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ICANN lifts the price cap on .org domains

168 points by ndmrs 7y ago

C1sc0cat 7y ago
Not to be bitchy maybe Poptel should have won the bid to run .org back in the day - not that I am biased :-)
halfmatthalfcat 7y ago
The whole domain market experience is utter crap. Commoditizing domain names has created such an unbalanced power dynamic between buyers and sellers where the sellers hold all the power. Gatekeeping at it's finest. Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations. I shouldn't have to name my company some contorted bastardization to successfully enter the market.
- mc32 7y ago
  I don’t like it either. But the diametrical solution of a DMV-styled org would also have problems, though different in nature perhaps.
- will_brown 7y ago
  >Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations. What do you mean by this? Generally if a corporate name is registered (example: ABC, INC.) most states will not allow another “ABC” to be registered (even if ending in another suffix like “Corp” or even if another type of entity like an LLC). I had a client in a certain state who registered their entity name as MSG HOLDINGS and wouldn’t you know I got a call from General Counsel of Madison Square Garden one day making an offer to purchase my clients entity solely for the name.
  - halfmatthalfcat 7y ago
    I mean if a name is available to use, you can just use it. There's no negotiation, no price barrier, nothing. I think most of my frustration is toward the domain squatting/reselling industry.
    - lunchables 7y ago
      >I mean if a name is available to use, you can just use it. There's no negotiation, no price barrier, nothing. How is that different in domain names? If the name is available, you buy it and use it. And the "price barrier" for domain names was less than filing incorporation paperwork, in my state anyway. >I think most of my frustration is toward the domain squatting/reselling industry. At least with domain names you can negotiate with someone. If someone else registers a company name before you, good luck. Same situation, look up the registered members and try to talk them into giving it to you, I guess?
      - eridius 7y ago
        > How is that different in domain names? If the name is available, you buy it and use it. Because in the absence of price caps the registrar can choose to increase the price on "valuable" domain names (for whatever arbitrary criteria it decides means a domain is "valuable").
        gist 7y ago
        All .org and .info domains will be priced the same. Not more valuable ones can be at a higher cost.
        dgellow 7y ago
        Not anymore, that's exactly what the article is about. > ICANN has agreed to remove price restrictions on .org domain names, letting the domain’s manager, Public Interest Registry, charge as much as it wants for the domains. (It also agreed to let .info manager Afilias charge whatever it wants for .info.)
        gist 7y ago
        You are wrong. All .org domains will be priced the same as will .info domains. They can't decide a particular .org domain is worth more than another (that has already been registered and is being used). They can charge what they want but they can't differentiate between domains. And the quote you gave essentially says that. This is different than a completely new tld whereby they might decide that a name is premium. The point is no legacy domain will be priced as premium. I guess in theory if it expires they might be able to do that but the 'can charge what they want' will not impact existing domain registrations. And in the case of a valuable domain if that were released it would be grabbed at auction and not available for the simple registration fee.
- belorn 7y ago
  Registering a trademark is generally more expensive than a domain name, and trademarks don't compete on the same namespace and is split depending on industry. The biggest difference to the domain market is that with domain names everyone is clogging the same namespace. If people just spread out based on nationality and industry it would be easy and cheap. To make a direct example, if I talked about Abba here in Sweden, most people think about the music band. But if I talk about Abba in the context of food, people will instead think of Abba seafood that make Kalles Kaviar and pickled herring. Abba.se as a domain is thus very ambiguous as it doesn't specify if it about food or music, and abba.com is likely to surprise people as it has nothing to do with either. To make matter worse, companies that want to protect their trademark or work actively at preventing fake shops will often buy several hundred versions of their domain names under different name spaces. It is seen as best practice, especially for online shops.
  - bin0 7y ago
