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VeriSign Can Raise .net Prices in 2007
miller60 writes "ICANN is lifting restrictions on VeriSign's pricing of .net domains as of Jan. 1, 2007, eliminating a cap that dictated the amount VeriSign could charge registrars for each .net domain. The cap, now at $4.25 per name, expires at the end of 2006. The pricing details were not included in a draft contract published by ICANN prior to the bidding process, but negotiated after VeriSign prevailed in a controversial evaluation by Telcordia. VeriSign must give six months before any price change, allowing time to lock in current pricing with multi-year renewals."
ICANN is lifting restrictions on VeriSign's pricing of .net
Time to get your Passport account while it's cheap...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"The cap, now at $4.25 per name, expires at the end of 2006."
So, the new price? Just tack a 4 infront of $4.25 and you have your answer.
Management of top-level domains is a public trust, and fees should be regulated.
If not regulated, then let anyone and everyone who do it. Oh wait, that would be too chaotic.
--
This may not be the first post but it's in the first 100.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So first they try screw us with that mis-typed domain crap, and now they are gonna try do get us on prices?
Bastards.
Because it costs so much to maintain TLD infrastructure. Hell, good thing they did this before VeriSign went broke!
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
haven't done one single good thing for people of late
They said the same about Clinton and look what happened after he left...
We as owners of .net domains we will be screwed soon. Question is what is ICANN getting out of it?
What is even worse is that from then on VeriSign does not need to pay the $0.75 ICANN tax. This is a contradiction to the requirements of the proposals the five applicants had to obey.
Are usually staffed by some pretty decent folks, and verisign are the scum of the earth, and I can quickly see them pricing themselves out of the DNS market. People are realizing the power of a .com is like a rose... or was that... anyway, the smells like shit *confused*.
.net, and basically give the finger to verisign.
.net purchases) would really want to be ass-fucked by them.
Since the community of web developers is thankfully separated from the hyperventilating MOOCFA crowd (make our own crazy fly acronyms) (for an indepth reference, read this insightful article) I can see that the google warriors of our time will find ways to drop the
After the fuss they caused breaking the whole damn internet, I don't think many people in technical decision making/planning roles (which I would guestimate would cover 80% of
Check out that link (here) you will like it, and it saves me some keystrokes harping on about hyperventilating eunuchs.
mxtosfb
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I am switching from .net to java NOW!!!
Uhm, whaat? Never mind... Oops!
Sounds like bad news for Microsoft, who will use .net now?
.net? Okay, nevermind.
Oh wait, that
I'm not understanding why they should be allowed to charge more. Does the registration business really follow the same dynamics that other businesses follow?
Let's say the costs to maintain their business follow inflation, wouldn't they always be profitable on the ever increasing numbers of domains being registered? It's not like a buy once and you're set type of deal, you're locked into a service forever unless you're ready to part with your "name".
Why didn't Microsoft (owners of the .net platform) sued Verisign (owners of the .net domain registry) for trademark/copyright/whatever violations? Pure Evil vs. Impure Evil is every ambulance chaser's dream case.
Perhaps now would be a good time for me to consider switching to another top level domain? This is going to suck for people like me who run a Web site just for fun and not making any money off it.
How is this going to affect people like Dotster, etc.?
.com and a .net and I personally don't want to be forced into paying more indirectly because of Verisign.
I have a
I'm curious as to why this is a big deal if it only affects their customers - they would just be pricing themselves out of existence. Or have I missed something as usual?
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Maybe now's the time to give serious consideration to long-standing alternative root servers like OpenNIC. And the only way alternative roots will catch on is if individuals fed up with the greedy ways of domain registrars demand that their ISPs allow them port 53 access (or better yet, also include the alternative root zones with the ISP nameserver's own root zones).
The decisions of what Verisign can charge and how long they can charge is are really up to YOU: the customer. Vote with your feet and start looking at some non Versign controlled TLD's!
Anthony
HELP AN OPEN SOURCE PROJECT:. 2005-07-08.3911172488/
https://www.fundable.org/groupactions/groupaction
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
If you are as outraged as I am, goto:
:-)
www.boycott-dot-net-domains.net
And voice your opinion!
Relax man, it's not like they will be bumping the price to $50 per registration or anything. It's still a free-market economy and the free-market won't allow it.
Bang Logic - Serious Small Business Services
You're joking or confusing .NET with .net.
their representative is quoted as saying, "Because I CANN."
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
If the US continues "hanging on" to parts of the Internet infrastructure, expect other governments to form cooperatives to clone these services and run them as they see fit.
r .org
Certain contries *COUGH*China*COUGH* already do this for political reasons.
By the way, the OpenNIC web site you cite is stale, as is the AlterNIC site it references.
Hmm, maybe I should register nictranslator.org, and map www.somedomain.someextension in OpenNic to www.somedomain.someextension.opennic.nictranslato
so domains registered in "any namespace" can exist in the "official namespace."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
IIRC, one of the proposals for .org a few years ago was planning to charge $2/year/domain, with prices going down over time. Of course this proposal was not chosen.
Sorry about this but you could get into an MBA program with your reasoning - a good one, like Harvard. If you do, ou can't post on /. anymore. We hateMBAs and discount whatever they say - regardless if it's true or not!
Ok, ok, throw me out, I;m a drunk,...but WTF! I try and try to give these folks business sense and I get flamed or mod'ed "Troll".?! I give up!
F.U. GNAA!!!! THanks for making posting as an AC More Difficult (TM)!! Fuckers!
