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ICANN Plans to Charge Fees to .net Domain Owners
museumpeace writes "ICANN, though it was soundly rebuffed for trying this in the past, is
reported by CNET to be planning a $.75/ year fee to holders of .net domains and will look at fees for other TLD's next year. Is this taxation without representation? And where would this trend stop?"
And where would this trend stop?
It wouldn't stop. Not until ICANN became less of an independant organization and more of an elected body.
I noticed GoDaddy started charging the new $.25 ICANN fee that was initiated in November. Sheesh.
:)
Presumably it would be a hidden cost passed on by your registrar.
Support the mob or mysteriously disappear.
Yes, Im sure that they will keep it at 75 cents too.
At least until they rationalize that they need to raise more money.
Do you see where this is going? They can charge as much as they want, be it the measly 75 cents or $15.
(It's like the income tax. The gov't said it would be temporary--and small. But it wasn't temporary, and it's grown quite a bit.)
Keep your eyes to the sky.
I'm going to wait at least till the third warning to pay. That way they spend more on stamps than they get from me.
So how exactly does this cause anyone real grief?
Self-referential sigs are rarely entertaining.
$0.75 plus the $0.25 cents they are already charging.
.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and .name domains. With the forthcoming .net charge, ICANN's cut of those domain name registrations would increase to $1 a year.
.net extensions when they impose a $2 additional fee. $2/year isn't bad, you'll say. But by then it will be $3 and they'll just keep sneaking those fees in. And what can we do to stop it?
From article: the group recently imposed a 25-cent annual charge on
and what's to prevent them from adding another fee next year, or in two years. Two years from now you might not remember they're charging a $1 for
If I renew my .net domain now for another 10 years, can I save the whole $7.50?
Wake up.
No ... ICANN needs to be restricted. Severely.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
RTFA... it's $0.75 plus $0.25 they snuck in just recently... Notice how they're sneaking those in? You'll be paying a dollar and you thought it was only $0.75... Slippery slope, isn't it?
haha. Should be from the ICANN0T-afford-budget-increases dept.
So .com already has a 25 cents charge, and .net is 3 times more expensive at 75 cents. Uhh.. why?
AccountKiller
They're upset because an unelected group is taxing an important part of the world's communications infrastructure, a group that, I might add, wields considerable power and has pretty much lost the respect of anyone that knows anything about them. BEGIN:TINFOIL I really have to wonder if Jon Postel's untimely death was entirely natural END:TINFOIL And that $.75 is just a start, like all taxing bodies they never know when to stop until they go so far that someone has to shoot them.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
There is no difference in requirements to purchase a .com, .net, or .org domain, so why should one have a different fee schedule from another?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
.... whats a penny, can't even buy a piece of gum right?
6 + billion people would result in a few dollars in my pocket, but that's not really the point.
The point is taxation without representation..
internet tea party anyone?
So why are they going to pick on us first? What's that about?
Those nice phone fees are where the legs of this fee grow from. The FCC line fee was introduced, and then increased under the same pretense -- "long distance rates will continue to fall, so even with increased FCC Line Fee you will see reduction of your overall bill". The hell it did.
So... I guess once this fee is applied and nobody's bottom gets removed from the high and mighty chair over this, there will be a fee increase, then another fee (for the regulation and patent disputes, for example), and another one (to help public schools pay for their domain names) etc.
All of those fees will be removed from the registrar's ads, so you'll see ".NET Domains for Only $5.95* " with fine print stating "Please note, additional fees and surcharges may apply" and final price will crawl up to $9 or more.
Look at cell phones and regular land-line phones... That's where it's heading.
Hyperom.com
This just give everybody who's concerned about ICANN's unchecked control even more reasons to learn about and support the Open Root Server Confederation.
The Internet needs to stay unregulated and as free as possible from the corporate mindset if it's going to stay in it's current shape. You can already see problems arising with corporations controlling so much of the public's interest in the Internet such as VeriSign's abusing their power by implementing programs like SiteFinder.
It's reasons like these and ICANN's increasing little fees they charge that something needs to be done at some point and the sooner the better. I suppose the very nature of the Internet is a saving grace - if the current custodians fail the public then the network can always be restructured, if very slowly. There is more than one way millions of computers can be inter-connected.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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They're introducing this because VeriSign's contract to administer .net runs out next year; they can take advantage of the bidding process for that contract to insert the fee. And they may do the same when the .com contract runs out in 2007.
ICANN only controls non-country TLDs. If you do not like the three quarters of a dollar tax, then move to a country TLD like .US.
Also of interest, everyone here complains about how closely aligned ICANN is with the US gov't. Now, from what I can see, they want to charge you 75 cents a year (1/3 the price of a cup of coffee) so they can privately fund themselves. This leads to getting the gov't OUT of the DNS game and truly internaitonalizes it!
...just because THEYCANN.
Ignoring that ``they shouldn't be doing that'', etc., the question is: Who cares? I may sound like a troll, but who in the hell cares for $0.75??? I never understand people who try to save every single penny per domain---that's just stupid.
If you have a website (that makes money, or not), then even a few hundreds of dollars won't make a difference---and $0.75 cents is certainly nothing to complain about. Just look at how much taxes you're paying on your cell phone per month.
On the other hand, if you're in the business of hogging hundreds of domains in a hope of selling them... then I understand how a few bucks per domain can make a huge difference in that business model. But then I don't think those people should be in business in the first place.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
when domains were $100.
