites that should be crawled. In one example explained in the patent, increased traffic to a blog could also suggest new comments are being left on a blog post. This could warrant speedier recrawling.

In Verisign’s case with .com, it operates a thin registry so it’s zone file doesn’t include much information about each domain. The patent allows that additional data resources could be included to provide even more triggers:

Other data sources include data received from registrars such as information that registrant has changed hands, that a registrant has changed hosting companies, data received from hosting companies related to changes to the hosted websites such as file uploading data. These data feeds may be free and publicly available or may be purchased and then integrated into the systems described herein. Therefore, the quality of the data used to trigger crawls may be improved by supplementing the data discussed herein, e.g., changes to the registry database, with additional data useful to the entity performing the crawling.

From Google to where it stashes its cash, here’s what Verisign told analysts yesterday.

Yesterday Verisign announced earnings for the first quarter and held its investor conference call. Here are four key things the company explained.

Google is slowing our growth.

Verisign blames the reduced growth rate in its domain base on overall macroeconomic trends (especially in Europe) and on changes to Google’s search algorithms. On yesterday’s conference call, it certainly focused on the latter.

Basically, Google’s Penguin and Panda updates have hurt some of the companies that register lots of domains solely for search-based monetization. They’re registering fewer domains and letting more expire.

I never thought I’d hear the name Matt Cutts mentioned on a Verisign conference call. But it happened yesterday.

For Q2 the company expects to add only 0.9 million and 1.3 million names.

We stash a lot of our cash overseas so we don’t pay taxes on it.

Like many tech companies, Verisign keeps a lot of cash overseas so it doesn’t have to pay as much to Uncle Sam.

Of the company’s $1.56 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities at the end of the quarter, approximately $240 million was domestic. The rest was held overseas and hasn’t been taxed in the U.S. yet.

The company continues to work on its tax strategy around these funds.

It will be a while before we see any positive or negative impact from new TLDs.

Except as it relates to marketing expenses, new top level domains weren’t discussed on the call until the last analyst inquired.

This lack of discussion is surprising after Verisign sent a letter to ICANN saying that new TLDs weren’t ready for primetime.

To quickly summarize Verisign’s response about new TLDs: there continue to be delays. We think it will get off the ground in the second half of the year. It won’t be material to us this year.

Will new TLDs ever be material to Verisign? I think it will be marginal on the upside. The company is clearly worried about the downside, though.

We’re getting ready to play hardball with our patent portfolio.

On last quarter’s conference call the company said it was reviewing its patent portfolio to figure out how its intellectual property can help its business.

That review is still ongoing, but CEO James Bidzos reiterated that the goal likely won’t be to extract royalties, “but to use it in support of our business goals and our business planning”.

I’ve work in the intellectual property licensing world, and I can tell you there’s little difference between these strategies. The company wants to extract revenue out of the patents, whether that’s through direct payments or strong-arming other companies to sell the company’s products or enter into other business deals.

.Com registry Verisign reports first quarter earnings.

Verisign reported its first quarter earnings after the bell today.

In the first quarter it added a combined 1.99 million domain names in .com and .net. That brings the total to 123.1 million active domain names in the zone for .com and .net — a 5.5 percent increase year over year. This is an improvement over Q4 2012 when it added only 1.25 million names. But a better comparison my by Q1 of 2012, when it added 2.86 million names to the root.

It processed 8.8 million new domain name registrations in the quarter, down from 8.9 million in the same quarter last year but up from 8.0 million in Q4.

The company reported $236 million revenue for the quarter, which is up 15% from the same quarter last year. GAAP net income was $85 million for the quarter.