Lycos Inc has signed an exclusive deal with domain name registrar Namesecure.com Inc, making it the only registrar featured across all the sites in the Lycos network. NameSecure says that includes banner advertising, text links and keyword buys. The deal took effect on Tripod yesterday and will roll out to the others Lycos sites, such as Wired, AngelFire, WhoWhere and MailCity, within the next two weeks. NameSecure has registered 32,000 names thus far and is one of Network Solutions Inc’s premier partners.
All domains registered in .com, .net and .org have to go through NSI, which hosts both the registry and registrar services for those names. The registrar part of the business – the retail side that sells individuals and companies names – is set to be opened up to competition this year, firstly in a test phase from late April to late June, then open to all that meet a set of accreditation guidelines laid down by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). NameSecure says it has already submitted its application to be one of the five companies chosen by ICANN to participate in the test phase – the deadline was recently extended to April 8. Financial terms of this deal were not disclosed. NameSecure has similar exclusive deals with Yahoo Inc’s GeoCities unit, Xoom.com and Netopia, among others.
