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ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money
- konschubert 7y agoAre there any alternative DNS resolution systems and which browsers are implementing them?
- dharmab 7y agohttps://ipfs.io https://ipfs.io has https://docs-beta.ipfs.io/concepts/ipns https://docs-beta.ipfs.io/concepts/ipns, but the names aren't human-readable- it still depends on DNS for human readable names: https://docs-beta.ipfs.io/concepts/dnslink https://docs-beta.ipfs.io/concepts/dnslink Basic IPFS support was added in Firefox 59
- troquerre 7y agoIPFS is more of a storage layer. Pairing it with a decentralized naming layer like https://handshake.org https://handshake.org (just launched a week ago) would make for a powerful combination.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- velcro 7y agohttps://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/
- miloignis 7y agohttps://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/
- admax88q 7y agohttps://www.opennic.org/ https://www.opennic.org/
- input_sh 7y agoPlenty, but in the best case scenario you need to convince your user to overwrite their DNS settings.
- BitwiseFool 7y agoI know very little about the technical and business side of DNS and Domain Registrars. That being said, have things actually gotten more expensive for them to operate? I'm pretty confident the answer is no and these price increases just reflect the need for a handful of entities to charge more for an essential service with no viable alternative.
- anfilt 7y agoIf anything costs should have gone down. Bandwidth is cheaper, and processing power has gone up. However, even with that DNS has been pretty distributed by design. Lowering system load at the top level to begin with. Like some country code domains are managed by a pretty small number people to begin with. So it's not like you need a large amount of staff either.
- AJ007 7y agoThe problem is lower registration prices mean more registrations and renewals, aka squatting. It is hard to say what direction or price point is either optimal or fair.
- colejohnson66 7y agoDomain squatters will exist no matter what. It’s just a business that exists to resell stuff. Price goes up, and their price will go up.
- dsl 7y ago> more registrations and renewals, aka squatting People falsely equate any domain they can't register and doesn't have a website with squatting. I get at least one angry email from someone a month trying to buy a domain that only has MX (mail) records. Another is a 3 letter .com I use for my internal lab environment, and I explicitly don't want it to resolve on the public Internet.
- GauntletWizard 7y ago
- arkitaip 7y ago"Verisign will be allowed to increase the wholesale price to registrars for .COM domains by 7% each year in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. After a two year “freeze”, Verisign can increase prices by 7% annually during 2026-2029, then another two year “freeze”. This cycle will continue, meaning that within 10 years, .COM domains could cost approximately 70% more than the current wholesale price of $7.85 — and the sky is the limit."
- losteric 7y ago70%?! Wow, that's enough to fund all kinds of innovation in the domain name space.
- vajrabum 7y agoIf by innovation you mean raise salaries, hire new people and add to your management consulting contracts sure.
- BitwiseFool 7y ago*raise executive salaries
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dmos62 7y agoLet us appreciate that ICANN doesn't manage access to other public resources, like water or healthcare.
- icedchai 7y agoAbsurd, especially considering domains used to be free (before 1997.) They did, on the other hand, sometimes take a month to register.
- gscott 7y agoThen .com became $100 a year... maybe they are hoping to get back to that level.
- whosaidwhat88 7y agoTake from the poor, give to the rich, same with .org it’s a transfer of wealth, land grab, whatever you want to call it, the 1% looking for new revenue streams, costs a lost to take a private jet these days, costs are going up, you even have to pay up to find a good gardener.
- NikkiA 7y agoI have mixed feelings about this, the increase by ICANN is outrageous, but at the same time NameCheap are positioning themselves as heros here, and I've been burnt multiple times by the byzantine way their renewal system tries to fool you into paying for the wrong thing (put 'registration period as 10 years? suuure, we won't tell you you're paying for 10 years of privacy guard over 1 year of domain registration though')
- _JamesA_ 7y agoThe WhoisGuard service is free with registration now.
- dawnerd 7y agoAfter that DNSSEC outage the other day with no notification or anything from them before or afterwards, I've been slowly moving my domains away from them. If they really wanted to fight back they could do a lot more than just post on their blog. Why don't they fund ICANN like Verisign is and maybe ICANN will start to listen?
- tptacek 7y agoWhich outage are you talking about? Got a link I can check out? Thanks!
- dawnerd 7y agoThere’s been quite a few. Some Not as widely noticed like this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19227618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19227618 But this was most recent https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/epbh7m/namecheap_fails_at_dnssec_yet_again/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/epbh7m/namecheap...
