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VeriSign Jacks Up .com, .net Prices To the Max
se7en writes "VeriSign is jacking up prices for the .com and .net domains for the second year running, increasing both by the maximum 7% allowed under its exclusive contract with ICANN. 'Assuming that VeriSign continues the 7 percent rise each year (which seems reasonable given the company's history), registrars will be looking at $9.00 for .com domains by the time the current contract ends in 2012 — a 50 percent increase in six years.' Registrars have no choice but to pony up, and chances are they'll pass the pain on to customers."
hmm 7%.. verisign is just trying to catch up with the rate of inflation :)
I would love to pay just $9.00 for a registration fee. Try > $100 here for a .com.au :/
The contract with Verisign does not end in 2012.
ICANN granted to Verisign a perpetual right of renewal.
In other words, unless Verisign goes out and illegally clubs baby seals (and maybe even if they do) they get the right to renew the contract again and again and again and again...
Has ICANN ever bothered to consider the actual costs that Verisign incurs to deliver those domain name registrations? No.
It has been estimated that the amount may be as low as $0.02 per year. In which case ICANN has created a guaranteed profit to Verisign of about $420,000,000 eavery year - with you and me paying.
The contract is on the ICANN site. People should read it before making statements that aren't true. Verisign can not raise the fee every year, only four of the six years in a contract period. Look at the payments they need to make to ICANN: $1.5 million rising to $3 million a quarter over the contract. Look at the SLAs for .com and .net (5-100 milliseconds), 100% availability per year on some services or penalties. How many company's can provide that level of service for the millions or billions of queries they get a day, especially from the squatters that register hundreds of thousands of names a day and release them during the grace period. Verisign doesn't make any money from the squatters yet has to store and report on all of that data. If people think the business is such a cash cow and easy to do, why didn't they bid on the contract? They could be billionaires by now.
http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/net/
http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/com/
And yet other people forget that before $140 domains, domain registrations were free, first-come first-served. I still own a couple of domains that I registered for free and didn't pay any fees on for the first few years I owned them.
Applying a Turing test to the sender is only successful if you assume that (a) machines can't send wanted mail, and (b) you receiving the e-mail is important enough for the human senders to jump through an extra hoop.
The first one is obviously false. There are newsletters I want, and automated alerts, like a bill becoming due. And I want to continue to receive these even if the sending company changes the sender address.
The second is false too. I can quite well imagine e-mails with something important to the recipient and not the sender, and if the sender gets a reply back asking them to identify themselves, they won't follow up. Because it wasn't important to them. No matter how important it might have been for the recipient.
An example: If I had tickets to a concert I can't go to after all, and knowing you're a fan, I sent you an e-mail offering them to you. If I got a reply back saying I need to identify myself as a human, I'd mutter "and the horse you rode in on", and either give the tickets to someone else or simply throw them away.
Except for emails sent by automatons. A server that sent an order confirmation email is not going to "reply" to any emails. Many important emails are sent from non-observed email boxes.
Sometimes an email may be sent from alternate or temporary accounts. This is more often the case when something is urgent.
Also my mom won't react to such an email. Most people assume that an email sent is an email sent, and any emails requesting some further action are always going to have problems.