    But at the same time, I think we might be a bit to far with the current setup of the web to change this. Not saying it can't be redesigned better, though. I can't see everyone moving to "abba.food.se" or "abba.music.se", especially as domain length is at a serious premium (though my information is old and it's just a correlation, it's the best factual support I could find short-notice for what is commonly known). [0] There's a fine line between "clogging the namespace" and commoditizing something. I like being able to have my own domain - I can host stuff, run a web site, access services with a friendly name, attach friendly names to my internal IPs, etc. Why should I have to be a legally-registered something-or-other to do that? And if I'm not, why should I have to settle for something three times as long? Most of the pollution is from squatters, who are cancerous to the internet. [0] http://www.gaebler.com/Domain-Length-Research.htm http://www.gaebler.com/Domain-Length-Research.htm
- 3xblah 7y ago
  I actually did a "side project" to fix this about 10 years ago. Never "released" it; I just wanted to see if it would work. I still think it could. Imagine being being able to get a copy of a zone file and that file reliably revealing something about what was being served from the associated IP address. Where each name was by the nature of its tld disambiguated from any other name. "Collision-proof" naming. Arguably, it already exists IRL. As a member of the public I can get a list, or search a database, of trademarks that reveals exactly what type of goods or services each mark ("name") covers. I do not need to submit each name/good/service I am interested in to a gatekeeper advertising company who will try to guess what it is I want based on other people's searches or personal information gathered about me. OTOH, if, for example, a trademark office started running an authoritative nameserver, serving its own zone with its own descriptive tlds and giving trademark registrants a matching domain name within a class-specific tld, I would not hesistate to add those tlds to the custom root.zone I use. It stands to reason that a business owner should trust a government entity with some accountability more than it trusts a made-up "authority" like ICANN. The "organisation of the world's information" should not be controlled by a private company. Any such company would obviously stand to benefit from the continued disorganisation of information on the web. A lack of organisation that only they have the "expertise" necessary to rectify. The ambiguity of ICANN domain names is one contributor to the ongoing state of disorganisation. Nor should the control of domain names be entrusted to a private company. They, too, benefit from the ambiguity. The profits from selling (through contractors) dispute resolution services and then new tlds to trademark holders are only possible when the ambiguity continues to exist.
walrus01 7y ago
Ever since icann lifted the floodgates on all the new gTLDs, it's been almost nothing but unmitigated mediocrity. Follow the money, look at how much a company like donuts pays to icann for the "application fee" for each individual gtld. Giving .Amazon to the company and not the brazilian-peruvian group that wanted to run it was really a fine example of icann in the year 2019.
- ailideex 7y ago
  > Giving .Amazon to the company and not the brazilian-peruvian group that wanted to run it was really a fine example of icann in the year 2019. Not to be that guy - but why should the brazilian-peruvian group have gotten it instead? If you said that the actual group of mythical woman should have gotten it I would say maybe you have a point, but then we would have to first figure out how mythical creatures can own things.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    Personally I think it's a bad idea for any corporation to have a whole gtld, Amazon or otherwise.
    - kristopolous 7y ago
      it's been like this since the 90s though. Things like .CX, .TV etc were managed by small firms who bought the rights and thought they could make megabucks with it ...
      - walrus01 7y ago
        those aren't gtlds, those are cctlds where the "ministry of communications" or equivalent in some tiny country has been sufficiently bribed by a bunch of domain registrar grifters.
  - salawat 7y ago
    >Not to be that guy - but why should the brazilian-peruvian group have gotten it instead? News flash: You're being that guy. They have a far more legitimate claim because they administer the majority of the geological zone known as the Amazon Basin, and have since long before Amazon the company was a twinkle in Bezos' eye? I mean... I'm hoping you were being tongue-in-cheek... Nowadays it seems to be getting more difficult to separate the jokers from those who just haven't quite thought through things long enough before posting.
cardamomo 7y ago
Press release from Public Interest Registry, which oversees .org and similar TLDs: https://pir.org/pir-welcomes-renewed-org-agreement/ https://pir.org/pir-welcomes-renewed-org-agreement/ > Regarding the removal of price caps, we would like to underscore that Public Interest Registry is a mission driven non-profit registry and currently has no specific plans for any price changes for .ORG. Should there be a need for a sensible price increase at some point in the future, we will provide advanced notice to the public. The .ORG community is considered in every decision we make, and we are incredibly proud of the more than 15 years we have spent as a responsible steward of .ORG. PIR remains committed to acting in the best interest of the .ORG community for years to come. And PIR's May 1 open letter to the .org community, which has much the same message as Friday's press release: https://pir.org/an-open-letter-to-the-org-community/ https://pir.org/an-open-letter-to-the-org-community/
