ICANN

ICANN

ICANN (pronounced /aɪkæn/, eye-can) is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, United States, ICANN is a non-profit corporation that was created on September 18, 1998 in order to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly on behalf of the U.S. government by other organizations, notably the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

ICANN's tasks include responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) top-level domain name system management, and root server system management functions. More generically, ICANN is responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses. To date, much of its work has concerned the introduction of new generic top-level domains (TLDs). The technical work of ICANN is referred to as the IANA function. ICANN's other primary function involves helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet; to promote competition; to achieve broad representation of global Internet community; and to develop policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes.

On September 29, 2006, ICANN signed a new agreement with the United States Department of Commerce (DOC) that is a step forward toward the full management of the Internet's system of centrally coordinated identifiers through the multi-stakeholder model of consultation that ICANN represents.

Paul Twomey has been the President/CEO of ICANN since March 27, 2003. As of November 3, 2007, Peter Dengate Thrush replaced Vint Cerf as Chairman of the ICANN Board of Directors .

At present, ICANN is formally organized as a non-profit corporation "for charitable and public purposes" under the California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation Law. It is managed by a Board of Directors, which is composed of six representatives of the Supporting Organizations, sub-groups that deal with specific sections of the policies under ICANN's purview; eight independent representatives of the general public interest, selected through a Nominating Committee in which all the constituencies of ICANN are represented; and the President and CEO, appointed by the rest of the Board.

There are currently three Supporting Organizations. The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) deals with policy making on generic top-level domains (gTLDs). The Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) deals with policy making on country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs). The Address Supporting Organization (ASO) deals with policy making on IP addresses.

ICANN also relies on some advisory committees to receive advice on the interests and needs of stakeholders that do not directly participate in the Supporting Organizations. These include the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), which is composed of representatives of a large number of national governments from all the world; the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) which is composed of representatives of organizations of individual Internet users from around the world; the Root Server System Advisory Committee which provides advice on the operation of the DNS root server system; the Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) which is composed of Internet experts who study security issues pertaining to ICANN's mandate; and the Technical Liaison Group (TLG) which is composed of representatives of other international technical organizations that focus, at least in part, on the Internet.

ICANN holds periodic public meetings rotated between continents for the purpose of encouraging global participation in its processes. Critics argue that the locations of these meetings are often in countries with lower Internet usage and far away from locations that the majority of the Internet-using public can afford to reach. This makes public input or participation from traditional Internet users less likely. Supporters reply that ICANN has a worldwide presence, and a key part of its mission is to build Internet use where it is weak.

ICANN was established in California due to the presence of Jon Postel, who was a founder of ICANN and was set to be its first CTO prior to his unexpected death. ICANN remains in the same building where he worked, which is home to an office of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.

Resolutions of the ICANN Board, preliminary reports and minutes of the meetings are published on the ICANN website, sometimes in real time. However there are criticisms from ICANN constituencies including Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) and At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) that there is not enough public disclosure and that too many discussions take place and too many decisions are made out of sight of the public.

One task that ICANN was asked to do was to address the issue of domain name ownership resolution for generic top-level domains (gTLDs). ICANN's attempt at such a policy was drafted in close cooperation with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and the result has now become known as the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). This policy essentially attempts to provide a mechanism for rapid, cheap and reasonable resolution of domain name conflicts, avoiding the traditional court system for disputes by allowing cases to be brought to one of a set of bodies that arbitrate domain name disputes. According to ICANN policy, a domain registrant must agree to be bound by the UDRP — they cannot get a domain name without agreeing to this.

A look at the UDRP decision patterns has led some to conclude that compulsory domain name arbitration is less likely to give a fair hearing to domain name owners asserting defenses under the First Amendment and other laws, compared to the federal courts of appeal in particular.

The original mandate for ICANN came from the United States government, spanning the presidential administrations of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. On January 30, 1998, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, issued for comment, "A Proposal to Improve the Technical Management of Internet Names and Addresses." The proposed rule making, or "Green Paper", was published in the Federal Register on February 20, 1998, providing opportunity for public comment. NTIA received more than 650 comments as of March 23, 1998, when the comment period closed.

The Green Paper proposed certain actions designed to privatize the management of Internet names and addresses in a manner that allows for the development of robust competition and facilitates global participation in Internet management. The Green Paper proposed for discussion a variety of issues relating to DNS management including private sector creation of a new not-for-profit corporation (the "new corporation") managed by a globally and functionally representative Board of Directors. ICANN was formed in response to this policy. The IANA function currently exists under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce.

On March 14, 2002, in a public meeting in Accra, in Ghana, ICANN decided to reduce direct public ("at large") participation.

On March 18, 2002, publicly elected At-Large Representative for North America board member Karl Auerbach sued ICANN in Superior Court in California to gain access to ICANN's accounting records without restriction. Auerbach won.

