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ICANN extracts $20m signing fee for $1bn dot-com price increases
- Tepix 7y agoThis appears to be a fierce competition between ICANN, the IOC, and the reigning corruption champion: FIFA.
- Balanceinfinity 7y agoThat's funny.
- killjoywashere 7y agoIt's also one of the subjects in The Dictator's Handbook, an excellent layman's read on political economics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845 https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po... If you want the hardcore game theory version, check out The Logic of Political Survival by the same authors: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/gov2126/files/bueno_mesquita_2003_logic.pdf https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/gov2126/files/bueno_mesquita...
- ignoramous 7y agoAlso see, Cricket and the BCCI: https://youtu.be/v5DWJv1hiwM https://youtu.be/v5DWJv1hiwM
- xemoka 7y agoAll this BS with ICANN, what other options are out there to replace them? Some decentralised solution would be great, I guess Namecoin is trying... What other options are there that you're aware of? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
- swiley 7y agoNames are hard. There are things like namecoin but so far they haven’t worked out.
- Tepix 7y agoWith Namecoin and ENS what's missing are easy to use browser add-ons for Chrome and Firefox (and Safari)
- somebodythere 7y agoFor ENS you can resolve names by just installing Metamask. The wallet part of Metamask is not easy to use, but if you just want to brows ENS domains I don't think it can get lower friction than that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- xemoka 7y agoIt does look like that exists: https://peername.com/browser-extension/ https://peername.com/browser-extension/
- swiley 7y agoWhy a browser add-on? That's a really bizarre way to do that and it only fixes interactive web browsing. There is a lot more to networking than web browsers!
- Mathnerd314 7y agoOpenNIC looks like the easiest replacement, they mention some other TLDs they're peered with on their front page such as emerDNS which is decentralized. That doesn't work for anyone who wants their site accessible to the public though, since it won't resolve. Maybe once a few ISPs switch and Google, OpenDNS etc. change their resolvers it'll be a possibility.
- gen3 7y agoSo, the price caps on .com have been released too? Isn’t this the same as what happened to .org? When will we hear that .net is ballooning too? What a scam.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoHonestly, I will just not renew, my domains aren't that special. I'll rather have 1 domain and everything else be a subdomain.
- davchana 7y agoThis is what I did, instead of buying new domains for my every new personal project, i just bought domain bydav.in; & now use foo.bydav.in, this.bydav.in bar.bydav.in etc.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoI gotta start doing this, and only once the projects are in a state I'm okay with, then buy a proper domain...
- gen3 7y agoI’m defiantly going to drop down. Right now I have a personal domain, my parents domain and a few other. High schooler me didn’t realize what I was signing myself up for when I started using a personal domain.
- troquerre 7y agoYou can also use alternative root zone projects like Handshake.org. Most people wouldn't be able to resolve it by default but if it's just for personal use it's trivial to set up a resolver for friends and family.
- p1necone 7y agoI just need 1 domain to use in code namespaces and it doesn't really matter what it is.
- vxNsr 7y agoSo let's get the players straight: In 2014 the Obama Admin decided to cede control of ICANN. ICANN is run like a classic Italian mafia org, with corruption at every level and zero accountability. This year the Trump Admin rubber stamped a price increase on .com because.... reasons? The price of domains should trend down. not up. This is a classic case of regulation being abused by those in power to give each other a bonus. Running a global address book has gotten cheaper and easier with automation and yet we're allowing these orgs to just increase prices willynilly instead of trying to make internet hosting more accessible.
- ebg13 7y ago> The price of domains should trend down. not up. Why? The value of a dollar goes down over time, but the value of a domain does not.
- DailyHN 7y agoI'd bet Moore's law has outpaced inflation. The value of high-demand domain names should increase on the secondary markets. But, the price of unregistered names should be decreasing.
- Tepix 7y agoIt's not about the value of the name, it's about the cost of running a TLD.
- jandrese 7y agoThe cost of running the system is trivial. Domains are more like real estate. They can become almost arbitrarily expensive on the global market because they represent a somewhat exhaustible resource of phrases that people can actually remember. As with any system where you have private resource owners controlling a basic need you should expect corruption and abuse of the customer base. From Water Barons to Landlords to Cable/Broadband companies the pattern repeats itself time and time again. This is why we have regulated industries.
- BitwiseFool 7y agoThe rent seeking has begun in earnest.
- troquerre 7y agoGiven the trend I think this is only the beginning. We'll likely see increasing rent seeking behavior from ICANN administration since their power is effectively unchecked.
- AmericanChopper 7y agoI can’t see how this is rent seeking. .com domains are a finite and scarce resource, they should be increasing in price over time. The registration costs are also a tiny fraction of what any desirable domain name would sell for on the secondary market. I don’t think you can describe selling something for well below the equilibrium price as rent seeking. I’m also not sure it’s even a bad thing to have registration costs increasing. DNS is a highly dysfunctional system, especially for the popular TLDs. If you want an alternative system to take its place, then rising registration costs will only increase the demand for that.
- unapologetic 7y ago> The registration costs are also a tiny fraction of what any desirable domain name would sell for on the secondary market That's rent seeking. They provide no value, they simply try to corner the market and jack up the prices.
- mundo 7y agoSince you're getting downvoted for an honest question, I'll explain: you're confusing the cost of owning a domain with the cost of registering a domain. ICANN and Verisign don't own nor sell domain names, they just perform administrative functions relating to owning and selling them. The gist of this article is that Verisign gave ICANN a kickback to get the right to charge more money without adding more value, which is pretty much what "rent-seeking" means.
- LatteLazy 7y agoThe ICANN ITSELF got 20m. How many senior members will, in totally unrelated transactions, suddenly find they can buy yachts or pay off mortgages they previously couldn't in the next 12 months?
- unapologetic 7y agoNah, they just change the rules then immediately jump into companies built specifically to take advantage of the rule changes. See the theft of dot org or the opening of TLDs.
- jlgaddis 7y agoThey likely already did that. They basically doubled their own salaries a while back.
- AWildC182 7y agoThis is corruption in it's purest form, but I feel like there might be a silver lining here. If they increase prices on domains the scummy domain name squatters will get burned and have to dump a good chunk of their inventory when renewal comes up. They're basically taking the margin that the scalpers were exploiting.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- minxomat 7y agoTime to snipe some former cnc server domains.
- echelon 7y agoLegitimate players lose out as well. But you're correct that this hurts the squatters more, as they're the ones subject to linear multiple cost increases.
- unapologetic 7y agoExcept the new people coming in are just rent seekers same as the scalpers.
- Can_Not 7y agoWhat TLDs should be looked at that are in the nearly $10~ or less range and are not likely to rate hike? I hate the idea of investing $10/year in a personal use domain then getting a surprise $50 bill X years later.
- download13 7y agoOh look capital is eating another public service who'd've thunk
- unapologetic 7y agoWe never bothered to properly build ICANN as a lasting public service. This is what happens.
- salawat 7y agoI never understood the fascination with domain names anyway. I actually rather liked just memorizing IP's. I thought it had a nice parity with phone numbers, which we were all kind of used to anyway. The whole "buy a name" thing struck me as little more than a land grab for speculators anyway. You already have a unique identifier to the overall network... Just use it!