- shock 7y ago
  > Public Interest Registry is a mission driven non-profit registry and currently has no specific plans for any price changes This means nothing. It's like when you get the hiring paperwork and the HR person says regarding the non-compete: "oh, don't worry about it, it's not enforceable"...
  - ohashi 7y ago
    They already raised prices higher than .COM. Trust us, it's fine isn't a defense. If it's not in writing, it doesn't matter. For an organization already making 30M profit on a monopoly that was gifted to them, and in a world where the registry providing actual services (afilias) has prices decreasing, there is essentially no way to ever 'need' to charge more. Only greed.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Exactly. If it's not an issue or it's not enforceable, then why not put it in writing?
    - ohashi 7y ago
pmlnr 7y ago
The whole decentralize everything! movement seems to overlook DNS. I get that technically the DNS system is decentralized, but in reality, you lease a domain from a random, usually politically charged entity, who can do anything with it, if they wish. We need a real DNS system, one where an individual can request and have a domain for life and which is truly decentralized. Unfortunately none of the attempts - .onion with tor, .bit with namecoin, etc - seem to be working. .onion is despised because tor and impossible to memorize them; .bit never gained any traction and namecoin, being a bitcoin clone, has it's own issues. Anyone knows of any working approach?
- rasengan 7y ago
  Handshake [1] does this exactly. [1] https://www.handshake.org https://www.handshake.org
  - pmlnr 7y ago
    I read buzzwords - proof-of-work, coins. Also seems to be venture funding based. What's the catch?
  - ailideex 7y ago
    How is this better than namecoin and how will it not end in same problem? Also this really does not do what the person you responded to asked for - I can't get some personal domain name for life from this - it is market based AFAICT. Really seems to solve almost none of the problems and goes directly for what ICANN only now does with .org as no domain will have any price cap with handshake.
    - xur17 7y ago
      > I can't get some personal domain name for life from this - it is market based AFAICT. The yearly renewal fee is fixed, and is a standard transaction fee, not market based [0]. [0] https://handshake.org/faq https://handshake.org/faq
      - 7y ago
1-6 7y ago
Will .com prices eventually increase? That'll bring havoc to my collection.
- teh_klev 7y ago
  From the article: "ICANN's decision foreshadows that the organization will agree to .com price increases. Eventually, caps on .com domains could disappear." So make of that what you will.
- ohashi 7y ago
  VeriSign lobbyists appeared to be pushing the hardest for this. That's the billion dollar question.
mehdix 7y ago
Does it mean that renewal prices for currently owned .org domains will sky-rocket?
- pmlnr 7y ago
  Potentially yes.
vectorEQ 7y ago
"The good news is that Public Interest Registry’s management is competent and well-guided. They will likely wait a while before making any major changes to avoid comments of “we told you so”." Well that's nice of them, so we get to pay crazy amounts in the near future instead of instantly. how generous.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Bets on how long? I reckon 6 months. And they'll use some excuse like "to prevent spam" or "infrastructure costs are going up" (despite them earning millions per year and having practically no expenses)
threezero 7y ago
One of the article comments suggests antitrust action, so I looked up prior lawsuits against ICANN for abusing their monopoly. The only one I found shows it being settled, not dismissed. Maybe it’s time to start filing complaints with government agencies against ICANN.
danShumway 7y ago
I'm slowly starting to suspect that maybe having human-readable names for domains is a mistake. Partially because phishing domains is already kind of easy (the rapid increase in tlds isn't helping), partially because the race to grab and hold names has been having increasing negative effects, and partially because (aside from domains) many actual URLs are already impossible to remember. We're running into the same problem with SSL certificates -- the position of LetsEncrypt is now that they shouldn't be used for identity verification. There would be some awful challenges if we got rid of the human-readable part of domains, but the benefits of moving to something like a unique hash or key instead: - instantly getting a domain for anything and have it be permanent, without any renewals. - getting rid of most name-squatting. - being explicit and up-front with consumers about the dangers of phishing, and the need to build separate identity-verification infrastructure that couldn't be beaten with dumb attacks like the `rn m` trick. I dunno. It could be a really bad, stupid idea, but I want to start thinking about if there are ways we could share domains in a hashed form on podcasts/posters/etc... that would mitigate some of the obvious downsides to having them be difficult to remember or type. I know IPFS and DAT are using hashes for everything, but as far as I know they're both falling back on stuff like IPNS and human-readable aliases when URLs get shared, and to me those have the exact same downsides as the domain system we're already using today. I'm not necessarily advocating anything, it's just less obvious to me today that a naming system that uses actual words provides more benefits than downsides.
