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Verisign .com/.net domain base increases by 1.34 million

by — Services 1 Comment

More cash in the coffers for .com registry Verisign.

Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) reported earnings for Q2 2019 yesterday.

The company had $306 million in revenue and $148 in net income. The operating margin was 65.9%, up from 63.8% in the same quarter last year.

.Com and .net domains increased by 1.34 million during the quarter, bringing the combined domain base to 156.1 million. 10.3 million new .com/.net domains were registered during the quarter, up from 9.6 million in the same quarter of 2018.

Renewal rates are trending slightly down, however.

Verisign narrowed its guidance for the year by shaving off the low end of its previous guidance.

On the investor conference call yesterday, analysts inquired about three things:

1. The status of .web – Afilias’ Independent Review continues to work through the process, and Verisign would like to participate despite not being a party to it. Verisign won .web in an auction through a deal with one of the applicants. Afilias was the runner-up.

2. .Com price increases – Verisign continues to negotiate with ICANN to try to incorporate the price increases the U.S. government granted into its existing .com contract.

3. .Org price increases – This was an interesting one. An analyst asked if ICANN’s approach to lifting price caps signals that it might relieve pricing controls further on Verisign. Verisign CEO Bidzos noted that he can’t speculate on what this means when .net comes up for renewal. He also noted that .com is a different animal because of the Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. government.

Verisign jumps in on .Web dispute, here’s what it could mean

by — Policy & Law 1 Comment

Actions suggest Verisign is ready to bring .web to market, not to bury it.

Shortly after domain name registry Afilias filed for Independent Review over the .Web top level domain, Verisign filed an amicus brief asking for an end to the shenanigans.

Domain Incite has a great summary of the filing, so I won’t rehash it. But I will discuss what Verisign’s goals might be.

For the uninitiated, here’s the background:

Nu Dot Co, a business founded by .Co’s founders, applied for the .web top level domain. In 2015, Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) decided it wanted to own .web and worked out a deal with Nu Dot Co in which Nu Dot Co would bid in the auction and Verisign would then buy the top level domain from it.

Nu Dot Co won the auction for $135 million, which was the amount of the second highest bid placed by Afilias.

Donuts subsequently sued, upset that Nu Dot Co pushed for an ICANN auction-of-last-resort in which the losers didn’t get to split the proceeds. Donuts lost its battle.

After Donuts exhausted its options, Afilias picked up the baton and filed for cooperative engagement with ICANN. Now it has escalated to the Independent Review Process.

During this time, U.S. antitrust forces investigated Verisign’s deal, ostensibly to see if its goal in getting .web was to quash competition. It decided to not take action, which suggests that it didn’t find any evidence that this was Verisign’s goal.

Fast forward to Verisign’s amicus brief. This is the first time Verisign has explained its side of the argument. It wants the matter resolved and wants to get control of .web.

What does this mean? Here are some reasons Verisign might now be pushing for speedy resolution:

1. It wants to bring .web to market. I tend to think that Verisign really wants to make money with .web. It doesn’t want to damage its bread-and-butter .com, but given how new TLDs have gone so far I think it would be very hard for .web to harm .com.

2. Its contract with Nu Dot Co could contain a clause that requires the company to wrap up the assignment soon.

3. It could be weighing in just to make sure it doesn’t lose the deal.

Regardless of Verisign’s thinking (and sometimes I have trouble understanding what the heck it is thinking), it’s fair to suggest that it’s the new top level domain companies, not Afilias, that have delayed the launch of .web. As Verisign points out in its brief

Afilias took no steps for over two years following its letters to ICANN to initiate an IRP or pursue any other ICANN accountability mechanism. Instead, Afilias sat on its supposed rights, relying on Donut’s CEP for a temporary stay of delegation, thereby scheming, along with Donuts, to delay the delegation of .web for as long as it could.

It’s possible that Afilias was free-loading on Donuts’ legal activity with the hope that it would be resolved in its mutual favor, but it certainly looks like it is trying to delay .web for as long as possible. It certainly could have made its own filings concurrent with Donuts’ activities.

New Amazon Alexa gadgets lead to profits for Verisign

by — Uncategorized 0 Comments

Amazon announced a bunch of products, which means it registered a bunch of domains controlled by Verisign.

New Amazon Alexa devices like the Echo Spot lead to defensive domain registrations.

Every time Amazon announces a new product its domain name team goes to work defensively registering domain names. So when the company announces six products on the same day it goes into overtime.

Amazon announced six new Amazon-Alexa powered devices yesterday including the new Echo, Echo Plus, Echo Spot, FireTV with Alexa remote, Echo Connect and Echo buttons. You can learn more about these devices in this week’s Internet of Things Podcast.

The company registered hundreds of domain names related to the new products. Some are specific to the individual products (AmazonEchoButton.com, AmazonEchoSpots.com, EchoPlusGuide.com) and others related to Echo Gadgets (AlexaGadgetAPI.com, GadgetsAPI.com).

Two companies win whenever Amazon registers these domains: Amazon’s brand protection registrar MarkMonitor and Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN), which runs .com and .net.

DomainTools shows that Amazon owns about 45,000 domains that are tied to hostmaster@amazon.com, and there are likely more registered under different names.