25 Years Of .Com – This .Net Is Older….

Lets not let the facts get in the way of a good story about the Internet. While symbolics.com might be the oldest currently registered dot com, its not the oldest currently registered domain.

As I pointed out years ago, nordu.net has a creation date of 01-jan-1985.

For those that don’t know, nordu.net is used by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden as their research and academic backbone. The interesting thing about this domain is that it was registered before you could actually register domains, which officially began on 15 Jan 1985 as per RFC921.

For those Americans reading this; sorry guys, the Europeans beat you to it.

Now lets get back to celebrating how great Verisign is and their price rise to $7.34 in July 2010.

VeriSign Increases Domain Name Fees In 2010

The thieves at Verisign announced today that effective July 1, 2010 there will be an increase in domain name fees for .com and .net.

The registry fee for .com domain names will increase from $6.86 to $7.34 and the registry fee for .net domain names will increase, from $4.23 to $4.65.

In a release to the market today, the organisation appeared to justify the increase saying:

“Over the last decade, the volume of Internet traffic and domain name system (DNS) queries on VeriSign’s global infrastructure has increased from an average of approximately 2 billion queries per day in the year 2000 to more than 50 billion queries per day today..”

To save you some maths, the industry is looking at a .com increase of 48 cents and .net increase of 42 cents. Happy New Year!

The Video: US Gov Oversight of ICANN and Proposed gTLDs

The U.S. House Of Representatives Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet recently met to examine issues related to ICANN, including the expiring JPA (Joint Project Agreement) between the Department of Commerce and ICANN, as well as ICANN’s proposed introduction of new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs).

What Happened?

It was quite entertaining. See for yourself; we have preserved this historical grilling session here:

Feel free to rate the video and post comments.

Documents

Chair Boucher’s Opening Statement

Chair Waxman’s Opening Statement

Testimony of Fiona Alexander, Associate Administrator, Office of International Affairs, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce

Testimony of Paul Twomey, President and CEO, ICANN

Testimony of Kenneth J. Silva, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, VeriSign

Testimony of Christine N. Jones, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, The Go Daddy Group, Inc

Testimony of Sarah Deutsch, Vice President & Associate General Counsel, Verizon Communications

Testimony of Thomas M. Lenard, President and Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Institute

US Court of Appeals Reverses Verisign Motion – Lobbyists & Bloggers Paid To Attack?

An appeal from the US District Court was recently lodged in California. The Plaintiff is the Coalition for ICANN Transparency with the Defendant, Verisign, Inc.

Here is a small extract that I found interesting:

“CFIT alleged that in order to get ICANN to agree to the terms VeriSign desired, VeriSign paid lobbyists to support its position, “stacked” ICANN’s public meetings with VeriSign supporters, hired purportedly independent organizations and individuals to advocate VeriSign’s position, paid bloggers to attack ICANN’s reputation, planted news stories critical of ICANN in mainstream media, threatened ICANN with litigation, arbitration, and government investigation, and indeed eventually brought suit against ICANN in federal and state court.”

“CFIT alleged that ICANN and VeriSign conspired to set artificially high prices for VeriSign’s services and to ensure that VeriSign would receive successor contracts with ICANN without having to go through a competitive bidding process.”

Conclusion

“We REVERSE the district court’s grant of VeriSign’s motion to dismiss CFIT’s complaint for failure to state a claim, and REMAND to the district court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”

Here is the original court document for your viewing pleasure.

Domain Name Industry Stats – Weekend Reading

Verisign has just released its quarterly report into the domain name industry. You can download the .pdf for your weekend reading.

Here are a few points from the Exec summary:

• In mid 2008 there were 168 million domain name registrations.
• 4% growth over Q1 2008 and a 22% growth over the same quarter last year.
• In terms of total registrations its .com followed by .de, .cn and .net.
• .uk and .org had about the same number of registrations (give or take 35k)

Today’s Domain Name Drop Cancelled

Just over an hour ago I received notice from Pool:

“We have received notice from Verisign that today’s drop has been cancelled due to technical difficulties on their end. We have been told by Verisign that the domains from today’s drop will be included in tomorrow’s drop. As we receive further information from the registry, we will be sure to keep you advised.”

Like me, you are probably asking, how exactly does a domain name drop get canceled? Hopefully I will have some answers on this soon. Stay tuned!