- athenot 7y ago
  You can do that today with IP addresses. v6 ones are plentiful. But I don't know how SSL would work without the domain part. EDIT: Cloudflare pulls it off here so it's certainly possible. https://1.1.1.1 https://1.1.1.1
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Can I move a v6 address between locations/machines?
    - sethhochberg 7y ago
soulofmischief 7y ago
> This is despite only six out of over 3,000 comments being in favor of removing price caps. Oh.. okay. Seems totally fair. If ICANN et al. want to charge an arm and a leg from non-profits seeking a .org domain on a public utility, I guess we can say goodbye to the prestige generally associated with that extension.
- jedberg 7y ago
  And all six were written by lobbyists for Verisign.
  - klez 7y ago
    It's a shame you're being downvoted, considering there was a post here last week proving this very fact.
    - SquareWheel 7y ago
      Accusations of shilling are pretty serious, and should include evidence alongside the claim.
jlgaddis 7y ago
If you have any .org domains, you may want to consider a 10-year renewal before any price increases happen.
- tzs 7y ago
  Network Solutions also offers 20 year and 100 year terms. ICANN rules say 10 years is the max, so I'm not sure how this works. Does NS just deal with it 10 years at a time at the underlying registry, eating any price increases themselves? 20 years .org at NS is $13.99/year, which is close to the more reasonable registries, such as Namecheap. 100 years gets it to $9.99/year, which is pretty good--if you believe that NS will really eat any underlying price increases over that time (and, of course, you will actually be using the domain for most of that time). (Well...pretty good until you remember that NS charges another $10/month for WHOIS privacy, which is free at Namecheap [1]). [1] ...and I would assume at other popular registries. I'm just using Namecheap for comparisons because that is where I now have my domains.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    That's a brilliant business model. They get all the money up front, get to invest how they want, and if there is a price increase, it probably will be less than inflation, and almost certainly less than their investment returns on your upfront payment.
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      Potentially unlimited losses if the price goes up to $99999 per year... Although in that case, I bet they'd just give an excuse and offer a refund of the originally paid amount.
      - jedberg 7y ago
        Keep in mind though that the price of the domains has to still be feasible for other people to register, so it would never go that high.
    - 7y ago
foota 7y ago
Related to discussion about domain industry in general, I stumbled on the weirdest business the other day trying to go to a website name and instead typing crun.com. It leads to https://venture.com/domains/ https://venture.com/domains/, which is... a startup that rents out high visibility domains to others, with discount plans available where the price increases exponentially with the assumption that your startup does as well. One of those things where you're not sure if it's satire at first.
- citrusui 7y ago
  Interesting quote that I found from Venture's homepage: > The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you’re so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you’re a marginal company. - PAUL GRAHAM, Y Combinator
londons_explore 7y ago
I'm glad I don't own any .org domains... I bet the renewal price will now go up by 25% every year forever...
killjoywashere 7y ago
In light of the prior article about ICANN as an unaccountable private company (1), this is a good time to encourage everyone to read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Dictator's Handbook (2). This is a classic setup for dictatorship by a small cabal (the board): a vast, unempowered populace, a clear source of money (increasing domain fees), and a fairly small elite that needs to be compromised, particularly relative to the size of the unempowered populace. If governments and corporations haven't already started buying influence, I'd be shocked. (1) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-internet-us-government https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-int... (2) https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845 https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
nikolay 7y ago
ICANN is a mafia. Not sure why it exists in its ugly form today. I'd rather transfer these rights to Mozilla.

