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Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes
- Olipro 7y agoAt this point, I believe that even if the population of 90% of the planet were to legitimately oppose this, ICANN would ignore it anyway. Not that it isn't worth a shot, but I have become highly cynical of the entire organisation.
- rambojazz 7y agoThey ignored completely any message that we sent their way regarding the sale of .org. Filling out this form feels like a huge waste of time.
- Hamuko 7y agoNo one likes a price increase, but 30% increase to ~$10/year over four years is not making my blood boil.
- rovr138 7y agoI’m not opposed to it if needed. This part is the one that convinced me it shouldn’t happen right now, > $7.85 of your registration or renewal payment goes to Verisign. The actual cost to Verisign to provide the expensive infrastructure and the management of the registry has been estimated at between $2.50 to $2.90 per domain name per year. Other registries have said they can offer the same services for cheaper. I’m wondering why the ICANN wouldn’t simply go to another company that would provide them the same service at that same rate. Is Verisign innovating somehow?
- lucb1e 7y ago> I’m wondering why the ICANN wouldn’t simply go to another company Do also consider the cost of change. I don't know if it's worth it, and it might be worth it just for keeping the 'market' competitive, but this is another factor.
- geofft 7y ago"Has been estimated" by others? I'm not a fan of government-style lowest-bidder procurement for something as critical as .com. Among other things, I assume this involves operating the .com DNS servers, and it seems like the current operators are probably uniquely positioned to understand what makes that different from operating e.g. .party or .racing, what weird load patterns it sees, maybe even how much to pay the folks who know the hard parts to keep doing this, etc. Obviously it would be better for the world if Verisign were transparent about their operations and it could be moved, but for potentially $5/domain name/year, forcing the change doesn't seem valuable. (If it were $50, sure, it'd be worth thinking about.)
- fgonzag 7y agoCritical infrastructure operated by a single company. That can't ever go wrong, provider redundancy is overrated.
- geofft 7y agoNot that I disagree, but wouldn't that require increasing the price even more so you could pay both companies? I don't think the argument for "We're paying Verisign too much to be a single point of failure, so let's pay someone else who's never done it less to be a different single point of failure" really holds up.
- josteink 7y ago> No one likes a price increase, but 30% increase to ~$10/year over four years is not making my blood boil. We're talking about something which has become a central piece of the modern internet largely by being perceived as a well governed non-profit organization. Unreasonable price-hikes undermines that position and seems like a clear violation of the natural monopoly they have obtained through good will so far. Maybe the internet just needs to learn a lesson or two, once again, about the problems with centralization.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- StavrosK 7y agoI kind of want the price to increase, to combat domain squatting. That said, I'd much prefer it if the money went to some charity instead of the ICANN.
- dessant 7y agoIt actually goes to Verisign, a for-profit company.
- foo101 7y agoSquatting can be easily prevented by reclaiming domain names without refund when the domain names have not been used or used illegitimately for more than a fixed threshold period of time. Parking pages or any other use that intends to work around the restriction can be deemed illegitimate use.
- StavrosK 7y agoI don't see that as very easy, given that there are degrees of parking pages and it can be hard to figure out where to draw the line.
- mopsi 7y agoNot to mention that there are many other uses for a domain, such as email.
- kerkeslager 7y agoYes, but can we agree that one company owning thousands of domains with a "buy this domain for $XXXX" homepages crosses any line that we would draw? The domain squatting problem is so bad, that even just solving the most egregious cases would be a big improvement.
- ryanlol 7y ago>The domain squatting problem is so bad How is the domain squatting problem so bad? You’ll need to expand on this further.
- buboard 7y agoIsn't it odd that prices are going UP instead of down ,even though they flooded the market with tlds? The issue is obviously their monopoly, and it needs to be broken down. Petitions are petty Actually what would be even better is if browsers started supporting ENS or some similar competing name system
- bitxbitxbitcoin 7y agoAgreed. Handshake[1] is another such similar competing name system that specifically is aimed at taking down ICANN's monopoly - which they've abused time and time again. [1] https://www.handshake.org https://www.handshake.org
- rasengan 7y agoSwitching away from ICANN will have a larger effect than a petition. If you don’t support centralized authority over the DNS root, you can vote with your computer for a new DNS root controlled by the commons [1]. [1] https://www.handshake.org https://www.handshake.org
- anonsivalley652 7y agoThere has to be a common namespace, even if it's controlled by a different entity that's transparent, fair and non-profit. Fragmentation of the namespace breaks the internet. Starting a parallel namespace doesn't address the core problem: the privitization/commercialization of names, registrars and the meta-registrar were all extremely bad ideas because publicly-traded companies are selfish, omnicidal and suicidal. All non-country TLDs should be run at actual cost by one entity that is a nonprofit. No more commercial registrars or meta-registrars; per-country registrars can do whatever they want. If people want to auction-off, buy or sell domains in a marketplace, that's their business. Let's not not solve the problem by avoiding it with phony solutions that cause more problems. Petitions won't work either.
- rasengan 7y agoHandshake isn’t parallel, but instead, it’s a drop in replacement for ICANN that is controlled by the people. All existing TLDs continue to function as they did prior.
- zchrykng 7y agoIf it is an exact mirror with no differences, there is no reason to use it. Either it will start to diverge, or it is pointless for it to exist.
- rasengan 7y agoIt will absolutely diverge, although it’s probable that ICANN will likely continue to mirror the Handshake Naming System on their end.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tehabe 7y agoDomains are the virtual realestate on the web and we are all just tennants and not owners. So there need to regulation for this "market" against domain hoarding and price hikes. Sadly the US government doesn't care.
- davinic 7y agoSince domain names are finite, like real estate, why not charge based on demand? In this scenario, in-demand domain names (mostly based on length) would have higher renewal fees than undesirable ones. Perhaps add an order of magnitude in pricing for each character under 7? >=7 - $10 6 - $100 5 - $1000 4 - $10,000 <=3 - $100,000