Domain Prices Set to Rise

February 2006

The days of ever cheaper domain names may well be numbered, thanks to a newly-revised agreement between ICANN and online security provider VeriSign.

If ratified, the revised proposed agreement would end years of festering disagreement over domain names and related services between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and VeriSign.

If all of this sounds a familiar, you would be correct. ICANN and VeriSign supposedly had reached a tentative deal along the same lines back in October. That deal was supposed to settle all outstanding issues between them.

VeriSign has been administering the .com domain name space on behalf of ICANN since it was awarded the contract in 2001. In 2004, VeriSign filed suit again ICANN, charging it with breach of contract issues stemming from VeriSign's similar SiteFinder and waiting-list service.