In September and October 2003 ICANN played a crucial role in the conflict over VeriSign's "wild card" DNS service Site Finder. After an open letter from ICANN issuing an ultimatum to VeriSign, later supported by the IAB, the company voluntarily shut down the service on October 4, 2003. Following this action, VeriSign filed a lawsuit against ICANN on February 27, 2004, claiming that ICANN had overstepped its authority. In this lawsuit, VeriSign sought to reduce ambiguity about ICANN's authority. The antitrust component of VeriSign's claim was dismissed in August 2004. VeriSign's broader challenge that ICANN overstepped its contractual rights is currently outstanding. A proposed settlement already approved by ICANN's board would resolve VeriSign's challenge to ICANN in exchange for the right to increase pricing on .com domains. At the meeting of ICANN in Rome which took place from March 2 to March 6, 2004, ICANN agreed to ask approval of the US Department of Commerce for the Waiting List Service of VeriSign.

On May 17, 2004, ICANN published a proposed budget for the year 2004-05. It included proposals to increase the openness and professionalism of its operations, and greatly increased its proposed spending from US $8.27m to $15.83m. The increase was to be funded by the introduction of new top-level domains, charges to domain registries, and a fee for some domain name registrations, renewals and transfers (initially USD 0.20 for all domains within a country-code top-level domain, and USD 0.25 for all others). The Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR), which represents the Internet registries of 39 countries, rejected the increase, accusing ICANN of a lack of financial prudence and criticising what it describes as ICANN's "unrealistic political and operational targets". Despite the criticism, the registry agreement for the top-level domains .jobs and .travel includes a US $2 fee on every domain the licensed companies sell or renew.

Along with the successful negotiations of the .travel and .jobs namespace, .mobi, and .cat are some of the new top-level domains introduced by ICANN. The introduction of the .eu Top Level Domain to the root in violation of RFC 1591, and the introduction of .asia are developments to watch.

After an extensive build-up that saw speculation that the United Nations might signal a takeover of ICANN, followed by a negative reaction from the US government and worries about a division of the internet the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia in November 2005 agreed not to get involved in the day-to-day and technical operations of ICANN. However it also agreed to set up an international Internet Governance Forum, with a consultative role on the future governance of the Internet. ICANN's Government Advisory Committee is currently set up to provide advice to ICANN regarding public policy issues and has participation by many of the world's governments.

On February 28, 2006, ICANN's board approved a settlement with VeriSign in the lawsuit resulting from SiteFinder that involved allowing VeriSign (the registry) to raise its registration fees by up to 7% a year. This was criticised by some people in the US House of Representatives' Small Business committee.

On May 10, 2006 ICANN failed to approve a plan for a new ".xxx" suffix that would have been designated for websites with pornographic content. ICANN formally rejected .xxx on March 30, 2007 during its meeting at Lisbon, Portugal.

On July 26, 2006, the United States government renewed the contract with ICANN for performance of the IANA function for an additional one to five years. The context of ICANN's relationship with the U.S. government was clarified on September 29, 2006 when ICANN signed a new Memorandum of Understanding with the United States Department of Commerce (DOC).

In February 2007, ICANN began the steps to remove accreditation of one of their registrars, RegisterFly amid charges and lawsuits involving fraud, and criticism of ICANN's handling of the situation. ICANN has been the subject of criticism as a result of its handling of RegisterFly, and the harm caused to thousands of clients due to what has been called ICANN's "laissez faire attitude toward customer allegations of fraud".

On May 23, 2008 ICANN issued Enforcement Notices against 10 Accredited Registrars and announced this through press release entitled: "Worst Spam Offenders" Notified by ICANN, Compliance system working to correct Whois and other issues. This was largely in response to a report issued by KnujOn called The 10 Worst Registrars in terms of spam advertised junk product sites and compliance failure. The mention of the word spam in the title of the ICANN memo is somewhat misleading since ICANN does not address issues of spam or email abuse. Website content and usage are not within ICANN's mandate. However the KnujOn Report details how various registrars have not complied with their contractual obligations under the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA). The main point of the KnujOn research was to demonstrate the relationships between compliance failure, illicit product traffic, and spam. The report demonstrated that out of 900 ICANN accredited Registrars fewer than 20 held 90% of the web domains advertised in spam. These same Registrars we also most frequently cited by KnujOn as failing to resolve complaints made through the Whois Data Problem Reporting System (WDPRS). The 10 Registrars cited were Xin Net, Beijing Networks, Todaynic, Joker, eNom, Monkier, Dynamic Dolphin, The Nameit Co, Directi, and Intercosmos. Two of these Registrars were later issued additional Breach Notices were sent to Joker and Beijing Innovative Linkage Technology Ltd.

On June 26, 2008 the ICANN Board approved the new gTLD program. This program would allow organizations, groups and individuals to register Internet addresses outside of the existing TLD rules. The proposed new top level domain names will expand to include common words such as .banks for all financial institutions, and so on. They will also open up to other languages that don't rely on Roman characters, such as Arabic or Chinese.

On June 27, 2008 the NYTreported that the official sites of ICANN and IANA had been defaced by Turkish hackers the prior day.

