Domain Industry & Internet News

Domain Name Industry News

afilias

Donuts’ Afilias Deal Closes

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Back in November many were surprised by the news that Donuts was acquiring Afilias. While mergers and acquisitions happen all the time, this deal was big news and to many observers probably a little surprising. Yesterday the deal closed. The "change of control" had been on the agenda of a recent ICANN Board meeting, but nothing of any substance came out of that. … [Read more...] about Donuts’ Afilias Deal Closes

Afilias Wins Contract to Run Backend Registry Services for .io, .ac and .sh

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Afilias has won the contract to run the backend registry services for a number of country code domain extensions. The new contract will see Afilias handling the technical side of .io, .ac and .sh which are currently run in-house by The Internet Computer Bureau. In the past few years the .io ccTLD has become popular with startups as an alternative to .com. Details of the … [Read more...] about Afilias Wins Contract to Run Backend Registry Services for .io, .ac and .sh

Afilias Attempts To Bury The Hatchet With Registrars

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Afilias was vocally opposed to vertical integration and cross-ownership between registrars and registries. Several of its policy staff were active participants in the VI (vertical integration) working group within the GNSO for the last few months. And if you have a few hours to spare you can trawl through the email archives and meeting recordings to get a "feel" of their … [Read more...] about Afilias Attempts To Bury The Hatchet With Registrars

Afilias Acquires dotMobi

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Afilias, which runs .info and provides registry services to a lot of other domains, has acquired the .mobi registry operator - mTLD Ltd.The acquisition was officially announced on February 11th 2010, with both Afilias and mTLD releasing press releases etc., as well as a message to pass on to any registrants who might be concerned by the acquisition.Is this good news or bad … [Read more...] about Afilias Acquires dotMobi

Domain Pricing – Is There A Ceiling?

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The announcements by Verisign, PIR and Afilias of price increases in com,net,org and .info shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone.However if the year on year price increases do leave an interesting question - is there an upper ceiling?Will the next price increase have a negative impact on some of the low cost registrars? (The last one didn't seem to have much … [Read more...] about Domain Pricing – Is There A Ceiling?

Dotdk To Come Under New Management

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It's official.DotDK is to come under new management from early 2009.The DotDK Society have released a full press release detailing some of the reasons why their new management will be a marked improvement for stakeholders.Afilias has been chosen to handle the registry backend, so the full deployment of EPP is to be expected.More information is available on the DotDK siteBoth … [Read more...] about Dotdk To Come Under New Management

Eurid and the failure to promote dotEU

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In some ways the failure of .eu to capture hearts and minds makes me sad. I'm European. I'd like to think that a European namespace could be a success, but that seems to be a misplaced desire.As I mentioned some time ago, the only way to grow a namespace or TLD is through usage. Once people start to see a domain extension in "action" then they begin to start using it. If people … [Read more...] about Eurid and the failure to promote dotEU

Afilias and GoDaddy to Get .Me

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According to post earlier today on Jothan Frakes' blog the .me registry is going to be managed by Aflilias in partnership with GoDaddy.Francesco posted about the tendering process back in November and while his post does cover most of the issues with the tender he obviously hadn't considered the possibility of a registry operator teaming up with a registrar - but who could … [Read more...] about Afilias and GoDaddy to Get .Me