Patent application for automatically creating Whois service for TLDs — Verisign files

Verisign wants to patent a way to scale creation of whois service for top level domain names.

Verisign has filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office related to automatically creating Whois for fresh top level domain names.

The application, 13/746579 (pdf), was filed in January 2013 and published the prior week.

It describes a typical whois system, and then explains that creating whois for a provisioned top level domain name does not scale:

With ICANN’s fresh gTLD program for fresh gTLDs, hundreds of fresh gTLDS are expected to be created over the next few years. Registries for the fresh gTLDs must provide Whois services for all of them. Still, creating a separate Whois service for each fresh gTLD is cost prohibitive and does not scale.

Thus, there exists a need in the art to automatically provide a Whois service upon the creation and provisioning of a fresh TLD with minimal manual intervention from registry administrative users.

The application then describes ways to automatically provide the whois service.

Verisign management has stated it is working on a plan to monetize its intellectual property.