In July 2008 the U.S. Department of Commerce reiterated an earlier statement that it has no plans to transition management of the authoritative root zone file to ICANN. The letter also stresses the separate roles of the IANA and VeriSign.

On October 1, 2008 ICANN issued Breach Notices against Joker and Beijing Innovative Linkage Technology Ltd. after further researching reports and complaints issued by KnujOn. These notices gave the Registrars given 15 days to fix their Whois investigation efforts.

In the Memorandum of Understanding that set up the relationship between ICANN and the U.S. government, ICANN was given a mandate requiring that it operate "in a bottom up, consensus driven, democratic manner." However, the attempts that ICANN have made to set up an organizational structure that would allow wide input from the global Internet community did not produce results amenable to the current Board. As a result, the At-Large constituency and direct election of board members by the global Internet community were soon abandoned.

It is argued that ICANN was never given the authority to decide policy (i.e. choose new TLDs or shut out other interested parties who refuse to pay ICANN's US$185,000 fee), but was to be a technical caretaker. Critics suggest that ICANN should not be allowed to impose business rules on market participants, and that all TLDs should be added on a first-come-first-served basis and the market should be the arbiter of who succeeds and who does not.

A member of the European Parliament, William Newton-Dunn, has recently been addressing questions to the European Commission which asks whether ICANN is engaging in restraint of European free trade laws by imposing restrictions on who can operate a TLD and sell domain names. Some restrictions are considered insurmountable by many small business owners and individuals, such as the perhaps-partially-refundable $185,000 application fee.

As of June 2008, none of these proposals had enough political support to be considered a viable alternative to the current processes. A number of private, for-profit firms are still trying to "seize the opportunity" of namespace development by creating new TLDs in alternative DNS roots.

To the top

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the entity that oversees global IP address allocation, root zone management for the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Internet protocol assignments. It is operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, better known as ICANN.

Prior to the establishment of ICANN for this purpose, IANA was administered primarily by Jon Postel at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, under a contract USC/ISI had with the United States Department of Defense, until ICANN was made to assume the responsibility under a United States Department of Commerce contract.

IANA is broadly responsible for the allocation of globally-unique names and numbers that are used in Internet protocols that are published as RFC documents. These documents describe methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems. IANA also maintains a close liaison with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and RFC Editorial team in fulfilling this function.

In the case of relatively high-profile subsets of protocol numbers – namely IP addresses and domain names – extra policy and handling is required and the allocation process is handled with more specific methods. This is to cope with the multi-layered administration of these resources.

IANA delegates local registrations of IP addresses to Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). Each RIR allocates addresses for a different area of the world. Collectively the RIRs form part of the Number Resource Organization formed as a body to represent their collective interests and ensure that policy statements are coordinated globally.

IANA delegates the allocation of IP addresses to RIRs in large blocks. The RIRs sub-allocate smaller blocks in their regions to Internet service providers and other organizations. Currently (as of 2008), IANA typically allocates address space in the size of '/8' prefix blocks (cf. CIDR) for IPv4 and '/12' prefix blocks from the 2000::/3 block for IPv6.

IANA administers the data in the root nameservers, which form the top of the hierarchical DNS tree. This task involves liaising with top-level domain operators, the root nameserver operators, and ICANN's policy making apparatus.

ICANN also operates the .int registry for international treaty organizations, the .arpa zone for Internet infrastructure purposes, including reverse DNS service, and other critical zones such as root-servers.net.

IANA administers many parameters of IETF protocols. Examples include the names of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) schemes and character encodings recommended for use on the Internet. This task is undertaken under the oversight of the Internet Architecture Board, and the agreement governing the work is published in RFC 2860.

IANA is managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) under contract to the United States Department of Commerce (DOC). The Department of Commerce also provides an ongoing oversight function, whereby it verifies additions and changes made in the root to ensure IANA complies with its policies.

On January 28, 2003 the DOC, via the Acquisition and Grants Office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, issued a notice of intent to grant ICANN the IANA contract for three more years. It invited alternative offerors to submit in writing a detailed response on how they could meet the requirements themselves. Such responses were to be received no later than 10 days following publication of the invitation and the decision on whether to open the "tender" to competition was to remain solely within the discretion of the government.

In August 2006 the DOC extended its IANA contract with ICANN for a further five years, subject to annual renewals.

The relationship between ICANN, the country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and the RIRs can best be described as highly political, and there have been a number of proposals to decouple the IANA function from ICANN completely. However, it is widely believed that it would be impractical to change the current control structure without risking fracturing the Internet.

IANA was established informally as a reference to various technical functions the Information Sciences Institute performed for the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency on the ARPANET.

The earliest reference to a registry function is probably RFC 322, published on March 26, 1972, which had Vint Cerf and Jon Postel establishing a "socket registry" - this registry was published in the RFC series as RFC 433 in December 1972.