See, a company I recently worked for had no qualms about registering 100 domains every other day for no other purpose than to use them for SPAM.
If the domains were $100 each, I am pretty sure that they wouldn't be burning through domains like that.
Well, as Gates said: "The internet is a pasing fad". He also promised that MSN was going to be bigger than internet, that is, internet will only be a small part into MSN, and not viceversa.
You are confusing centralized management with centralized servers. P2P would decentralize the servers, and not solve the management problem - if anything, it would -cause- problems.
I register FooCompany.com. Some guy on his server publishes FooCompany.com to his IP. Which server has the correct IP? You need a way to verify authenticity. Maybe SSL certs? Oops, those are centralized under a small handful of companies... Maybe GPG keys? We can see how all the other web-of-trust security systems have just taken the 'net by storm...
No, ICANN's purpose is to provide management of the namespace and make sure that someone can't just use FooCompany without having gone through a central source to do it. You can't have two FooCompany's in existance. (Aside from server hacking. Which, btw, becomes so, so much easier in a P2P resolution system.) The DNS system itself is already highly distributed in technical terms - a hierarchy where each level is distributed between several (or more) servers.
You can't turn something like ICANN into a global shared responsibility. You need some real management. If you pull that management out of DNS, you just push it somewhere else - making all 'net traffic require SSL certs or GPG keys or somethign else, which is still going to require a central authority. (Sorry guys, even GPG will have central authority's, since 95% of users would much rather pay $100 to a company to sign their keys than have to track down, call, and meet in person with a handful of 'net uber-geeks to get keys signed, and have to do that over and over everytime they get a new key.)
Does anyone know what grants ICANN the right to essentially have a monopoly on the domain names? The internet is supposedly free and decentralized, and the article makes it clear that ICANN is not regulated by any government. In that case, how did they get to where they are? I admit that I don't really know what ICANN really does or provides, but it seems to me like someone else should be competing with them.
Do you think implementing a 75 cent fee is going to stop this? Even if a company owns a thousand, this will only cost them 750 bucks more.
Don't get me wrong, the problem you described sucks, but irrelevant to this topic.
--- The revolution will be digitized! - http://www.binrev.com/ ---
At last we can add in step two!
1. Get self on ICANN board.
2. Increase fees gradually so nobody notices. (formerly ???)
3. Profit!
A lot of this seems way over my head, so I want to make sure I understand everything correctly. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a government run organization, correct? They control who gets the Top Level Domains (TLD). Currently, companies like GoDaddy and Verisigns ( I'm assuming ) bid on chunks of TLD's. Then those companies sell them individually as domains to people. Currently there is a $.25 charge on each domain name. When Verisign's contract bid ends in 2005, ICANN is going to add an additional $.75 charge to each .net TLD. The reason people are upset is because they feel that the $.75 is unnecessary for what ICANN does. If I am wrong about any of this or if I'm missing anything, let me know. Like I said, most of this is a little over my head and I want to understand it better before I make any kind of judgement.
As a result, I will be charging ICANN a monthly 7.50 'Blow Me' fee. Bitches.
Fees and surcharges are the first sign that you should get your gun and start thinning the herd from the top down, because someone has decided you're easy pickin' and an easy money bitch. ICANN does not DO anything, except charge poor fucks like me and you for having a shitty website.
Now mod me offtopic, you ICANN sniffing mod-whores. HAHAHA! Profanity is always uncalled for, and used by ruffians, and ner' do-wells, so eat it.
This is the danger of having one controlling body over essentially the entire Internet.
Perhaps people shouldn't have dismissed alternatives like PacificROOT in the past -- at least there'd be some competition to prevent these sorts of things.
Looks like I'll be paring back my domains next year.
SNACKS ARE AWESOME
--
Build an internet incorruptible by corps and goverments.
Metanet
please forgive my ignorance, but what does icann do?
You're forgiven. :)
Okay, here's how it works. You know how the tech community likes to tell newbies that nobody controls the Internet? Well, that's not entirely true. At the time the Internet was founded, peer-to-peer was nowhere near as sophisticated as it is today, so you needed somebody to keep all the important information about computers on the Internet, to prevent it from melting into anarchy.
Various organizations (and in particular, Jon Postel) had different sets of these responsibilities until 1998, when ICANN was founded. ICANN is a non-profit corporation with a U.S. government contract. They are responsible for assigning IP addresses (so there's no duplication), running the DNS system (so mere mortals can get to Slashdot without having to memorize IP addresses) and other more mundane tasks specified in various RFCs, such as tracking well-known port numbers and MIME types.
So, ICANN and its subsidiaries basically represent a government-sanctioned monopoly, like the phone company used to be. Other companies and non-profit organizations occasionally try to create alternative DNS services, such as OpenNIC, but they don't usually get very far because ICANN, in its official capacity, squishes them like bugs.
I may be hazy on the details, but I think this is accurate enough to get you started on your own research.
Is this taxation without representation? And where would this trend stop?
It will never stop. Observing trends, taxation is increasing for long as past 4000 years. Next phase is Slashdot charging all Cowards $.03/year for keeping them Anonymous...
There you are, staring at me again.
ICANN's projected budget for 2003-2004 was in the region of $6M, and they looked pretty close to be breaking even.
What the holy badger-fuck are they going to do with another $3.8M? A 63% budget increase? Is the internet going to get 63% bigger? Or are they going to try to have 63% more fun? (from this looks of this, they need to try......)