168 points by ndmrs 7y ago

Not to be bitchy maybe Poptel should have won the bid to run .org back in the day - not that I am biased :-)

The whole domain market experience is utter crap. Commoditizing domain names has created such an unbalanced power dynamic between buyers and sellers where the sellers hold all the power. Gatekeeping at it's finest. Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations. I shouldn't have to name my company some contorted bastardization to successfully enter the market.

mc32 7y ago
I don’t like it either. But the diametrical solution of a DMV-styled org would also have problems, though different in nature perhaps.
will_brown 7y ago
>Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations. What do you mean by this? Generally if a corporate name is registered (example: ABC, INC.) most states will not allow another “ABC” to be registered (even if ending in another suffix like “Corp” or even if another type of entity like an LLC). I had a client in a certain state who registered their entity name as MSG HOLDINGS and wouldn’t you know I got a call from General Counsel of Madison Square Garden one day making an offer to purchase my clients entity solely for the name.
- halfmatthalfcat 7y ago
  I mean if a name is available to use, you can just use it. There's no negotiation, no price barrier, nothing. I think most of my frustration is toward the domain squatting/reselling industry.
  - lunchables 7y ago
    >I mean if a name is available to use, you can just use it. There's no negotiation, no price barrier, nothing. How is that different in domain names? If the name is available, you buy it and use it. And the "price barrier" for domain names was less than filing incorporation paperwork, in my state anyway. >I think most of my frustration is toward the domain squatting/reselling industry. At least with domain names you can negotiate with someone. If someone else registers a company name before you, good luck. Same situation, look up the registered members and try to talk them into giving it to you, I guess?
    - eridius 7y ago
      > How is that different in domain names? If the name is available, you buy it and use it. Because in the absence of price caps the registrar can choose to increase the price on "valuable" domain names (for whatever arbitrary criteria it decides means a domain is "valuable").
      - gist 7y ago
        All .org and .info domains will be priced the same. Not more valuable ones can be at a higher cost.
        dgellow 7y ago
        Not anymore, that's exactly what the article is about. > ICANN has agreed to remove price restrictions on .org domain names, letting the domain’s manager, Public Interest Registry, charge as much as it wants for the domains. (It also agreed to let .info manager Afilias charge whatever it wants for .info.)
        gist 7y ago
        You are wrong. All .org domains will be priced the same as will .info domains. They can't decide a particular .org domain is worth more than another (that has already been registered and is being used). They can charge what they want but they can't differentiate between domains. And the quote you gave essentially says that. This is different than a completely new tld whereby they might decide that a name is premium. The point is no legacy domain will be priced as premium. I guess in theory if it expires they might be able to do that but the 'can charge what they want' will not impact existing domain registrations. And in the case of a valuable domain if that were released it would be grabbed at auction and not available for the simple registration fee.
belorn 7y ago
Registering a trademark is generally more expensive than a domain name, and trademarks don't compete on the same namespace and is split depending on industry. The biggest difference to the domain market is that with domain names everyone is clogging the same namespace. If people just spread out based on nationality and industry it would be easy and cheap. To make a direct example, if I talked about Abba here in Sweden, most people think about the music band. But if I talk about Abba in the context of food, people will instead think of Abba seafood that make Kalles Kaviar and pickled herring. Abba.se as a domain is thus very ambiguous as it doesn't specify if it about food or music, and abba.com is likely to surprise people as it has nothing to do with either. To make matter worse, companies that want to protect their trademark or work actively at preventing fake shops will often buy several hundred versions of their domain names under different name spaces. It is seen as best practice, especially for online shops.
- bin0 7y ago
  But at the same time, I think we might be a bit to far with the current setup of the web to change this. Not saying it can't be redesigned better, though. I can't see everyone moving to "abba.food.se" or "abba.music.se", especially as domain length is at a serious premium (though my information is old and it's just a correlation, it's the best factual support I could find short-notice for what is commonly known). [0] There's a fine line between "clogging the namespace" and commoditizing something. I like being able to have my own domain - I can host stuff, run a web site, access services with a friendly name, attach friendly names to my internal IPs, etc. Why should I have to be a legally-registered something-or-other to do that? And if I'm not, why should I have to settle for something three times as long? Most of the pollution is from squatters, who are cancerous to the internet. [0] http://www.gaebler.com/Domain-Length-Research.htm http://www.gaebler.com/Domain-Length-Research.htm
3xblah 7y ago
I actually did a "side project" to fix this about 10 years ago. Never "released" it; I just wanted to see if it would work. I still think it could. Imagine being being able to get a copy of a zone file and that file reliably revealing something about what was being served from the associated IP address. Where each name was by the nature of its tld disambiguated from any other name. "Collision-proof" naming. Arguably, it already exists IRL. As a member of the public I can get a list, or search a database, of trademarks that reveals exactly what type of goods or services each mark ("name") covers. I do not need to submit each name/good/service I am interested in to a gatekeeper advertising company who will try to guess what it is I want based on other people's searches or personal information gathered about me. OTOH, if, for example, a trademark office started running an authoritative nameserver, serving its own zone with its own descriptive tlds and giving trademark registrants a matching domain name within a class-specific tld, I would not hesistate to add those tlds to the custom root.zone I use. It stands to reason that a business owner should trust a government entity with some accountability more than it trusts a made-up "authority" like ICANN. The "organisation of the world's information" should not be controlled by a private company. Any such company would obviously stand to benefit from the continued disorganisation of information on the web. A lack of organisation that only they have the "expertise" necessary to rectify. The ambiguity of ICANN domain names is one contributor to the ongoing state of disorganisation. Nor should the control of domain names be entrusted to a private company. They, too, benefit from the ambiguity. The profits from selling (through contractors) dispute resolution services and then new tlds to trademark holders are only possible when the ambiguity continues to exist.