The first reference to the name "IANA" in the RFC series is in RFC 1060, published in 1990, but the function, and the term, was well established long before that; RFC 1174 says that "Throughout its entire history, the Internet system has employed a central Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)...", and RFC 1060 lists a long series of earlier editions of itself, starting with RFC 349.

Jon Postel managed the IANA function from its inception until his death in October 1998. After his death, Joyce Reynolds, who had worked with him on IANA for many years, managed the transition of the IANA function to ICANN. Postel was given defacto authority to perform the IANA function, as he had always done it in his position at the Information Sciences Institute, under its DoD contract.

Starting in 1988, IANA was funded by the U.S. government under a contract between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Information Sciences Institute (ISI). This contract expired in April 1997, but was extended to preserve IANA's function.

To the top

Domain name

This article primarily discusses registered domain names. See the Domain Name System article for technical discussions about general domain names and the hostname article for further information about the most common type of domain name.

The main purpose of a domain name is to provide a recognizable names to mostly numerically addressed Internet resources. This abstraction allows any resource (e.g., website) to be moved to a different physical location in the address topology of the network, globally or locally in an intranet, in effect changing the IP address.

Registered domain names are restricted to using the same characters as all other hostnames, as such they typically can only use ASCII letters, numbers, the hyphen (-), with the dot (.) used to separate DNS labels. Since this definition does not allow the use of many characters commonly found in non-English languages, and no multi-byte characters necessary for most Asian languages, the Internationalized domain name (IDN) system has been developed and is now in testing stage with a set of top-level domains established for this purpose.

The underscore character is frequently used to ensure that a domain name is not recognized as a hostname, as with the use of SRV records, for example, although some older systems such as NetBIOS did allow it. To avoid confusion and for other reasons, domain names with underscores in them are sometimes used where hostnames are required.

Domain names are often referred to simply as domains and domain name registrants are frequently referred to as domain owners, although domain name registration with a registrar does not confer any legal ownership of the name, only an exclusive right of use.

As a general rule, the IP address and the server name are interchangeable. For most Internet services, the server will not have any way to know which was used. However, the explosion of interest in the Web means that there are far more Web sites than servers. To accommodate this, the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) specifies that the client tells the server which name is being used. This way, one server with one IP address can provide different sites for different domain names. This feature goes under the name virtual hosting and is commonly used by web hosts.

When a request is made, the data corresponding to the hostname requested is provided to the user.

Every domain name ends in a top-level domain (TLD) name, which is always either one of a small list of generic names (three or more characters), or a two-character territory code based on ISO-3166 (there are few exceptions and new codes are integrated case by case). Top-level domains are sometimes also called first-level domains.

Below the top-level domains in the domain name hierarchy are the second-level domain (SLD) names. These are the names directly to the left of .com, .net, and the other top-level domains. As an example, in the domain en.wikipedia.org, wikipedia is the second-level domain.

Next are third-level domains, which are written immediately to the left of a second-level domain. There can be fourth- and fifth-level domains, and so on, with virtually no limitation. An example of a working domain with four domain levels is www.sos.state.oh.us. The www preceding the domains is a host name of the World-Wide Web server. Each level is separated by a dot, or period symbol. 'sos' is said to be a sub-domain of 'state.oh.us', and 'state' a sub-domain of 'oh.us', etc. In general, Sub-domains are domains subordinate to their parent domain. An example of very deep levels of subdomain ordering are the IPv6 reverse resolution DNS zones, e.g., 1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.ip6.arpa, which is the reverse DNS resolution domain for the IP address of a loopback interface, or the localhost name.

Second-level (or lower-level, depending on the established parent hierarchy) domain names are often created based on the name of a company (e.g., microsoft.com), product or service (e.g., gmail.com). Below these levels, the next domain name component has been used to designate a particular host server. Therefore, ftp.wikipedia.org might be an FTP server, www.wikipedia.org would be a World Wide Web server, and mail.wikipedia.org could be an email server, each intended to perform only the implied function. Modern technology allows multiple physical servers with either different (cf. load balancing) or even identical addresses (cf. anycast) to serve a single hostname or domain name, or multiple domain names to be served by a single computer. The latter is very popular in Web hosting service centers, where service providers host the websites of many organizations on just a few servers.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has overall responsibility for managing the DNS. It administers the root domain, delegating control over each TLD to a domain name registry. For ccTLDs, the domain registry is typically installed by the government of that country. ICANN has a consultation role in these domain registries but cannot regulate the terms and conditions of how domain names are delegated in each of the country-level domain registries. On the other hand, the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are governed directly under ICANN, which means all terms and conditions are defined by ICANN with the cooperation of each gTLD registry.

Domain names are often seen in analogy to real estate in that (1) domain names are foundations on which a website (like a house or commercial building) can be built and (2) the highest "quality" domain names, like sought-after real estate, tend to carry significant value, usually due to their online brand-building potential, use in advertising, search engine optimization, and many other criteria.

