Patent for managing domain name bundles — Afilias gets

Patent describes way to manage multiple domain names at once.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted patent number 10,599,632 (pdf) to registry operator Afilias for “Domain name registration and management.”

The patent describes the ability to bundle domain names and then apply changes to those bundles universally. For example, three domain names could be bundled together and then any change made to one, such as the administrative contact or nameservers, could automatically be applied to the others.

The patent states:

It is a disadvantage with the current domain name registration and management systems that a registrant’s plurality of domain names must be individually registered and subsequently individually maintained (e.g. renewals, etc.). It is critical that registry information relating to the various domain names of a registrant be complete, consistent, accurate, and up to date. As such, it is critical that the domain name registrant keep their domain name records up to date to prevent undesirable expense, complication and worst-case loss of domain name rights. The coordination involved by the registrant in today’s multi-TLD universe is becoming increasingly complex, due to the increased availability in the number and variety of domain names.

The idea behind the patent sounds a lot like Enom’s Magic Folders.

Afilias declined to comment regarding the patent.