Verisign sometimes refers to their IDN.IDN activities as "
aliasing"
Excerpts from their Q1 2015 Earnings Report conference call:
23 April 2015
Jim Bidzos (Chairman, President and CEO):
"One way VeriSign
has been
participating in ICANN's new gTLD program was by applying for
internationalized domain name transliterations of .com and .net. We have
signed 11 IDN TLD registry agreements and are seeking a modified sunrise
period from ICANN... we have submitted our request for this modified sunrise period and are awaiting the response from ICANN. The failure to gain approval could delay a general availability date or could result in VeriSign
having to revise our go-to-market strategy for the IDNs."
Pat Kane (SVP - Naming and Directory Services):
"The process that we have to go through, it starts off with what is
called pre-delegation, which will happen in early May [2015]. And then, there
is a controlled interruption phase, which lasts for 90 days which
actually has to deal with name collisions and making sure that there is
not any unwanted behaviors within the new gTLD space, and then we would
launch after that at the earliest. So it really all depends upon,
though, getting approval from ICANN on the modified sunrise period and
seeing what we can do from there. ...There are no set prices within the new registry agreements for the IDN TLDs."
David Atchley (VP, Treasury and IR):
"We are free to set any initial price that we choose under the new
registry agreement, and the only requirement should we choose to change
those prices would be a six-month notice period. We have additional
flexibility in that we applied for 11 of these IDNs. Most of them are
.com. Some of them are .net. All of them are spread across different
countries and different local language character sets. And we are free,
also, to price differently in those geographies or differently for .com
or .net. We have complete flexibility in how we price those products."