walrus01 7y ago

Ever since icann lifted the floodgates on all the new gTLDs, it's been almost nothing but unmitigated mediocrity. Follow the money, look at how much a company like donuts pays to icann for the "application fee" for each individual gtld. Giving .Amazon to the company and not the brazilian-peruvian group that wanted to run it was really a fine example of icann in the year 2019.

ailideex 7y ago
> Giving .Amazon to the company and not the brazilian-peruvian group that wanted to run it was really a fine example of icann in the year 2019. Not to be that guy - but why should the brazilian-peruvian group have gotten it instead? If you said that the actual group of mythical woman should have gotten it I would say maybe you have a point, but then we would have to first figure out how mythical creatures can own things.
- walrus01 7y ago
  Personally I think it's a bad idea for any corporation to have a whole gtld, Amazon or otherwise.
  - kristopolous 7y ago
    it's been like this since the 90s though. Things like .CX, .TV etc were managed by small firms who bought the rights and thought they could make megabucks with it ...
    - walrus01 7y ago
      those aren't gtlds, those are cctlds where the "ministry of communications" or equivalent in some tiny country has been sufficiently bribed by a bunch of domain registrar grifters.
- salawat 7y ago
  >Not to be that guy - but why should the brazilian-peruvian group have gotten it instead? News flash: You're being that guy. They have a far more legitimate claim because they administer the majority of the geological zone known as the Amazon Basin, and have since long before Amazon the company was a twinkle in Bezos' eye? I mean... I'm hoping you were being tongue-in-cheek... Nowadays it seems to be getting more difficult to separate the jokers from those who just haven't quite thought through things long enough before posting.

cardamomo 7y ago

Press release from Public Interest Registry, which oversees .org and similar TLDs: https://pir.org/pir-welcomes-renewed-org-agreement/ https://pir.org/pir-welcomes-renewed-org-agreement/ > Regarding the removal of price caps, we would like to underscore that Public Interest Registry is a mission driven non-profit registry and currently has no specific plans for any price changes for .ORG. Should there be a need for a sensible price increase at some point in the future, we will provide advanced notice to the public. The .ORG community is considered in every decision we make, and we are incredibly proud of the more than 15 years we have spent as a responsible steward of .ORG. PIR remains committed to acting in the best interest of the .ORG community for years to come. And PIR's May 1 open letter to the .org community, which has much the same message as Friday's press release: https://pir.org/an-open-letter-to-the-org-community/ https://pir.org/an-open-letter-to-the-org-community/