We as owners of .net domains we will be screwed soon. Question is what is ICANN getting out of it?
Bribes.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
It still blows my mind that VeriSign can hold a monopoly on these registrations, getting so much value out of the DNS system and Internet that everyone else operates without charging VeriSign. Without giving much back - and with notoriously bad customer service, and attempted coups in breaking the protocol, by offering their own proprietary promotional database of "what you were looking for", rather than failure responses. Monopoly sure is nice - they're printing money.
--
make install -not war
I actually think raising the price is a good idea. How much of a big deal is it to pay 49.95/yr for a domain, even for us who have their own domain at home ?
I thought part of the reason that spammers can move so quickly is that domains are so cheap now.
Just a random thought
I read the stuff on the links, and it's not clear.
Is this only for new or all domain names under their care? In other words, are they grandfathering in all the people who've renewed their domains past this date, or will they be charged more?
For the market that they are interested in keeping ( ie, big businesses ) a few bucks a year is nothing..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's kinda funny. Laugh.
.NET is always capitalized. I betcha if VeriSign started advertising ".NET domains" for sale, the Collective would throw a litigious fit.
Besides,
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Shouldn't the cost of maintaining each domain name decline as they add more domains? Sure, they have some variable costs like salaries for staff, but the cost of server equipment is plummeting and their fixed costs should be diluted across an increasing number of domain names.
What the Heck are ICANN upto.
.nets are there?
Verisign suck and get bags of cash for no work - lets give them loads more cash for no reason.
Joi Ito, are you stoned - whats up ?
The Question is how much cash are Verisign currently gouging - how many
We need an explanation, because on the face of it this is a totally stupid descision.
I mean really utterly stupid. Like on a scale of 1 to 10, googleplex stupid.
Will it get worse, how about 50$ a pop, thats 100$ to the public for your com, net and org.
May be I am an ignorant, or an idiot. But why does Verisign manage domain names? Is it impossible for governments to do it, just like they issue license plates?
If the current rate to Verisign is $4.25 per domain and there are 5,324,213 registered .net domains as of January 16th.. thats $22,627,905. So exactly what is all this money used for?
A few distributed dns servers and a (should be) highly automated system for managing domains and a handful of support people? That sure doesn't seem like $22m worth of expenses.. what else is it used for?
I suppose technically we geeks should be bitching about how the TLD's are rampantly mis-used..aren't .net domains supposed to be for ISP's, web hosting co's etc?
.net domain too.
Yes I have a
The money that goes to Verisign for every domain name for every year is more of a price floor than a price cap. ICANN has gifted unto Verisign for many years an amount of $6 per name per year without any regard to the actual cost to Verisign of providing the registry service or any inducement to reduce those costs.
.net and .com, that fixed part is only a few cents per name per year.
This has had the effect of sucking litterally hundreds of millions of dollars per year out of the pockets of domain name customers. Thank you ICANN.
I voted against that contract (I was ICANN's board of directors until ICANN eliminated publicly elected directors) because it was a rip-off of domain name customers who were forced to pay this ICANN-imposed tax.
Now ICANN has reduced the total sum of that tax by a bit, although ICANN has snuck in a $0.75 per name per year tax that goes directly to ICANN. Yet as far as I can tell there is no mechanism to induce Verisign to actually reduce its portion in 2007 (or before) - so it seems that we have yet another gift to Verisign to be paid for out of the pockets of internet users.
One of ICANN's first acts after it came into existance was to arbitrarily require that domain name contracts be of 1 to 10 years in increments of one full year. That decision, a decision made with no public input whatsoever, makes it impossible for people to protect themselves against arbitrary price manipulations by registries in the future.
If one were to actually look at the cost of providing domain name registratin services it becomes apparent that there is a fixed chunk - the cost of running a robust set of name servers and a back-end system to handle registrations - and a variable part. When amortized over millions of names, as we have in
In other words, if ICANN required the monopoly registries to base their prices on the actual cost of providing services, the registry price could drop substantially below the values that ICANN has established. And, given that the cost of renewals is a large part of the variable costs, allowing customers to lock in for long periods would further reduce the price to the customer.
The bottom line is this: ICANN acts as a meeting place for those who sell domain name products and the intellectual property industry. Those groups gather and decide (conspire?) to set prices, product specifications, rules (e.g. the privacy-busting "whois" and the trademark-friendly UDRP), and other aspects of the domain name business. Those groups also decide who may and who may not enter the domain name industry and under what terms. In other words, it is a combination in restraint of trade. Whether that combination violates US or other laws against restraint of commerce is an open question that deserves to be squarely asked and clearly answered.
I registered my own domain about 4 years ago so I'd never have to change my email address again; it happens to be a .net. Now I face what amounts to a retroactive price hike.
.net domain, and lock in the price for that year. It's just like cell phone service, cable TV (really, more monthly), and every other service you get provided.
.com domains. And since most registrars currently charge you the same fee for .com and .net, you're actually getting "screwed" now.
Speaking of nothing practical to add...
How is this retroactive? You're not being asked to pay more for the last 4 years you were registered. You can lock in prices now with a longer term contract. You sign a 1 year contract every year for a
Show me where you were ever guaranteed that your prices would stay the same, and then you can start complaining. Or heck, wait until VeriSign actually decides to raise prices. Right now it's just ICANN saying that they can. Chances are, if they do raise the prices they'll just raise them to $6 per domain per year, like the
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."