A few companies have offered low-cost, below-cost or even cost-free domain registrations with a variety of models adopted to recoup the costs to the provider. These usually require that domains be hosted on their website within a framework or portal that includes advertising wrapped around the domain holder's content, revenue from which allows the provider to recoup the costs. Domain registrations were free of charge when the DNS was new. A domain holder (often referred to as a domain owner) can give away or sell infinite number of subdomains under their domain name. For example, the owner of example.edu could provide subdomains such as foo.example.edu and foo.bar.example.edu to interested parties.

As domain names became interesting to marketers because of their advertising and marketing potential, rather than just being used to label Internet resources in a technical fashion, they began to be used in manners that in many cases did not reflect the intended purpose of the label of their top-level domain. As originally planned, the structure of domain names followed a hierarchy in which the TLD indicated the type of organization (commercial, governmental, etc.), and addresses would be nested down to third, fourth, or further levels to express complex structures, where, for instance, branches, departments and subsidiaries of a parent organization would have addresses in subdomains of the parent domain. Also, hostnames were originally intended to correspond to actual physical machines on the network, generally with only one name per machine.

As the World Wide Web became popular, site operators frequently wished to have memorable addresses, regardless of whether they fit properly into the structure; thus, because the .com domain was the most popular and therefore most prestigious, even noncommercial sites began to obtain domains directly within that gTLD, and many sites desired second-level domain names in .com, even if they were already part of a larger entity where a subdomain would have been logical (e.g., abcnews.com instead of news.abc.com).

The popularity of domain names also led to uses which were regarded as abusive by established companies with trademark rights; this has become known as cybersquatting, in which a person registers a domain name that resembles a trademark in order to profit from visitors looking for that address. To combat this, various laws and policies were enacted to allow abusive registrations to be forcibly transferred, but these were sometimes themselves abused by overzealous companies committing reverse domain hijacking against domain users who had legitimate grounds to hold their names. Such legitimate uses could include the use of generic words that are contained within a trademark, but used in a particular context within the trademark, or their use in the context of fan or protest sites with free speech rights of their own.

As of 2008, the four major Registrars have all sub-contracted their expiring domain lists to certain reseller and auctioneer partnerships, for the purpose of keeping the domain name at the original registrar and continuing to extract revenue off the renewal of premium registered names. Since this policy is not explicitly banned at ICANN, the practice has become more commonplace and as a result, complaints from individual registrants about losing their domains has tracked higher over the past two years .

Laws that specifically address domain name conflicts include the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act in the United States and the Trademarks Act of 1999 in India. Alternatively, domain registrants are bound by contract under the UDRP to comply with mandatory arbitration proceedings should someone challenge their ownership of a domain name.

Within a particular TLD, parties are generally free to register an undelegated domain name on a first come, first served basis, resulting in Harris's lament, all the good ones are taken. For generic or commonly used names, this may sometimes lead to the use of a domain name which is inaccurate or misleading. This problem can be seen with regard to the ownership or control of domain names for a generic product or service. By way of illustration, there has been tremendous growth in the number and size of literary festivals around the world in recent years. In the current context, a generic domain name such as literary.org is available to the first literary festival organization that is able to obtain the registration, even if the festival in question is very young or obscure. Some critics argue that there is greater amenity in reserving such domain names for the use of, for example, a regional or umbrella grouping of festivals. Related issues may also arise in relation to noncommercial domain names.

Due to the rarity of one-word dot-com domain names, many unconventional domain names, domain hacks, have been created. They make use of the top-level domain as an integral part of the Web site's title. Two popular domain hack Web sites are cr.yp.to and blo.gs, which spell out "crypto" and "blogs", respectively.

Unconventional domain names are also used to create unconventional email addresses. Non-working examples that spell 'James' are j@m.es and j@mes.com, which use the domain names m.es (of Spain's .es) and mes.com, respectively.

In the business of marketing domain names, "premium" domain names are often valuable, and have particular characteristics. For example, the names are short and memorable, or may contain words that are regularly searched on search engines, or keywords that help the name gain a higher ranking on search engines. They may contain generic words, so the word has more than one meaning, and they may contain common typos.

The business of resale of previously registered domain names is known as the "domain aftermarket".

Various factors influence the perceived value or market value of a domain name. They include 1) the natural or "organic" traffic that can be attributed to web surfers typing in a domain name in their web browser as opposed to doing a search for the site through a search engine. 2) Branding Opportunity. The ability to have a term recognized and easily recalled as a brand for a company or entity. 3) Re-sale value. The ability to spot trends and predict the value of a name based on its length (short is preferred), clarity, and commercial use. The word loan is far more valuable than the word sunshine.

Generic domain names have sprung up in the last decade. Certain domains, especially those related to business, gambling, pornography, and other commercially lucrative fields of digital world trade have become very much in demand to corporations and entrepreneurs due to their importance in attracting clients.

