Later this morning at the Gov 2.0 Summit, Federal Government CIO Vivek Kundra will talk about data.gov and other governmental transparency initiatives, and will also be making an announcement regarding the launch of a open identity initiative featuring the use of both OpenID and InfoCards in a special pilot program.

Make no mistake about it: this has the potential to change the way citizens participate in and communicate with the U.S. government.

The OpenID Foundation has recently published a letter from executive director Don Thibeau as well as a fairly detailed white paper (PDF) on the subject of open frameworks for open governments that you might want to read for background. While the ‘Participating Providers in the U.S. Government Pilot Program’ section on the OpenID Foundation’s website hasn’t gone live yet, the Information Card Foundation provides more details about the pilot program on its blog.

Google, Yahoo, PayPal, AOL, VeriSign, Citi, Equifax, Acxiom, Privo and Wave Systems will be the ten organizations to act as digital identity providers using OpenID and Information Card technologies in the first pilot programs designed for the American public to engage in open government. Representatives from the companies had met with government IT officials early August to engage in talks about the initiative, which ReadWriteWeb caught wind of at the time.

The programs are being conducted by the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. The participating companies are said to be getting certification under non-discriminatory open trust frameworks developed under collaboration between the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) and the Information Card Foundation (ICF) and reviewed by the federal government.

As an example, we have learned that VeriSign – a founding member of the OpenID Foundation – will serve as an identity provider for a pilot program with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services and regarded as one of the world’s foremost medical research centers as well as the Federal focal point for health research. Thanks to this implementation, citizens will be able to more easily provide input on public policy and access their own tax and Social Security records with OpenID:

In essence, this initiative will help transform government websites from basic “brochureware” into interactive resources, saving individuals time and increasing their direct involvement in governmental decision making. OpenID and Information Card technologies make such interactive access simple and safe. For example, in the coming months the NIH intends to use OpenID and Information Cards to support a number of services including customized library searches, access to training resources, registration for conferences, and use of medical research wikis, all with strong privacy protections.

Dr. Jack Jones, NIH CIO and Acting Director, CIT, notes, “As a world leader in science and research, NIH is pleased to participate in this next step for promoting collaboration among Assurance Level 1 applications. Initially, the NIH Single Sign-on service will accept credentials as part of an “Open For Testing” phase, with full production expected within the next several weeks. At that time, OpenID credentials will join those currently in use from InCommon, the higher education identity management federation, as external credentials trusted by NIH.”

Likely, we’ll learn more from Vivek Kundra’s scheduled speech at the Gov 2.0 Summit later today, but one thing is crystal clear: this is a big win for both the OpenID Foundation and the Information Card Foundation.

Who would have predicted say, 5 years ago, that you would some day be able to use commercial identities on government websites? Evidently, this raises questions about privacy and security but if these initiatives can garner enough public support, government validation of open identity frameworks could be a boon for the ecosystem of the open, distributed web. Plus, it can make dealing with the government a lot easier for you, too.

P.S.: also read Tim O’Reilly’s guest post on Gov 2.0 as a platform.

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The fourth quarter of the year is traditionally a slow one for .com and .net registrations, but the whole of 2008 was particularly slow, at least partially due to the “current macro-economic environment,” according to the report. But Q1 2009 saw those numbers turn around:

New .com and .net registrations were added at an average of approximately 2.4 million per month in the first quarter of 2009 for a total of 7.3 million new registrations in the quarter. This 17 percent increase from the previous quarter also marked the first positive growth rate in new registrations since the first quarter of 2008.

Also interesting is that domain renewals turned around for the first time in a few years. Beginning in Q1 2007, .com and .net renewal rates began declining from a Q4 2006 peak of 77%. That decline continued through Q4 2008, when the renewal number reached a low of 70%. But Q1 2009 brought the first uptick in the number (71%) in over 2 years.

So after a small depression, things appear to be looking up for .com domains once again. But that growth looks fairly minimal when compared to ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domains). Those are the domains that end in things like .cn (China) and .de (Germany), representing countries. While .com is still far and away the biggest domain, .cn and .de have both surpassed .net for the number 2 and 3 spots on the list, respectively.

You can find a lot more data in the full PDF report here.

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As you could have deducted from the headline, last year ended with a total base of 177 million domain name registrations across all of the Top Level Domains (TLDs), up from 153 million at the end of 2007 representing a 16% growth rate. Over the entire year, there was an average of 11.9 million new domain names registered per quarter compared to an average of 12.2 million new domain names registered each quarter in 2007.

Last quarter, like Q3 2008, the five largest TLDs in terms of overall size were .com, .cn (China), .de (Germany), .net, and .org. The overall base of .com and .net domain names grew to 90.4 million domain names at the end of 2008.

But growth is slowing, likely because of the bad economy (although this apparently didn’t stop VeriSign from raising its prices) and a falling interest and revenue potential for parked domains.

More than 10.1 million new domain names were registered across all of the TLDs in the last quarter of 2008. This reflects a slower growth in new registrations with a decline of 12 percent from the third quarter 2008 and 17 percent from the same quarter in the previous year. The decline was driven by slower growth in both gTLDs and ccTLDs. Over the entire year, there was an average of 11.9 million new domain names registered per quarter compared to an average of 12.2 million new domain names registered each quarter in 2007.

Last year ended with 71.1 million ccTLD (country code Top Level Domains) registrations, a 22 percent increase over the end of 2007. In total, there are more than 240 ccTLD extensions globally, but the top 10 ccTLDs contribute 65 percent of the total number of registrations. Unsurprisingly, .ru (Russian Federation) and .cn (China) were the fastest growing. But overall, the growth of ccTLDs is also slowing down: only 36 percent of the top 25 largest ccTLDs experienced growth rates in the fourth quarter that were higher than the growth rates in the third quarter.

