VeriSign ($VRSN) podcast mentions
Some big news dropped the Friday, late the Friday before Labor Day holiday, and that is that a California man filed an antitrust lawsuit against Verisign and ICANN over .com pricing. Jeff Kessler is a registrant of 6 domain names, and his lawsuit, filed by a class action firm, details the decades-long history of Verisign's contract with ICANN for .com domain names and argues that Verisign coerced ICANN into giving the company good terms. Kessler is seeking to represent a nationwide class of people and businesses that have paid to renew .com domains since at least September 4th, 2022. And that nationwide class seeks injunctive relief. A separate California class seeks monetary damages and other relief under California state laws. Among other things, the lawsuit asked the court to stop the defendants, VeriSign and ICANN, from continuing the alleged anticompetitive conduct and prevent enforcement of provisions that restrict ICANN's ability to regulate .com wholesale pricing. Last week, I had an exclusive on another new top-level domain name applicant, Aruba, the company that currently operates the .cloud top-level domain name, applied in this year's round. It named 39 top-level strings as part of its applications. These include both the primary and replacement strings. Now, Aruba surprised many when it topped Amazon, Google, and other companies in a private auction for .cloud back in the 2012 expansion round. .cloud now has over half a million registrations. Aruba is a dominant player for web presence in Italy and offers services elsewhere in Europe as well. .cloud obviously had a lot to do with Aruba's core business in IT. This time around, it has a broad swath of applications, everything from .ask to .hello to .moon to .sign, .yes, .zen, and .zzz. Many of these proposed strings conflict with those announced by other applicants, so it'll be interesting to see where everything shakes out. Also last week, ShortDot, the top-level domain name company behind .icu, .cfd, and other short names, announced that it has submitted 40 top-level domain applications covering 80 total strings when you include replacement strings. ShortDot was not an applicant in the 2012 round but later acquired and repurposed strings. Shortdot CEO Lars Jensen explained the company's story on Domain Name Wire Podcast 586, so you can go back and listen to that if you'd like.
Andrew Allemann · Domain Name Wire Podcast · Australian domain alert – DNW Podcast #603 · 2026-09-14And keeping with its name, all of its proposed strings are just 3 to 4 characters. Some examples include .api, .hub, .git, .hero, and .slay. Again, some of these might be primary and some might be replacement strings and As with Aruba, a lot of the names that it disclosed will be in contention sets with other applicants. Some unfortunate news last week. IONOS, a very large domain and hosting company in Europe, announced layoffs. It's going to trim about 10% of its staff, going from roughly 3,800 to 3,350 full-time employees. It said that reduction will be split equally between domestic and international operations. Employment laws in Germany, where IONOS is based, and in much of Europe are relatively strong, making it difficult for companies to immediately terminate employees. IONOS said it hopes to do the majority of these reductions through volunteer redundancy programs. The company's move comes as artificial intelligence affects not only the workforce requirements of tech companies, but also the demand for the products they sell. Some of Iona's brands include InternetX, Arsys, United Domains, and Strato. The company also owns Seedo, which it is trying to sell, and Seedo has already laid off workers this year. Finally, if you like to drop catch.com and .net domain names and you're in the United States, the time that names drop is going to be a little bit inconvenient going forward. Currently, domains drop in the afternoon US time, but effective October 1st, VeriSign is moving the drop time to start at noon UTC. This is rather early during daylight savings time. That's 5:00 AM Pacific, and during standard time it's 4:00 AM Pacific. On the East Coast, it's 8:00 AM and 7:00 AM respectively. So now the drop time is actually going to change depending on the time of year and if you're in daylight savings time or standard time. SnapNames and Namejet encourage customers to submit backorders no later than 15 minutes before the drop begins. Dropcatch is now asking customers to place orders 30 minutes ahead of time. There is more news at Domain Name Wire, including a story about a fake domain sales post on X, more details on a lawsuit involving domains that were stolen from the registrar TrustaName, and a couple of reverse domain name hijacking decisions. So check that out. But now let's chat with Aaron.
Andrew Allemann · Domain Name Wire Podcast · Australian domain alert – DNW Podcast #603 · 2026-09-14