In Ron Jackson's latest Lowdown post, he begins the reel of news with Verisign. Most will remember a major battle two years ago when the prospect of ICANN allowing Verisign to charge varying prices for domain name registrations and renewals caused an uproar in the domain community.
The 2006 battle was triggered when veteran domainer and long-time ICANN watcher George Kirikos spotted dangerous language in the proposed .biz/.info/.org contracts and sounded the alarm. Now, in contracts that are being proposed for the new gTLDs that ICANN plans to start rolling out next year, Kirikos has again found a variable pricing trojan horse lurking in the contract language. ICANN opened a public commentary window to support or oppose the new contracts on October 24 and in typical ICANN fashion that window will close very quickly - on December 8.
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Jackson's second piece of news deals with the holiday season. With the general economy in complete disarray nearly all of the "experts" are predicting a dismal Christmas season for retailers, except merchants who sell online, who are expected to enjoy double digit growth over last year. Time Magazine has all of the details in an article released today titled Will Online Sales Brighten a Bleak Holiday Season? Author Kristina Dell wrote, "Holiday forecasts predict zero to 2.2% overall sales gains for November and December, according to respective estimates by Bain & Co. and the National Retail Federation (NRF), the world's largest retail trade association. By comparison, online retail sales are expected to grow 12% to $44 billion according to Forrester Research."
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Source: Reprinted with Ron Jackson’s Permission – DomainNews.com on November 12, 2008 – Posted by Caycee Boyce – Editor