There are disputes about the high values of domain names claimed and the actual cash prices of many sales such as Business.com. Another high-priced domain name, sex.com, was stolen from its rightful owner by means of a forged transfer instruction via fax. During the height of the dot-com era, the domain was earning millions of dollars per month in advertising revenue from the large influx of visitors that arrived daily. The sex.com sale may have never been final as the domain is still with the previous owner. Also, that sale was not just a domain but an income stream, a web site, a domain name with customers and advertisers, etc. Two long-running U.S. lawsuits resulted, one against the thief and one against the domain registrar VeriSign . In one of the cases, Kremen v. Network Solutions, the court found in favor of the plaintiff, leading to an unprecedented ruling that classified domain names as property, granting them the same legal protections. In 1999, Microsoft traded the name Bob.com with internet entrepreneur Bob Kerstein for the name Windows2000.com which was the name of their new operating system.

One of the reasons for the value of domain names is that even without advertising or marketing, they attract clients seeking services and products who simply type in the generic name. This is known as Direct Navigation or Type-in Traffic. Furthermore, generic domain names such as movies.com (now owned by Disney) or Books.com (now owned by Barnes & Noble) are extremely easy for potential customers to remember, increasing the probability that they become repeat customers or regular clients. In the case of Movies.com, Disney has built a stand-alone portal featuring branded content. More and more large brands are beginning to employ a more comprehensive domain strategy featuring a portfolio of thousands of domains, rather than just one or two.

Although the current domain market is nowhere as strong as it was during the dot-com heyday, it remains strong and is currently experiencing solid growth again. Annually tens of millions of dollars change hands in connection with the resale of domains. Large numbers of registered domain names lapse and are deleted each year. On average, more than 25,000 domain names drop (are deleted) every day.

It is important to remember that a domain (name, address) must be valued separately from the website (content, revenue) that it is used for. The high prices have usually been paid for the revenue that was generated from the website at the domain's address (URL.). The intrinsic value of a domain is the registration fee. It is difficult to appraise a current market value for a domain. The Fair Market Value of a domain can be anything from nearly nothing to millions of dollars. Factors involved may include previous sales data of similar domains, however a single letter difference can completely alter the value. The value of the domain (or any sum resp. division etc.) are usually added to the current or expected revenue from the web content (advertising, sales, etc.). The price of a domain (name + ext.) should not be confused with that of a website (content + revenue).

An estimate by an appraiser is always the addition of what they would like a domain to be worth together with the effective/expected/desired revenue from the web content. Some people put value on the length of the SLD (name) and other people prefer description capability, but the shorter an SLD is, the less descriptive it can be. Also, if short is crucial, then the TLD (extension) should be short too. It is less realistic to get a domain like LL.travel or LL.mobi than a domain travel. LL or mobi. LL. This illustrates the relativity of domain value estimation. It is safe to say that the revenue of web (content) can be easily stated, but that the value of a domain (SLD.TLD aka name.ext) is a matter of opinion and preference. In the end, however, any sale depends on the expectations of the domain seller and the domain buyer.

A webmaster creating a new web site either buys the domain name directly from a domain name registrar, or indirectly from a domain name registrar through a domainer. People who buy and sell domain names are known as domainers. People who sell value estimation services are known as appraisers.

Domain name sales occurring in the aftermarket are frequently submitted to the DN journal. The sales are listed weekly and include the top aftermarket resellers which include but are not limited to Sedo, Traffic (auctions), Afternic, NameJet, Moniker and private sales.

The week ending January 27, 2008, DNJournal reported that CNN, a cable news channel purchased iReport.com for $750,000. This signifies another turning point in domain name sales. This name has neither organic traffic, nor does it have a dictionary term alone. Instead it is a highly brandable domain name utilizing the second most popular prefix for a "dictionary" and commercial word.

In addition to a domain placing value on the shortness of the word, ease in spelling, commercial appeal, and organic capacity to generate natural traffic, today's domain names are being valued for the branding potential. The domain name sale iReport although not an organic or dictionary term alone, is actually preferred as a highly brandable term, in that it is has a popular pre-fix "i" which indicates the "report" to be online.

The prefixes and dashes between words were once considered second, but now due to brandability, if the term is a commercial term, a prefix is often preferred. Example eLoans markets with an e to indicate to its potential customers that a loan may be obtained online.

The two primary prefixes are "E", for electronic, and "I", for Internet. Both indicate the word or phrase to be accessible online. Because of that, in terms of branding, an i or e combined with a commercial term are highly desirable. In domain sales typically an e has been preferred, and i slightly less in terms of demand. eBrooklyn sold for approximately $2500 whereas once it would have been available to register at the price of a domain name (which ranges from $8 to $30 us dollars depending on the registrar). The rapidly increasing use of prefixes in conjunction with main dictionary and or commercial terms is here and for some predominantly internet based companies, or high technology, high profile companies, the prefix is now preferred.

One of the details that make a domain with a prefix more valuable for a brand, is the ability to simply promote the name without the use of ".com" in the promotion. If a domain owner had report.com he would be forced to use the .com to indicate it was on the net at that address, however a domain name with a one letter prefix does not need to use the ".com".

