VeriSign Increases Domain Name Pricing

BillGatesLoveChild writes "CNET reports VeriSign has made its move, increasing domain name prices by 7%. From October 15 2007, .com domains will now cost $6.42 (up from $6) and .net domains $3.85 per annum. ICANN had previously voted to support the increase. Despite annual income of $323.4M from .com domain names alone, VeriSign claims it needs the increase to provide "a high level of security and reliability for .com." This increase comes in the face of complaints by customers, registrars and senators alike that VeriSign is abusing its ICANN monopoly. Yet the furrowed brows and promises of senators of investigations have come to nothing, even though the only people seemingly in favor of the monopoly are ICANN and VeriSign. With complaints about the pair running back to 2002, what can we the public do to get our elected representatives to take the great domain name ripoff seriously?"

Comments

Re:Voting Power

[krbvroc1]

Kind of reminds me of much ado about Exxonmobil. Say, whatever happened with those congressional hearings about an $8 billion dollar profit for a single quarter? Well, it turns out that over the past 25 years oil companies paid more than $2.2 trillion in taxes (adjusted for inflation). That is more than three times what they earned in profits during the same period. What your misleading example fails to factor in are the 'other costs'. How many trillions of tax dollars have we spent providing 'security'/'defense' for the oil industry, billions propping up corrupt governments so these oil companies can access the resource, thousands of lives lost, etc. Talk about a corporate subsidy. None of those trillions have been paid for by oil companies as a cost of their product, so the free market has not factored that in. Hell, we haven't even paid for it, our children and grandchildren will be paying for it. If the price of oil truly reflected these costs and subsidies, other alternative products would be more attractive in the market.

iPhone batteries "die in 40 minutes"

[Anonymous Coward]

iPhone batteries "die in 40 minutes"

Apple fanboys kill the messenger

By Nick Farrell: Friday 06 April 2007, 07:14

APPLE FANBOYS have really been going for hack John C Dvorak after one of his sources in Cingular told him the iPhone's batteries lasted just 40 minutes.
During Episode 93 of the spodcast this Week in Tech (TWiT)Dvorak said he received information from "a guy at Cingular who's testing the product." The unnamed, male Cingular employee told Dvorak "there's lots of issues" with the iPhone.

Dvorak said that the iPhone was blighted with not having a removable battery, so "you run 20 minutes and you're using up half the battery power. You get 40 minutes total talk time. And the interface fouls up constantly."

The Cingular geezer or geezerette asked Dvorak not to tell anyone. OK it is a "man in the pub told me" style story, but it does not mean that there is no truth behind it. Certainly it is an odd thing to make up.

But the fan boys are up in arms about the comment and every where the story appears on the interweb there is a diatribe from at least three fanboys about how unreliable Dvorak is as a reporter.

One post said that Dvorak had a background in news and was therefore not qualified to write about technical stuff. Others sited a 1991 prediction he made that didn't come true.

One poster said that if Steve Jobs said that 40 minutes on the phone was long enough to speak to someone that must be OK and he would curtail his usage immediately. Another added that if people used their phones longer than 40 minutes there must be something wrong with them.

More here: http://www.twit.tv/93 [www.twit.tv]