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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
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.
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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.
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
We as owners of .net domains we will be screwed soon. Question is what is ICANN getting out of it?
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".
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/
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Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
their representative is quoted as saying, "Because I CANN."
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
They're not raising their own prices, they're raising the price they sell domains to companies like Dotster. When you buy something through them you pay $9 (or whatever) per year, of which $4.25 goes to verisign since they need *some* money to run the physical infrastructure for handling all of the lookups. So for dotster to keep their $5 per domain profit margin they'll have to raise their rates by as much as whatever verisign increases their price by.
Ad in classifieds: Pandora's Box (no box) $5
So how much is 4$4.25????
It affects all .net domains. Dotster is "buying" your domains from VeriSign and "reselling" them to you; they'll always add a markup on top of VeriSign's "wholesale" price.
Since the registrar (GoDaddy,Network Solutions, Dotster, etc) has to pay Verisign to register a .net domain, any price increase will be passed along by the registrar to the end comsumer registering the domain.
Of course, this announcement only says that Verisign CAN raise prices in Jan, doesn't say they will. Although based on Verisign's past practices, I'd expect an annoucement on Jan 2nd that starts the 6 month grace period mentioned in the article.
Since they are the sole suppliers of .net domains to everyone, normal free-market pricing doesn't come into play. If you want or must have a .net domain because your domain name fits with it or a business need, you're going to pay whatever verisign says to pay. It's like going to the doctor and wanting drug X that does everything you need with few side-effects, but only being able to afford less effective generic drug Y because multiple companies make it.
If you are the sole supplier of something, whether it's a tld, OS, or drug, you can charge whatever you want and free market be damned.
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.
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make install -not war
$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!
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.