This announcement came as a total surprise to the domain industry. I should have known something was afoot a few weeks ago when analysts started calling looking for the inside track on rumors and news. They usually don't do that unless they've got a reason to dig further - well, this definitely would have been a reason to dig. Verisign was off 15% in pre-market trading and will probably dive lower. I found their comments about "exploiting their patent portfolio" to be pretty interesting. Is Verisign a troll-in-waiting?