Fresh Verisign patent brings us back to the days Verisign promoted domain investing

Patent covers a tool designed to help domain investors find more domains to register.

Based on what you read in its statements, you’d think Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) loathes domain name investors. Following all, it tells the government that it’s not Verisign’s wholesale prices it needs to worry regarding; it’s those pesky domain name investors that mark up prices substantially beyond wholesale.

Of course, Verisign needs domain name investors, who inflate .com registration numbers beyond what they would otherwise be.

What Verisign wants is for domain investors to continue doing what they do but to shut up regarding higher wholesale prices.

To wit, a patent granted today.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted patent 12,169,768 (pdf) to the firm for “Deep neural network generation of domain names”.

It describes a system for generating lists of unregistered domains that domain investors might want to register. It even explains the business model:

Moreover, since a domain investor typically purchases a multitude of domain names and expects that the aggregate sales’ proceeds will exceed the purchasing cost, “as valuable” here can be interpreted as applicable to a collection of names rather than just a single name.

You might be surprised that Verisign would file this patent while publicly blasting domain investors. Well, Verisign applied for the patent in 2017. Back then, Verisign continued to face a big challenge. It wasn’t allowed to increase .com prices, so the only way it could grow revenue was by selling more domains.

During the period between when the Obama administration froze .com prices and the Trump administration relieved them, Verisign had a completely different (public) attitude regarding domain investing than it does now. It sponsored domain conferences and promoted tools to help domain investors find domains to register.

Now, the firm sings a very different tune…publicly.