The WWW prefix – a relic from the early days of the ‘world wide web’ – is about to become more expensive to use.
Citing skyrocketing operational costs, Verisign announced that it will not automatically enable the prefix for new domain registrations, unless the registrant explicitly requests it; for a fee of course.
“We examined all the corners we could cut in our budget and frankly speaking, the current state of bad economy does not allow us to hold onto legacy systems, such as the ‘www’ prefix without a surcharge”, said Jillian McNibble – deputy CFO at Verisign.
“The new, improved DNS that we are designing will have to be funded from internal systems, such as the ‘www’ prefix support. We expect this to be a medium-sized complaint from our users, who are used to such measures”, added Jillian McNibble with a smile.
In recent years, several thousand companies have dropped the prefix ‘www’ from their URLs and domain ads altogether; once considered a necessity to distinguish the web from FTP, newsgroups, Gopher and other such protocols of the primordial Internet, the ‘www’ prefix is breathing its final bytes as we speak.
This measure will also make the registration of ‘wwwdomain.com’ typos obsolete, according to Verisign experts.
It’s yet another counter-measure against cybersquatters, who tend to latch onto premium domains by adding a ‘www’ to the keyword for its typo-traffic.
There was no announcement on the exact amount to be charged for using the ‘www’ prefix but it’s expected to be less than 50% of the registration fee.
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prepare to hear from verisign legal 😉
I will gladly point them to the footer 😀
This is a good one, Lucius. Too bad the other domain blogs didn’t get the joke.
I might have unleashed Pandora’s Box and Verisign might consider this in all seriousness!
Actually, the folks at VeriSign got a chuckle out of this. Full disclosure: I work for their PR firm. 🙂