I have been looking up the registrars of all the top websites and have come up with the following list

MarkMonitor
VeriSign Digital Brand Management Services
Network Solutions
Register
Tucows

I am trying to find out if anyone here has experience with MarkMonitor or VeriSign. If not does anyone have an idea of their fees? I am guessing that is the only reason they are not used more widely. But what is the damage? Much higher then the others listed?

Registrars don't differ too much from each others these days. Back in the day there were only a few registrars, and that is why you see many old domains still registered with NetSol.

As long as the registrar has decent support (Search WHT) the registrars are mostly all the same. "Why pay more when you can get it for cheaper?" is the reasoning behind GoDaddy, NameCheap, etc's success.

Markmonitor is used by the BIG guys like Google, Yahoo and the likes. I don't think they accept ordinary Joes as their customers. They don't publish their rates online, but I think they are extraorbitant. Simply because they include much more than registration services.

Never heard of Verisign as registrar. It's *registry* for com, net and few ccTLDs (among many things they do).

Never heard of Verisign as registrar. It's *registry* for com, net and few ccTLDs (among many things they do).

Verisign has different divisions doing all sorts of different things. Verisign DBMS is one of the major players in the corporate/brand protection domain name market. Verisign DBMS came about when Verisign bought Texas-based IDnames, California-based 1GlobalPlace and New York-based NameEngine.

Large corporations generally want to register their names and product names in every TLD under the sun (i.e., including all 200+ ccTLDs), and they use companies like Markmonitor and Verisign DBMS to manage their global domain name portfolios for them. These days most ccTLDs have fairly unrestricted registration policies, but until a couple of years ago there was a lot of bureaucracy in registering ccTLD domains, and these companies specialised in dealing with all the bureaucracy.

Verisign has different divisions doing all sorts of different things. Verisign DBMS is one of the major players in the corporate/brand protection domain name market. Verisign DBMS came about when Verisign bought Texas-based IDnames, California-based 1GlobalPlace and New York-based NameEngine.

Large corporations generally want to register their names and product names in every TLD under the sun (i.e., including all 200+ ccTLDs), and they use companies like Markmonitor and Verisign DBMS to manage their global domain name portfolios for them. These days most ccTLDs have fairly unrestricted registration policies, but until a couple of years ago there was a lot of bureaucracy in registering ccTLD domains, and these companies specialised in dealing with all the bureaucracy.


Exactly. At this point I only need to secure a few domains but if things go well I would want to secure the important ccTLDs. Researching all the top domains showed me that Verisign and MM were the most trusted companies offering this type of service. Ofcourse registering domain names can only go so far and I would expect them to push other services on me.

It looks like I will be using godaddy and the like to reserve a few and use Register.com for my top levels, then get in touch with VS and MM when I am ready to take the jump.

I did not know that verisign was in the corporate brand business

I did not know that verisign was in the corporate brand business

Live and learn (I never realized this too :) ).

It shows you can learn something new everyday :)