VeriSign Retains Control of .com

Management of the .com Top Level Domain registry is going to remain with VeriSign. That’s the ICANN board level decision, coming out of the ICANN meeting in Prague this morning, which approved the renewal of VeriSign’s .com mastery.

VeriSign’s agreement to manage .com was last renewed in 2006. The 2006 agreement had been set to expire on November 30th of this year. VeriSign has managed .com continuously with 100 percent DNS uptime since 1999.

The new agreement adds new contractual obligations for VeriSign as part of its management of .com.

“In accordance with the renewal provisions of the current .com Registry Agreement, the proposed .com renewal Registry Agreement includes modified provisions to bring .com into line with other comparable agreements (e.g. .biz, .info, .net, and .org), including modifications to terms such as functional and performance specifications, Whois, indemnification, and broad audit provisions,” the ICANN board resolution states.

As was the case with previous VeriSign .com renewal agreements, the 2012 renewal includes a provision for price hikes to .com domain prices.

“Both the current .com registry agreement and the proposed renewal agreement permit Verisign to increase the price it charges registrars for domain names registrations four times during the six-year term with each increase being no greater than 7 percent,” the contract states. “This provision was substantially negotiated between Verisign on the one hand, and the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Commerce, on the other.”

While price hikes are typically not a welcome item, the .com prices hikes are actually lower than the negotiated hikes the ICANN has with other TLDs owners.

“If the .com pricing provisions were to be changed to be similar to the other large gTLDs then that would most likely allow Verisign to raise prices by 10 percent per year in each of the six years of the agreement, as in the .biz, .info, .net, and .org agreements,” the agreement states. “Note: ICANN’s registry agreement for new gTLDs and registry agreements for sponsored gTLDs (.aero, .asia, .cat, .coop, .jobs, .mobi, .museum, .post, .pro, .tel, .travel, and .xxx) do not include any price controls.”

Read the full story at Datamation:
ICANN Renews .Com Agreement with VeriSign

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.