shock 7y ago
> Public Interest Registry is a mission driven non-profit registry and currently has no specific plans for any price changes This means nothing. It's like when you get the hiring paperwork and the HR person says regarding the non-compete: "oh, don't worry about it, it's not enforceable"...
- ohashi 7y ago
  They already raised prices higher than .COM. Trust us, it's fine isn't a defense. If it's not in writing, it doesn't matter. For an organization already making 30M profit on a monopoly that was gifted to them, and in a world where the registry providing actual services (afilias) has prices decreasing, there is essentially no way to ever 'need' to charge more. Only greed.
- danShumway 7y ago
  Exactly. If it's not an issue or it's not enforceable, then why not put it in writing?
  - ohashi 7y ago

pmlnr 7y ago

The whole decentralize everything! movement seems to overlook DNS. I get that technically the DNS system is decentralized, but in reality, you lease a domain from a random, usually politically charged entity, who can do anything with it, if they wish. We need a real DNS system, one where an individual can request and have a domain for life and which is truly decentralized. Unfortunately none of the attempts - .onion with tor, .bit with namecoin, etc - seem to be working. .onion is despised because tor and impossible to memorize them; .bit never gained any traction and namecoin, being a bitcoin clone, has it's own issues. Anyone knows of any working approach?

rasengan 7y ago
Handshake [1] does this exactly. [1] https://www.handshake.org https://www.handshake.org
- pmlnr 7y ago
  I read buzzwords - proof-of-work, coins. Also seems to be venture funding based. What's the catch?
- ailideex 7y ago
  How is this better than namecoin and how will it not end in same problem? Also this really does not do what the person you responded to asked for - I can't get some personal domain name for life from this - it is market based AFAICT. Really seems to solve almost none of the problems and goes directly for what ICANN only now does with .org as no domain will have any price cap with handshake.
  - xur17 7y ago
    > I can't get some personal domain name for life from this - it is market based AFAICT. The yearly renewal fee is fixed, and is a standard transaction fee, not market based [0]. [0] https://handshake.org/faq https://handshake.org/faq
    - 7y ago

1-6 7y ago

Will .com prices eventually increase? That'll bring havoc to my collection.

teh_klev 7y ago
From the article: "ICANN's decision foreshadows that the organization will agree to .com price increases. Eventually, caps on .com domains could disappear." So make of that what you will.
ohashi 7y ago
VeriSign lobbyists appeared to be pushing the hardest for this. That's the billion dollar question.

mehdix 7y ago

Does it mean that renewal prices for currently owned .org domains will sky-rocket?

pmlnr 7y ago
Potentially yes.

vectorEQ 7y ago

"The good news is that Public Interest Registry’s management is competent and well-guided. They will likely wait a while before making any major changes to avoid comments of “we told you so”." Well that's nice of them, so we get to pay crazy amounts in the near future instead of instantly. how generous.

londons_explore 7y ago
Bets on how long? I reckon 6 months. And they'll use some excuse like "to prevent spam" or "infrastructure costs are going up" (despite them earning millions per year and having practically no expenses)

threezero 7y ago

One of the article comments suggests antitrust action, so I looked up prior lawsuits against ICANN for abusing their monopoly. The only one I found shows it being settled, not dismissed. Maybe it’s time to start filing complaints with government agencies against ICANN.

danShumway 7y ago

I'm slowly starting to suspect that maybe having human-readable names for domains is a mistake. Partially because phishing domains is already kind of easy (the rapid increase in tlds isn't helping), partially because the race to grab and hold names has been having increasing negative effects, and partially because (aside from domains) many actual URLs are already impossible to remember. We're running into the same problem with SSL certificates -- the position of LetsEncrypt is now that they shouldn't be used for identity verification. There would be some awful challenges if we got rid of the human-readable part of domains, but the benefits of moving to something like a unique hash or key instead: - instantly getting a domain for anything and have it be permanent, without any renewals. - getting rid of most name-squatting. - being explicit and up-front with consumers about the dangers of phishing, and the need to build separate identity-verification infrastructure that couldn't be beaten with dumb attacks like the `rn m` trick. I dunno. It could be a really bad, stupid idea, but I want to start thinking about if there are ways we could share domains in a hashed form on podcasts/posters/etc... that would mitigate some of the obvious downsides to having them be difficult to remember or type. I know IPFS and DAT are using hashes for everything, but as far as I know they're both falling back on stuff like IPNS and human-readable aliases when URLs get shared, and to me those have the exact same downsides as the domain system we're already using today. I'm not necessarily advocating anything, it's just less obvious to me today that a naming system that uses actual words provides more benefits than downsides.