Someone could promote "iReport" as a brand, and assuming it was a world class brand, visitors would know they could find it at "iReport.com without seeing the .com. However if it was a .net, it would be wise to state iReport.net. This option to simply state the name of the company or entity is particularly valuable in that it is brief and clear in indicating that a report can be either made or found on the "i"nternet.

Some alternative domains that avoid the use of ".com" in their promotion are "WebMD" as the word web as a prefix suffice to indicate the information is online and likely at a .com extension.

Brands are greatly affected by the ability of the company to obtain the matching domain name. If a company builds a brand around a name to which it does not own the domain name, it can end up directing traffic to another domain owner's site. If it is a competitor, this would be a problem.

Today's advertising development of a great brand is strictly confined to the availability to synchronize the brand with a domain name. Any confusion might result in a competitor gaining valuable internet traffic and possible customers.

Intercapping is often used to clarify the meaning of a domain name. However, DNS is case-insensitive, and some names may be misinterpreted when converted to lowercase. For example: Who Represents, a database of artists and agents, chose whorepresents.com, which can be misread as whore presents dot com. Similarly, a therapists' network thought therapistfinder.com looked good. Other examples include cummingfirst.com, the website (as of August 2007) of the Cumming First United Church in Cumming, GA and powergenitalia.com, the website of an Italian Power Generator company. In such situations, the proper wording can be clarified by use of hyphens. For instance, Experts Exchange, the programmers' site, for a long time used expertsexchange.com, but ultimately changed the name to experts-exchange.com.

Leo Stoller threatened to sue the owners of StealThisEmail.com on the basis that, when read as stealthisemail.com, it infringed on claimed trademark rights to the word "stealth". There is no word mark for "stealth" in the USPTO trademark database and Leo Stoller's trademarks on this term were cancelled.

To the top

VeriSign

VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN) is an American company based in Mountain View, California that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the generic top-level domains for .com and .net, one of the largest SS7 signaling networks in North America, and the RFID directory for EPCGlobal. VeriSign also provides a variety of security and telecom services ranging from digital certificates, payments processing, and managed firewalls to mobile call roaming, toll-free call database queries and downloadable digital content for mobile devices. The company groups all of these functions under the banner of 'intelligent infrastructure' services.

The company's former payment processing service was sold to eBay in 2005.

VeriSign was founded in 1995 as a spin-off of the RSA Security certification services business. The new company received licenses to key cryptographic patents held by RSA and a time limited non-compete agreement. The new company served as a certificate authority (CA) — a role it still fulfills — and its initial mission was "providing trust for the Internet and Electronic Commerce through our Digital Authentication services and products." VeriSign now has more than 3,000,000 certificates in operation for everything from military to financial services and retail applications, making it the largest CA behind the encryption and authentication on the Internet, which most people recognize as the small padlock icon in their Web browser when shopping online. VeriSign is well known for the VeriSign Secured Seal, which is an outward expression of a Web site's authentication and encryption commonly posted to VeriSign SSL Certificate customers' Web sites.

The company held an Initial Public Offering on January 30, 1998 for US$14 a share. The pre-IPO investors included RSA Data Security Inc., Bessemer Ventures, Kleiner-Perkins, VISA International, Ameritech, Mitsubishi, Security Dynamics, and Fischer International. Along the way, VeriSign broadened its portfolio of "infrastructure services" by acquiring a number of additional businesses, including SecureIT in 1998 (from which it derived its Security Services division), Network Solutions in 2000 (from which it derived the domain name business, and later spun off the customer-facing 'registrar' component), Illuminet in 2001 (which marked the company's first foray into telecommunications), Guardent in 2003 (which improved its managed security offering), and Jamba! in 2004 (which is called Jamster! in English-speaking countries and consists of downloadable digital content for mobile phones). VeriSign made its presence in India by acquiring Unimobile in 2004.

As of 2005, VeriSign takes in more than $1 billion in annual revenue ($1.66 billion for FY 2005) with more than 4000 employees worldwide. The business is divided into two large divisions: Internet Services and Communications Services.

The Internet Services division includes Naming & Directory Services, which houses the domain name registry for .com and .net, as well as other DNS-related services, and RFID services; and Security Services, which spans a diverse set of capabilities. Managed Security Services includes managed security services (firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, vulnerability protection, etc.), global security consulting (assessments, design, compliance, certification), email security (anti-spam, anti-virus), strong authentication (tokens and remote access validation), as well as the original digital certificate/SSL business including the most recent Extended Validation (High Assurance) SSL Certificates. VeriSign claims to handle 32 billion domain name system (DNS) inquiries daily, 35% of North American e-commerce, and encryption for the "majority" of secure Web sites.

The Communications Services group acts as a service provider to the global telecommunications sector, with a similarly diverse set of capabilities. The division offers a variety of services for both wireline and wireless telcos, including pre-paid and post-paid billing; network interoperability for text messaging and call roaming; and the database and mediation services that power caller ID, local number portability (LNP), wireless LNP, VoIP, call routing, toll-free call directories, and more. VeriSign also offers a white-labeled retail wireless content portal which it operates directly to consumer under the Jamba! and Jamster! brands. The stats on VeriSign's communications network are significant: 2.7 billion phone call connections, 10 million caller IDs, and 3 million game, ringtone and picture downloads per day.

