Verisign is tightening its grip on the wacky world of domain registration with the $45m cash purchase of the rights to flog .tv names from existing rights holder .tv Corp international.

Verisign maintains the directory of approx. 30 million .com, .net, and .org addresses. With .tv, the Net country code for Tuvalu, under its belt, the company now controls the only unequivocal 'alternative' domain name success.

.TV will add less than a million dollars in sales to Verisign in Q4, 2001 and $7m-10m in net deferred revenues - whatever that means - the company reports. ®

Reuters reports that VeriSign has announced the purchase of "worldwide registry rights" to .tv by buying .tv Corp International for $45 million. It's certainly good to see competition keep increasing in the registry sector so very dramatically.

The small size of the deal, and .tv's relatively small market share, ensure that this deal will not, however, cause any anti-trust scrutiny...at least outside