Neustar have advised ICANN they will be increasing the wholesale price of .BIZ domains, the price they charge registrar’s, by $0.55 or approximately 7.5 per cent as of 1 February 2012. This means the price will increase from the current$7.30 to $7.85 per year and is in line with the registry agreement Neustar have with ICANN. Of course, registrants can avoid the fee increase by registering their .BIZ domain names before 1 February through America Registry here .

Verisign reported financial results for the second quarter to end 30 June 2011 with reported revenue of $190 million for the quarter, up five per cent from the prior quarter and up 13 per cent from the same quarter in 2010. Verisign Registry Services ended the quarter with 110 million active domain names in the adjusted zone for .COM and .NET, representing an eight per cent increase year-over-year. In the second quarter of 2011, Verisign processed 8.1 million new domain name registrations, representing a two per cent increase year-over-year. Other highlights of the report relating to domain names included: On May 11, 2011, Verisign announced that it had entered into a Settlement Agreement and Mutual Release with the Coalition for ICANN Transparency, Inc. (CFIT), CFIT’s members and specified related parties that resolved the over five year long CFIT litigation On June 28, 2011, Verisign announced that ICANN and Verisign have renewed Verisign’s contract to serve as the authoritative registry operator for the .NET registry for another six years On 14 July, 2011, Verisign announced that as of 15 January, 2012, the registry fee for .COM domain names will increase from $7.34 to $7.85 and that the registry fee for .NET domain names will increase from $4.65 to $5.11, the maximum possible under the registry agreement with ICANN. The full Verisign news release with further details of the financial results is available here .

The registry fee for .COM and .NET domain names will increase from $7.34 to $7.85 and $4.65 to $5.11 respectively on 15 January 2012 VeriSign, the registry for both TLDs, announced. The increases are a smidgen under the maximum possible under the registry agreement with ICANN – seven per cent for .COM and ten per cent for .NET. The last increase was on 1 July 2010 when the registry fee for .COM domains increased from $6.86 to $7.34 and for .NET domains increased from $4.23 to $4.65. In justifying the increases, VeriSign said in a statement that: “Continued strong global Internet usage growth, along with increasingly powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks leveled against all parts of the Internet’s critical infrastructure, have dramatically increased the demands on Internet infrastructure providers such as Verisign. In the last five years, the volume of Domain Name System (DNS) queries on Verisign’s global Internet infrastructure has more than doubled, increasing to an average daily query load of 57 billion in the first quarter of 2011. Future growth is expected to occur at an even faster pace. Verisign’s infrastructure has maintained 100 percent operational security, accuracy and stability for more than a decade due to continued innovation and investment in the infrastructure.” To avoid the increases, registrants are able to register their .COM and .NET domains before 15 January. To register your .COM and .NET domain names, check out America Registry here .

With the registration of wikileaks.ch, the registry for .CH domain names, SWITCH, has been receiving what they say have been a large number of enquiries as to the circumstances where they would delete the domain name. SWITCH has said in a statement they are “not responsible for the content of websites

.CO announced this week the official launch of its “Rapid Domain Compliance Process,” which gives the registry the tools it needs to quickly bring “into compliance” any domain name that is being deployed for fraudulent, malicious or illegal purposes as well as it will begin testing DNSSEC in January.

The recent launch of Russia’s Cyrillic top level domain, where over 600,000 domain names have been registered in less than three weeks since its launch, has been touched by scandal.

The relaunch of .CO has proved to be a resounding success to date with the registry announcing they have passed the 600,000 active registrations mark as of 24 November. The relaunch of .CO, the ccTLD for Colombia, took place earlier this year and it has been four months since registrations were available to the general public.