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Verisign sues Google's new love-interest .XYZ for a second time

Dot-com owner applies screws to young upstart

Verisign under pressure

Whether Verisign really believes any of this is uncertain, but what has managed to do is pull the companies that are attacking the .com name into very expensive litigation. Verisign has money to burn; the others do not.

On the face of it, Verisign doesn't have a leg to stand on. While companies that applied for new internet extensions were obliged by ICANN to name a back-end operator, it's questionable whether that constituted a binding agreement, since at that stage of the process, it wasn't clear whether they would win the TLDs at all.

Similarly, when XYZ.com offered to buy the rights to .security, .protection, and .theatre, it's very unlikely that it would have been obliged to use the back-end operators named in the applications – especially if ICANN later approved a change, which it did in each case.

Likewise, Verisign's claim that its .com domain business – which currently comprises 118 million domains – is being disrupted by a few blog posts and a YouTube ad that has been viewed just 50,000 times is bordering on farcical.

The real issue is that Verisign's .com operation has nowhere to go but down.

At the moment, one of the biggest factors holding back uptake in the new domains is a widespread belief that they aren't really needed, and that getting a .com address should be a company's first priority.

Yet it is accepted wisdom in the domain name world that there are no good .com domains left and therefore you have to pay a premium to get hold of one. The decision to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a .com rather than spending $50 to get the same name under dozens of other registries is almost entirely a question of perception.

Can't even get it

Take Google, one of the largest companies in the world. When its CEO Larry Page restructured it as a subsidiary of a new company, Alphabet, he wasn't even able to purchase alphabet.com, which is owned by car maker BMW. Thus, abc.xyz.

In short, there is also no good reason why having the letters C, O, and M at the end of web address is any more useful than having other letters there.

And with many of the new endings offering advantages – such as industry-specific words (.music) or extra in-built security (.bank) – the days of .com's unquestioned dominance are all but over.

Is Verisign simply using its financial firepower to slow its competitors and so slow the decline of .com domains? Or is its corporate ego so huge that it genuinely can't see why an overcrowded .com namespace is not a good bet, and so it sees conspiracy when people point that fact out? It's probably a combination of both.

One thing is for sure: for the foreseeable future, XYZ.com is going to see a lot of its time and profits chewed up in sparring with the domain industry's behemoth. ®

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