ICANN will grant Verisign the right to register a single-character domain name, O.com. This matter has been included in the consent agenda of the next board meeting that will be held during ICANN 64 that kicked off in Koba, Japan. The point in the consent agenda almost automatically means that the board has already supported this decision, Domain Incite adds.
The registration of single-character domains was prohibited back in 1993 because of possible technical problems. As of today, there are only three single-character domains registered before the ban came into effect: q.com, x.com and z.com. Later it turned out that the threat of single-character domains was exaggerated. No TLD added to the DNS route zone after 2012 has restrictions on the registration of single-character domains. Nevertheless, these restrictions are still present in “old” domain zones, such as .COM.
A large US online retailer, Overstock, is the main and maybe the only contestant for O.com. For many years, it has been lobbying for the lifting of these restrictions, and it looks like the company has finally succeeded. It is expected that O.com will be auctioned at a starting price of several million dollars. However, Verisign will only get the standard registration fee: $7.85. The rest of the money will be donated to charity. But Verisign is hardly going to be disadvantaged: first, the annual prolongation fee of such a valuable domain will probably be rather high, and second, other single-character domains can follow soon.
