Registrar criticizes .com contract
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(InfoWorld) - A contract for VeriSign Â to operate the .com domain should include infrastructure build-out requirements and make the company justify built-in prices increases, a lawyer for the GoDaddy.com registrar said Wednesday. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit organization that oversees the Internetâs technical infrastructure, has not put enough checks in place in a proposed extension of VeriSign's .com contract, said Christine Jones, general counsel for GoDaddy, during a hearing before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. A presumption from ICANN that the .com contract will be renewed when it expires in November 2007 gives VeriSign a "monopoly" on operating the largest generic top-level domain, Jones said. "It's incredible to us that ICANN did not include an infrastructure investment requirement in the proposed .com agreement," she said. "In negotiating that agreement, VeriSign ensured that their revenue would increase, and ICANN ensured that their budget would benefit, but who's going to ensure the benefits of the public interest?" The proposed agreement allows VeriSign to increase wholesale site registration fees by 7 percent in four of the contract's six years. More oversight on pricing is needed, Jones said. "Other legitimate monopolies ... must justify their price increases, and VeriSign, the monopoly provider, should be required to do the same," she said. But VeriSign already spends significant money improving its Internet infrastructure every year, said Ken Silva, VeriSign's chief security officer. The ICANN presumption that it will renew the .com contract encourages VeriSign to continue investing in infrastructure, instead of waiting until it knows it has a new contract, he said. The .com domain has never crashed in the last seven years, but price increases may be necessary as attacks against Internet domains become more complex, Silva added. "We're not talking about commodity hardware here," Silva said. "There's no automatic price increase. What there is, is a possibility of a price increase, based on the security and stability needs we have at the time." ICANN President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Twomey also defended the contract, saying his organization is fostering competition in other ways such as creating more top-level domains. There are also nearly 800 site registrars competing for business, he said. But Senator Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, questioned the .com contract. "The question a lot of people are asking is, what's wrong with bidding out .com?" he said. "Why not let VeriSign win it, if they can, with a competitive bid?" Senators also asked whether the U.S. Department of Commerce should renew its memorandum of understanding with ICANN for the organization to continue oversight of the Internet's technical infrastructure. The memorandum expires at the end of this month. GoDaddy's Jones criticized ICANN for too often conducting business, including the proposed .com agreement, "behind closed doors." She called on Congress to require ICANN to create a plan to increase the Internet community's confidence in it. Even though ICANN needs to improve its transparency and accountability to the Internet community, the memorandum should be extended, said John Kneuer, acting assistant secretary for communications and information at the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. ICANN is taking steps to improve support from its constituencies, he said.
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When it comes to ICANN, let&#39;s just say &quot;You Can&#39;t.&quot; Or rather, you can&#39;t dispute its authority. In the latest phase of a long-simmering dispute between VeriSign (Nasdaq: VRSN
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Google has entered into the domain registration game via a partnership with eNom and GoDaddy, wherein Google is only offering the registration of .com, .net, .biz and .info domain extensions. $10 a year is a bit more expensive than some of the other registrars on the market (by a dollar or so) and I find it [...]
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Website Pros has the whole Web.com in its hands.
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Claims 'deceit, negligent misrepresentation' over CRM deal
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InfoWorld - Network Solutions is standing by its controversial policy of automatically registering some domain names that are the subject of searches on the company's Web site.
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A site that was the target of a legal takedown maneuver was less vulnerable to more standard approaches. It signed up with what is perhaps the worldâs least lawyer-friendly Web hosting company.
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A major provider of credit card authorizations for Internet retailers was struggling to remain online yesterday. Authorize.net, of Bellevue, Wash., purchased this year by Lightbridge Inc. of Burlington, has been subjected since last week to ''denial of service&quot; attacks, in which vandals try to knock computers out of commission by overwhelming them with data. ''We are working diligently to minimize ...
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An online shoe store owner is threatening to sue a blogger unless the blogger &#8216;lowers his Google ranking&#8221; for a keyword phrase that the store owner feels he deserves.  More from Search Engine Roundtable: In short, the store owner feels he should rank better than the blog, because he is selling the item on his site [...]
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A GoDaddy.com Inc. customer is seriously concerned that this domain registrar and hosting company may not be ready for the switch to Daylight Saving Time (DST) on Sunday.
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The popular online auction site raises its fees. Is it biting off more than it can chew?
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Company: "It's not supposed to be possible to transfer a domain name from one registrar to another without notifying both the current registrar and the current domain owner, and yet it happened anyway."
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Network Solutions, a major registrar of Internet domain names, counters accusations it's grabbing domain names after customers show an interest but before they register them.
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It can be the hardest word Registration and web hosting company 123-Reg has again apologised to customers hit by hardware problems which meant some customers' websites fell offline.â¦
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I overheard a long-time hospital client talking to another support vendor today. The hospitalâs patient accounting department was attempting to send patient financial and billing data to a third-party biller. The vendorâs normal Web site was down, and they were trying to come up with an emergency fix.
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On Paul Jones' weblog today, there's a posting covering one of the banes of PHP life - form processing/handling.
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Worried about spyware? spam? "spim"? AOL wants to set your mind at rest. Also: Putting patches in place.