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 new top level domain names.
The application, 13/746579 (pdf), was filed in January 2013 and published last 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 new gTLD program for new gTLDs, hundreds of new gTLDS are expected to be created over the next few years. Registries for the new gTLDs must provide Whois services for all of them. However, creating a separate Whois service for each new 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 new TLD with minimal manual intervention from registry administrative users.
The application then describes ways to automatically provide the whois service.
Verisign management has said it is working on a plan to monetize its intellectual property.
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