The ICANN 67 Public Meeting, which was scheduled to be held in Cancún, Mexico, has been moved to an online event due to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. The event is still scheduled to proceed online from March 7-12, 2020. It is the first time ICANN will be holding a totally remote event. If it goes well, perhaps ICANN can save money by holding future events online.
Verisign submitted a letter (pdf) to ICANN in response to the comments regarding the proposed amendment #3 of the .com registry contract. I want to highlight one aspect of the letter I found notable. In providing an example of domain name speculator activity, Verisign wrote:
“As a recent example, moments before the World Health Organization announced the official name of the coronavirus, Namecheap registered the name (covid-19.com) to a domain name speculator, presumably unassociated with the public health mission of the WHO.”
GoDaddy sent a warning email to a group of its customers about the potential for price increases on .com domain names that were authorized by ICANN. A comment period is now underway for people to share their feedback about the proposed changes allowing Verisign to increase the wholesale price of .com domain names, and several domain registrars have proactively contacted their customers to encourage them to submit comments to ICANN about this.
My understanding is that GoDaddy sent the email below to its Premier Services customers. This group is primarily made up of domain investors, but there are other businesses with large domain name portfolios that are in this group of customers. Obviously, the businesses with the largest portfolios of .com domain names under management are those that will be impacted the most by price increases.
The Internet Commerce Association (ICA) is urging its members and other domain name registrants to let ICANN know they oppose price hikes on .com domain names. Just like the organization did when it opposed the removal of price caps on .org domain names, the ICA has created an easy to use tool to allow people to submit a comment to ICANN voicing their opposition. For what it’s worth, people in favor of allowing price hikes could also use the tool.
Despite the fact that I have been involved in the domain name investment space for close to 15 years (full time for 12), I still don’t have expert level knowledge about the Domain Name System (DNS). I know enough about DNS to get by, but I would not consider myself anything close to an expert when it comes to DNS.
ICANN will be hosting a free webinar to help people learn more about DNS Fundamentals. The webinar was announced this morning on ICANN’s Twitter feed:
There has been quite a bit of coverage about the Ethos Capital acquisition of PIR (and the .org registry) for a reported sale price of $1.135 billion. Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire has done a particularly good job of covering this, as has Kevin Murphy of Domain Incite and several others. In addition, there has been mainstream coverage of the proposed deal in the Wall St. Journal, The Register, ArsTechnica, and other news outlets with considerable reach.