On November 14th 2007, during VeriSign Analyst Day presentations, VeriSign announced that it would focus on its core businesses of Naming Services, Web Certificates, and Identity Protection Services by divesting (selling or shutting down) much of the rest of its portfolio. Published reports indicate that the company may end up divesting up to 12 of its 15 business units, eliminating half of its 4500 employees.

On March 2nd, 2009, the firm announced it was selling its Communications Services Group for $230M to TNS, Inc.

In 2002, VeriSign were sued for domain slamming. Although they were found not to have broken the law, they were barred from suggesting that a domain was about to expire or that a transfer was actually a renewal.

VeriSign has also faced some public scrutiny regarding its relationship with ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and DNS. In September 2003, VeriSign introduced a service called Site Finder, which redirected Web browsers to a search service when users attempted to go to nonexistent .com or .net domain names. ICANN asserted that VeriSign had overstepped the terms of its contract with the U. S. Department of Commerce, which in essence grants VeriSign the right to operate the DNS for .com and .net, and VeriSign shut down the service. Subsequently, VeriSign filed a lawsuit against ICANN in February 2004, seeking to gain clarity over what services it could offer in the context of its contract with ICANN. The claim was moved from federal to California state court in August 2004 and is still pending. In late 2005 VeriSign and ICANN announced a proposed settlement which defines a process for the introduction of new registry services in the .com registry. The documents concerning these settlements are available here. The terms of this proposed settlement are themselves contentious, and have received widespread criticism. The ICANN comments mailing list archive documents some of these. Additionally VeriSign was involved in the sex.com matter decided by the Ninth circuit.

In other negotiations with ICANN, VeriSign gave up operation of the .org top-level domain in 2003 in return for continued rights over .com, the largest domain with more than 34 million registered domain names. In mid-2005, the existing contract for the operation of .net expired and five companies, including VeriSign, bid for management of it. VeriSign's bid was backed by numerous IT and telecom heavyweights including Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems, MCI and others, which all asserted that VeriSign had a perfect record operating .net. They proposed VeriSign continue to manage the .net DNS due to its critical importance as the domain underlying numerous "backbone" network services. On the 8th of June 2005 ICANN announced that VeriSign had been approved to operate .net until 2011. More information on the .net bidding process is available here.

VeriSign has a very important place in the Internet's DNS infrastructure. VeriSign is the authoritative registry operator for two of the most important top-level domains, .com and .net. It is also the authoritative registry operator for the country code top-level domains .cc (Cocos Islands) and .tv (Tuvalu). In addition, VeriSign runs the DNS servers for .edu, .name, and .jobs for their respective registry operators which are non-profit organizations, however they do not have any say in the operation of these domains. Registry operators are often a "wholesale" role; there are many "retail" domain name registrars which actually sell .com and other domain names to consumers.

VeriSign also runs two of the Internet's root nameservers, A and J. It is the only root server operator that runs more than one server. The J root is anycasted. The A root is located in their global network operation center in Loudoun County, Virginia.

Activision Blizzard · Adobe · Akamai Technologies · Altera · Amazon.com · Amgen · Apollo Group · Apple · Applied Materials · Autodesk · Automatic Data Processing · Baidu · Bed Bath & Beyond · Biogen Idec · Broadcom · C. H. Robinson Worldwide · CA, Inc. · Celgene · Cephalon · Check Point · Cintas · Cisco · Citrix · Cognizant Technology Solutions · Comcast · Costco · Dell · DENTSPLY International · Dish Network Corporation · eBay · Electronic Arts · Expedia · Expeditors International · Express Scripts · Fastenal · First Solar · Fiserv · Flextronics · FLIR Systems · Foster Wheeler · Garmin · Genzyme · Gilead Sciences · Google · Hansen Natural · Henry Schein · Hologic · IAC/InterActiveCorp · Illumina · Infosys · Intel · Intuit · Intuitive Surgical · J.B. Hunt · Joy Global · Juniper Networks · KLA-Tencor · Lam Research · Liberty Global · Liberty Media · Life Technologies · Linear Technology · Logitech · Marvell · Maxim Integrated Products · Microchip Technology · Microsoft · Millicom International Cellular · NetApp · News Corporation · NII · Nvidia · O'Reilly Automotive · Oracle · PACCAR · Patterson Companies · Paychex · Pharmaceutical Product Development · Qualcomm · Research In Motion · Ross Stores · Ryanair · Seagate · Sears · Sigma-Aldrich · Staples · Starbucks · Steel Dynamics · Stericycle · Sun Microsystems · Symantec · Teva Pharmaceutical Industries · The DirecTV Group · Urban Outfitters · VeriSign · Vertex Pharmaceuticals · Warner Chilcott · Wynn Resorts · Xilinx · Yahoo!

To the top