Last week brought some very important news for the domain industry with the delegation of .web within the DNS root zone. This ends over 10 years of dramatic fighting for this domain. Back in 2012, in the early days of the gTLD program, there was hardly anyone in the sector who did not view .web as the most praised asset and the main competitor of .com . Accordingly, many sought to control it.
ICANN had to hold an auction in which Nu Dot Co, an obscure company nobody knew, won the bid by offering to pay a record amount of $135 million for managing the domain. Soon, it turned out that Verisign secretly bankrolled Nu Dot Co and went on to obtain the rights to the .web domain.
This sparked indignation and controversy in the industry with Afilias, another contender for the .web domain, showing the most zeal and spending ten years challenging the auction’s results and its legitimacy. Even after being taken over by Identity Digital, Afilias continued its crusade through its offshoot Altanovo.
But now these are all things of the past. “The delegation of .web follows the successful resolution of all previous disputes related to the generic top-level domain (gTLD), the details of which are confidential,” Verisign said in its official statement. In its article on this news story, Domain Incite pointed out that it looked like Altanovo has yanked its Independent Review Process complaint against Verisign, with Verisign’s statement strongly suggesting it received generous compensation to do so.
In 2016, most observers thought that Verisign’s main objective did not provide for developing .web but rather to prevent any other company from getting its hands on the asset which could challenge .com ’s dominance. Some argued that Verisign would not even launch .web and leave it dormant. That may or may not have been true at the time, but clearly the situation has changed. In its statement, the company announced plans to launch .web later this year with its mandatory sunrise period for trademark holders, followed by the Limited Registration Period (LRP) for existing .com registrants.
“We intend to run an LRP, and the rules that we will use is we will give all of our holders of .com registrations, the opportunity to come and get the same registration in .web before we open registrations for general availability,” Verisign CEO Jim Bidzos said.
This could have a major impact from a business perspective. Unlike .com , .web is not subject to pricing controls. If, say, Verisign charges about $15 per domain per year, and about 1% of .com domains have their matching .web names registered, this could fetch about $25 million a year in revenue.
This is merely a hypothesis, so far, since .web has yet to announce its pricing. It remains to be seen how many .com registrants will want to use the same names in the .web domain. That said, it is obvious that launching and developing .web does make sense from a business perspective. There is also a reason why Verisign wanted to launch the domain as quickly as possible. New domains will be entering the market in the coming years as part of the second gTLD round, which means that .web wants to get ahead of the curve to get more visibility and not to be submerged by this new wave.
