Nineteen Registrars Decry ICANN Arrangement

hpcanswers writes "ICANN, the governing body for Internet domain names, recently gave VeriSign exclusive control of the top-level .com domain until 2012. Now, nineteen registrars, including GoDaddy and Network Solutions, have petitioned ICANN to reconsider on the basis that VeriSign will most likely increase registration fees. A few of the registrars have also asked the US Department of Commerce to veto the deal." From the article: "The new deal permits VeriSign to increase the price of domain name registrations by 7 per cent in four of the next six years. In the two remaining years, VeriSign will only be able to raise prices if it can show the rises are necessary for security reasons. It also gives VeriSign a presumptive right to renewal of the .com registry, on the proviso that it complies with certain aspects of the agreement."

Comments

Security Reasons.

[mumblestheclown]

In the two remaining years, VeriSign will only be able to raise prices if it can show the rises are necessary for security reasons.

Come again?

Re:Security Reasons.

[MightyMartian]

I'd like to know why, after its nasty stunts, Verisign isn't outright forbidden to have anything to do with .com.

Re:Security Reasons.

[MBCook]

You know... security reasons. Like:

• We can't be sure that your domain won't be hijacked unless you pay our security fee
• or We find our records tend to be sold to spammers, but we could fix it with some more security money
• or We can't be positive that we won't send people to beat you up unless you pay the security deposit

This is great. Am I the only one who thinks that ICANN needs a serious blow to the side of the head to get things back in order? I remember paying $100 for a .com a few years ago when there was no choice of registrars. Now they are like $7. Here comes "inflation."

Re:Security Reasons.

[Rekolitus]

Perhaps they mean financial security reasons.

exclusive

[Tachikoma]

what was the last good thing that came out of exclusive control of something?

Re:exclusive

[Unordained]

You know, now that you mention it ... why -do- we give exclusive control of TLD's to anyone? It's a technology problem: namespace registrations need to be unique, we need to prevent two people from buying the same item at the same time. Isn't there a technological solution? We've been doing two-phase-commit for a long time, and that's all this really is -- updating several databases at once, making sure the new domain name is unique in each one. It'd require cooperation between registrars, as they'd all have to be checking/hitting each others' databases ... but it's not impossible. It would open the whole process up to new competitors on an ad-hoc basis, even, which could be expected to drive down prices.

Re:exclusive

[feijai]

what was the last good thing that came out of exclusive control of something?

Er, rural electrification?

Long-distance telephone calls?

Community sewage?

Mail?

Sometimes monopolies occur because it's not economically feasible or not a social good to have competition if that competition results in a race to the bottom. At least at the outset.

Your quote sounds very much like someone who's taken neither a civics nor microeconomics course. No wonder /. modded you insightful! :-)

Where's the increased cost?

[onetwentyone]

They are selling an intangible product. There are no production, R&D, or distribution costs. I can see marketing and bandwidth charges but raising the purchase price by seven percent every four years just doesn't really add up.

Re:Where's the increased cost?

[enjar]

I guess that you have refused any part of a raise due to the "cost of living" adjustment, then? :)

There are production costs, to be sure. Someone has to take phone calls, someone has to take complaints, someone has to pay the light bill, someone has to pay the people, someone has to process the registrations, someone has to fix it when it breaks, etc. I'm sure it's 99% automated, but SOMEONE has to do SOMETHING at some point.

They can't have level prices year over year for 12 years since their costs will rise with inflation, and there might be additional costs they don't know about. So they peg it at 7% to cover the risk that the gap between inflaton (think 3-4% for the US, different elsewhere) and the additional costs they may incur still nets them a profit. Having 7% laid out as the plan for X number of years is preferable to commercial enterprises, as they can plan the costs over that number of years rather than having to guess at what revewal may be each year.

Sure, the costs are pretty small overall for most businesses, but that's the basic reason they can increase the cost overall year over year.

oh please

[slackaddict]

FTA: Now, nineteen registrars, including GoDaddy and Network Solutions...

So would GoDaddy have turned down the same contract offer? Would Network Solutions have turned ICANN's offer down? Would ANY registrar have turned down this offer? Sounds like a bunch of sour grapes to me...

Re:oh please

[jwdeff]

No one said Verisign should have declined the offer. This is about ICANN giving it to a less than ideal candidate on less than ideal terms.

UNIX

[Short Circuit]

UNIX, courtesy of Ma Bell.

Thus, the foundation was laid for BSD and Linux.

Are you for real?

[C10H14N2]

There are 21 people on the board of directors.

This cult of personality crap with ICANN is just exhausting. Say something like "Vint Cerf Sell Out!" and heads nod everywhre, but if you were to say the same thing about, say Amadeu Abril i Abril, Nii Quaynor or Masanobu Katoh they wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about, but would happily drone on about how it's all a conspiracy of U.S. control blah blah blah blah blah.

Re:GoDaddy Blog

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Doesn't Go Daddy make a lot of money on the (in my opinion) shitty practice of after market domain name sales (registering a domain name that you will never use in order to sell it at a profit to someone who does need it or will use it)?

Go Daddy doesn't ask its customers what they plan to do with their domains. Are you suggesting that people should be required to justify their intended domain use before they can buy it? Do we set up some committee to decide who is worthy and who is not? Sounds like a big can of worms to me...

Re:GoDaddy Blog

[metamatic]

People say the UN shouldn't do this because the UN is corrupt and inefficient. However, Verisign is verifiably corrupt and inefficient as well, perhaps even more so.

More to the point, the US government is clearly corrupt and inefficient.

"Verisign have my complete confidence. They do a heck of a job!"

Re:GoDaddy Blog

[ivan256]

As I read the comments in this thread, it really is starting to piss me off that people are letting their anti-American attitudes get in the way of talking about what's really going on.

Neither Verisign, ICANN,nor the UN are elected bodies, and none of them exist for the wellbeing of individuals or businesses. Verisign exists to make a profit, ICANN seems to exist to make sure they continue to exist, and the UN operates on the positions of governments (both the elected and/or corrupt types equally). Also, they each make the tasks they perform way more expensive than they have to be (this goes doubly so for the UN).

Are you sure it isn't that the primary reason you want the UN to take over is because you dislike the US government so much? If you ask me, the primary reason to oppose a UN takeover of DNS is that the UN answers to governments instead of people. Maybe you European types like that sort of thing. You did, after all, basically eliminate any individual level involvement in your new government when you set up the EU. I, however, would like a body that is actually accountable to ordinary people to be in charge... even if, for now, that means a subset of ordinary people.

Let's find some organization to run things that is actually democratic, and world representative, instead of handing it over to the UN just because people don't trust the US. Or better yet, let's trade a tiny bit of the reliablilty of the DNS system for distributed, de-regulated management.

(Yeah, I know, I'm going to get modded as Flamebait. Let me tell those moderators in advance that they're biased and wrong.)

Re:GoDaddy Blog

[JordanL]

No, he's talking about GoDaddy's parking of domains for themselves not other. Usually this occurs on domains that its customers let expire. Then, if they ever want to reregister the domain again, they have a much bigger fee.

I Hate TLDs

[General Alcazar]

God, I wish no one had ever thought it would be a good idea to have TLDs. Just make everything be the same, with one name. Then we wouldn't have all of this damn arguing about .com this, .org that. If you need to differentiate your name, just do it within the name itself. There really isn't any need to sort things according to categories.

Re:I Hate TLDs

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this insightful? You eliminate top domains, and then instead of having a different group responsible for managing each subset, you now have to give control of managing the ENTIRE domain space to ONE group. Remember, you have to have someone watching out to ensure that each registered domain is unique.