Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
$50 a year is a lot if you are just wanting a domain to run a personal website or play around with a server. Its not a lot if you are running a business(like spammers are). I'm sure most spammers make more than $50 a year.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
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.