athenot 7y ago
You can do that today with IP addresses. v6 ones are plentiful. But I don't know how SSL would work without the domain part. EDIT: Cloudflare pulls it off here so it's certainly possible. https://1.1.1.1 https://1.1.1.1
- danShumway 7y ago
  Can I move a v6 address between locations/machines?
  - sethhochberg 7y ago

soulofmischief 7y ago

> This is despite only six out of over 3,000 comments being in favor of removing price caps. Oh.. okay. Seems totally fair. If ICANN et al. want to charge an arm and a leg from non-profits seeking a .org domain on a public utility, I guess we can say goodbye to the prestige generally associated with that extension.

jedberg 7y ago
And all six were written by lobbyists for Verisign.
- klez 7y ago
  It's a shame you're being downvoted, considering there was a post here last week proving this very fact.
  - SquareWheel 7y ago
    Accusations of shilling are pretty serious, and should include evidence alongside the claim.

jlgaddis 7y ago

If you have any .org domains, you may want to consider a 10-year renewal before any price increases happen.

tzs 7y ago
Network Solutions also offers 20 year and 100 year terms. ICANN rules say 10 years is the max, so I'm not sure how this works. Does NS just deal with it 10 years at a time at the underlying registry, eating any price increases themselves? 20 years .org at NS is $13.99/year, which is close to the more reasonable registries, such as Namecheap. 100 years gets it to $9.99/year, which is pretty good--if you believe that NS will really eat any underlying price increases over that time (and, of course, you will actually be using the domain for most of that time). (Well...pretty good until you remember that NS charges another $10/month for WHOIS privacy, which is free at Namecheap [1]). [1] ...and I would assume at other popular registries. I'm just using Namecheap for comparisons because that is where I now have my domains.
- jedberg 7y ago
  That's a brilliant business model. They get all the money up front, get to invest how they want, and if there is a price increase, it probably will be less than inflation, and almost certainly less than their investment returns on your upfront payment.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    Potentially unlimited losses if the price goes up to $99999 per year... Although in that case, I bet they'd just give an excuse and offer a refund of the originally paid amount.
    - jedberg 7y ago
      Keep in mind though that the price of the domains has to still be feasible for other people to register, so it would never go that high.
  - 7y ago

foota 7y ago

Related to discussion about domain industry in general, I stumbled on the weirdest business the other day trying to go to a website name and instead typing crun.com. It leads to https://venture.com/domains/ https://venture.com/domains/, which is... a startup that rents out high visibility domains to others, with discount plans available where the price increases exponentially with the assumption that your startup does as well. One of those things where you're not sure if it's satire at first.

citrusui 7y ago
Interesting quote that I found from Venture's homepage: > The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you’re so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you’re a marginal company. - PAUL GRAHAM, Y Combinator

londons_explore 7y ago

I'm glad I don't own any .org domains... I bet the renewal price will now go up by 25% every year forever...

killjoywashere 7y ago

In light of the prior article about ICANN as an unaccountable private company (1), this is a good time to encourage everyone to read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Dictator's Handbook (2). This is a classic setup for dictatorship by a small cabal (the board): a vast, unempowered populace, a clear source of money (increasing domain fees), and a fairly small elite that needs to be compromised, particularly relative to the size of the unempowered populace. If governments and corporations haven't already started buying influence, I'd be shocked. (1) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-internet-us-government https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-int... (2) https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845 https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

nikolay 7y ago

ICANN is a mafia. Not sure why it exists in its ugly form today. I'd rather transfer these rights to Mozilla.