ICANN recently announced that its Board of Directors approved the pending deal with VeriSign for the .COM registry. ICANN has been under a lot of pressure to transfer the “ownership” of domain names to the UN. A few months ago, ICANN got another five-year lease … so they hurried to cast in stone VeriSign’s monopoly.

The .COM registry already is VeriSign’s highest-margin business, netting VeriSign $450 million each year. The deal with ICANN will allow VeriSign to increase prices significantly (as much as 28% in the next four years). Combine that with the explosive growth of domain registrations in general and VeriSign will soon be looking at a cash cow that yields $600+ million per year.

GoDaddy’s CEO, Bob Parsons, is one of the most vocal opponents of the deal. Another opponent is Paul Garrin (a complete article about it in The Village Voice).

In short: sell your domains, buy VeriSign stock. Your domains are going to get more and more expensive to renew. I personally own about 50, so I was thinking about selling half of them to buy VeriSign stock. That way, no matter what happens, I win!

Note: Originally posted at SmartApps