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“dotMobi, a consortium to offer the first and only Internet address created for mobile phones, today announced that Visa International has made an investment in dotMobi and will have a representative on dotMobi’s Board of Directors. This investment adds Visa to a consortium that already represents 13 leading mobile operators, network & device manufacturers, and internet content providers. ” Press release here

VeriSign has asked ICANN to permit a  new DNS Update Service for registrars and others.  Notice of new Service (.pdf) 

Rob Hall CEO of Momentous.ca made a very good presentation yesterday
at the ICANN Public meeting in Lisbon in which he looked at how the domain expiry process has evolved over the last few years.  

Momentous.ca ICANN Tutorial – Changes in the expiry process (.pdf)

Domisfera has interviewed Benjamin Blumenthal, Director of Marketing at Telnic the company behind .tel.

The interview explains what sets .tel apart from other tlds.

Interfax is reporting – MOSCOW. March 23 – The number of domain names registered in the .ru zone (www.name.ru) has reached 800,000, the company RU-Center, the largest registrar of Russian domain names, told Interfax.

Neustar has announced it intends to deploy IDNs for both Japanese and Chinese languages from the 21st April, 2007 – Press release here

TechWorld is reporting – Niue, a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, claims that its internet domain, .nu, was stolen by an American businessman, and they want it back.

Afilias has just posted a press release confirming the number of .info domains as we reported last month has past 4,000,000 registrations.

The press release contains an analysis report which has some interesting stats
including a graph showing the number of registrations over time since 2002

The reports highlights include

•.INFO sites are active – 74 percent of .INFO sites are active, including over 1 million dedicated sites. This figure is an increase from 65 percent in 2004.

•Wide distribution channel promotes .INFO sales – .INFO’s availability is expanding as the domain is now available for sale through 183 registrars worldwide.

•.INFO is becoming characteristic of the global domain name market – North America is the top market for .INFO domain sales (51 percent) with Europe closely in second place (38 percent). The US is the top country for .INFO registrations (48 percent) followed by Germany (11 percent).

•.INFO is increasing in aftermarket sales – The highest aftermarket sale on record for .INFO was NewYork.info which sold for over US$46,000 in September 2006.

Sometimes its good to try and visualise the the domain industry. Here is a list showing the relative size by numbers of domains registered) of the the worlds largest registrars.

1 Go Daddy Software – 16,322,370
2 eNom – 7,177,819
3 Network Solutions – 6,648,715
4 Tucows – 5,717,664
5 Melbourne IT – 4,404,239
6 Schlund+Partner – 3,229,846
7 Register.com – 2,756,129
8 Wild West Domains – 2,244,088
9 Moniker Online Services – 1,967,207
10 DomainDoorman – 1,845,374
11 Belgiumdomains, LLC – 1,773,561
12 CapitolDomains – 1,756,673
13 PublicDomainRegistry.com – 1,560,582
14 Intercosmos Media – 1,289,904
15 OnlineNIC, Inc. – 1,096,358
16 Key-Systems GmbH – 1,085,710
17 Dotster – 1,068,231
18 Dotregistrar.com – 962,333
19 NameKing.com – 934,874
20 RegisterFly.com, Inc. – 900,355
21 DomainDiscover – 867,274
22 Fabulous.com Pty Ltd – 850,772
23 Xin Net Corp – 699,720
24 Cronon AG – 653,746
25 Compana LLC – 652,607
26 ItsYourDomain.com – 610,333
27 joker.com – 583,728
28 DomainSite.com – 537,920
29 PSI-USA, Inc. – 507,194
30 Name.net LLC – 480,991

The sheer scale of Tasting and Kiting means the figures at some registrars are subject to much greater change than happened a couple of years ago. 

Edit:  New post showing the latest list of  largest registrars

In a well written mainstream media article the Financial Times takes a look at the ownership of domains.