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KKR, Others Near Deal to Buy GoDaddy

Anupreeta Das — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 15:44:46 +0000

Private equity firms KKR & Co. and Silver Lake Partners, along with a third investor, are nearing a deal to buy GoDaddy Group Inc., the closely-held company that registers Internet domain names, for between $2 billion and $2.5 billion, people familiar with the matter said.

An announcement of the sale could come as early as next week, although a deal hasn’t been signed yet and the people cautioned that an agreement may not be reached.

Private equity and venture capital firm Technology Crossover Ventures is also a minority investor in the proposed deal for Scottsdale, Ariz.-based GoDaddy, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

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Egypt Grabs First Arabic Domain Name

Cassandra Vinograd — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:00:47 +0000

On the first day that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers opened registration for non-Latin script domains, Egypt says it has seized the opportunity to register the first all-Arabic domain name.

Information Technology Minister Tarek Kamel said at a U.N. sponsored Internet conference that his government had filed an application to register the domain “.masr”–or “.Egypt”–written entirely in Arabic, according to the Associated Press. ICANN chief executive Rod Beckstrom said so far six countries submitted applications for domains in three languages, AP reports.

Not everyone thinks the groundbreaking move deserves fanfare–Reporters Without Borders said it finds it “surprising and disturbing” that Egypt is playing host to the Internet Governance Forum. “It is astonishing that a government that is openly hostile to Internet users is assigned the organisation of an international meeting on the Internet’s future,” the advocacy group said in a statement.

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ICANN: Club Med for Geeks?

Marisa Taylor — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:11:37 +0000

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization that manages Internet domain names, has been called a lot of names, but “Club Med for Geeks” is a new one.

Computerworld reporter Patrick Thibodeau hurled the insult on an email list discussion after learning that ICANN had a travel budget of more than $12 million.

The organization convenes three international meetings a year to discuss Internet domain name issues, in places such as San Juan, Sao Paulo, Marrakech and Wellington.

Thibodeau suggests that ICANN’s recent decision to relax top-line domain-naming rules and allow businesses to purchase their own is a ploy to rake in more money for travel to exotic locales.

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Mac Attack

John Paczkowski — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:55:51 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Recession Weighs on Web Address Growth

Andrew LaVallee — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:01:25 +0000

Maybe sexy Super Bowl ads aren’t helping the domain name business as much as we thought.

Domain registrar VeriSign’s (VRSN) latest report on the state of the industry shows that while more than 10.1 million new Web addresses were registered in the fourth quarter, this was a 17 percent drop from the period a year earlier.

The report, which drew from data provided by VeriSign, domain-data provider ZookNIC and the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, also showed a yearlong decline: New domain registrations averaged 11.9 million in 2008, compared with 12.2 million in 2007.

The slowdown in new URLs is clearly a reflection of the recession’s impact, says VeriSign spokesman Tom Galvin. “Any type of broader economic weakness is going to affect” that, he said, and it’s something the industry saw in the early part of the decade as well.

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