To conclude, an interesting tidbit: VeriSign estimates that 88 percent of .com and .net domain names resolve to a website. Broken down, nearly a quarter of the 90 million .com and .net domain names the company analyzed lead to one-page websites, which include include under-construction, brochure-ware and parked pages in addition to online advertising revenue generating parked pages. 12 percent doesn’t resolve at all.

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We are pleased to announce that VeriSign closed on an agreement to acquire Global Name Registry, Ltd., which includes management of the .name top level domain on October 1, 2008. We believe the addition of .name is a natural fit, as we have run the technical backend in support of .name for more than five years.

What does this mean for existing registrars?

Your interface to VeriSign for .name domain names will continue to operate as it has in the past with no changes.

We are currently assessing enhancements to the service offering that meet the needs of the registrar channel in servicing the consumer market. Please look for service notices in the coming weeks that will outline those changes and the steps you need to take advantage of those features.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Customer Service at info@verisign-grs.com.

Very truly yours,

PJ Bolanos
Vice President, Global Customer Support
VeriSign, Inc.

The size of the transaction is not being disclosed. Other investors in the company include Northzone Ventures AS, and Verdane AS.

I worked briefly with the .name guys in 2001 (and I have also consulted to Verisign in the past), although I don’t have any financial stake in the company or this transaction.

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We had previously heard rumors that Verisign was in negotiations to sell the assets, which have been combined into the Real-Time Publisher Services business unit, to the Associated Press in connection with a settle agreement over the AP’s 2007 copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit against Verisign. However, that litigation was settled last month without any agreement over the RTP assets.

Now Verisign is offering the business unit to a wider group of potential buyers. In an offering document we’ve obtained, Verisign reports business unit revenues of $6.5 million in 2005, growing to an estimated $8.8 million in 2008.

Verisign continues to restructure its core business under new CEO Jim Bidzos.

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PIP is a a single sign in solution that supports both OpenID (you are issued a Verisign OpenID) and direct sign in to a number of supported websites. If a site doesn’t support OpenID, login is handled by populating the username and password fields directly.

So far, PIP isn’t much different than the previously covered Clickpass and other solutions. It supports a lot more sites, however. And it also handles signin directly from a bookmarklet that resides directly in the browser chrome.

Being Verisign, they’ve also added optional support for two factor authentication. Users can choose to receive a unique one time security token for each login, and/or get a browser-side certificate. Most users will find this overkill.

From a usability standpoint, the biggest drawback is the need to stay logged in to an active PIP browser session. Users could set it to their home page, I guess, and make it the first sign each time they use their browser. One use case that is particularly compelling – mobile devices. Verisign says iPhone support is coming very soon – Verisign says they are experiencing “a few challenges with certificates on the iPhone Safari.”

A last, possibly unintended feature: the pop up box is a great easy navigation tool for much-visited sites.

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Melbourne IT

DBMS offers a portfolio of digital brand security services, including domain name management, global brand expansion services and digital brand monitoring solutions. Services include brand and fraud protection and “global digital brand expansion.” According to a release Verisign put out when the service launched in 2006, the service “benefits marketing executives by allowing the marketing team to holistically and globally manage the customers’ online experience with the firm’s brands.”

Melbourne IT was originally part of Melbourne University and was Australia’s equivalent to Network Solutions, maintaining a monopoly on .com.au registrations until 2002. The company is best remembered locally as one of the boom/ bust stocks of the first dot-com bubble, reaching lofty heights after listing in 1999. Melbourne IT was one of the first companies globally to be granted access to .com sales, being one of five granted the rights to .com sales by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers as Network Solutions monopoly was slowly unwound in 1999. MelbourneIT built a global client base based on undercutting Network Solutions rates at the time by 10%.

(via DomainTools)

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Google has been dabbling with OpenID for some time with its Blogger platform (and Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of OpenID, is now a Google employee).

Yahoo also announced support for OpenID earlier this month, which more than tripled the number of OpenID accounts to 350 million. 10,000 websites now accept OpenID accounts for login.

All of the newcomers, along with Yahoo, have joined OpenID’s corporate board and, we assume, will be making their user accounts OpenID-compatible. But it’s not clear that any of them are in a hurry to become a “relying party” (allowing users with third party OpenIDs to log in to their sites). OpenID looks like it’s going to be a winner, so big companies making their user accounts OpenID compatible is a good hedge. Everyone, of course, wants to be an ID issuer, since they get to “own” the user. Less attractive is allowing users from other sites to log into your services, so don’t expect that functionality to come for some time.

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Austin-based Mumboe, originally founded in 2005 as FineTooth, has recently relaunched as another SAS contract management tool. It is similar to Negonation, in that it doesn’t handle eSignatures, but the contracts themselves. FineTooth’s original software solution used natural language analysis to help manage contracts by extracting the important details from contracts. Mumboe, short for the mumbo jumbo found in most contracts, lets companies create contracts from templates, share, search, and track important milestones. The company currently has a three month free trial.

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We aren’t going to write a lot about it here on TechCrunch because Keith Teare and I were advisors to Weblogs.com on the deal. I will say that I believe this is a game-changing event for the blogosphere.

Dave Winer, the founder of Weblogs.com and the inventor of blog ping servers tells the story here (and kindly mentions our involvement).

If you’d like to understand more about ping servers, I wrote a profile of Weblogs.com in July of this year.

For more coverage, you should also read Jason Kottke, Staci Kramer, Robert Scoble and Michael Bazeley.

Congratulations, Dave. You deserve this, my friend.