- kodablah 7y agoSeparate the issues and it'll make your conscience clearer. I too have issues w/ how NameCheap presents things (sale prices for other TLDs don't clearly state renewal rates for example), but that is orthogonal to their position here.
- notyourday 7y agoHow else would ICANN pay for vacations for its officers, directors, advisers and staff? https://meetings.icann.org/en/calendar https://meetings.icann.org/en/calendar
- dmos62 7y agoThree 3-5 day events per year doesn't sound very relaxing.
- ortusdux 7y agoNamecheap has already sent out an email about the possible price increase containing an explanation and a link to the comment process.
- Marsymars 7y agoI'm really considering abandoning my firstlast.com domain (used for email and personal blog) and transitioning to firstlast.ccTLD so that I can stop giving Verisign money.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aeden 7y agoJust make sure you pick a ccTLD that has not already been bought/taken from the country in question. If you don't, it could be operated by Verisign anyhow (see .cc, .tv, etc)
- btrettel 7y agoI've had $lastname.org since 2004 but plan to move to $lastname.us for similar reasons. I did register $lastname.org until 2029, though.
- Can_Not 7y ago.us domains don't allow whois privacy.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoWell, even if .com lost its credibility tomorrow, it couldn't come at a better time with other tlds gaining credibility over the years. Only downside is that a 7% increase is too slow to kill .com. Would be nice if it died fast enough for the zeitgeist to actually consider another DNS system which I don't think will ever happen without a distinct exodus event. Until then, this kind of news doesn't really penetrate beyond HN.
- Eric_WVGG 7y agoI'm not sure that an "exodus" is really possible. Let's just say that, for example, the ACLU decided to bail out of aclu.org to aclu.io. Whomever ends up with that domain now gets all incoming *@aclu.org emails, which would include a massive amount of sensitive, privileged information. Has there ever been an instance of an online company with a serious presence that changed domains? Even del.icio.us didn't let icio.us out of their hands. (in fact, delicious.com wound up being the domain they eventually parted with) and regarding alternative TLDs "gaining credibility," well first, THANK GOODNESS we all lived long enough to be able to use other TLDs finally finally finally; but who's to say this won't just happen to any other TLD? ICANN needs to be reined in or replaced.
- dmos62 7y agoI feel like ICANN is anxious to demonstrate just how defunct our DNS system is. Every ICANN's cleptocratic blunder is a step closer to an alternative.
- yCombLinks 7y agoPossible positive side effect is reducing profitability of Domain Squatters, leading to more names available. If you've ever tried to get a domain you know what a hassle it is to find a decent .com
- dsl 7y agoAs an owner of thousands of domains, I can tell you a minor price increase is not going to change the economics of the business.
- akvadrako 7y agoIt might be a start though. If domains were taxed at say 1% of their value it would go a long way towards evicting squatters.
- Avamander 7y agoAnd the poor or nonprofits having a valuable domain would have to give them up, terrible idea.
- deepsun 7y agoI'm thinking, is that really any different from real estate property tax? Imagine there was some poor non-profit owning like 15 acres on Manhattan, would it be better to tax them the same a in the middle of Nevada?
- dwild 7y ago> I'm thinking, is that really any different from real estate property tax? Property taxes goes toward the city budget which is spend for the city. Domains taxes goes toward... a bigger boat for the CEO?
- dsl 7y agoYeah, no. Selling a single domain covers my renewals for the year. Even raising prices to the point where normal users are priced out, I might have to sell two.
- robgibbons 7y agoBetween this, and the .org fiasco, I have lost any faith I had in ICANN's stewardship of the web.
- tekstar 7y agoI have a friend in the domain regulation industry. His take on the .org sale, was that everyone's worries about what a private equity firm might do to a TLD has already happened under ICANN.
- ObsoleteNerd 7y agoIs there a TLD/gTLD that isn't run by people intent on profiteering and corruption? Even if everyone were to abandon .com/net/etc, and moved to .whatever, you're still supporting ICANN through IANA, no? So basically we have no choice but to support them, or revert to sharing IP addresses?
- akvadrako 7y agoccTLDs don't really depend on ICANN. They need a root server entry, but politically it would be suicide to deny it.
- JohnFen 7y ago> or revert to sharing IP addresses I've been seeing this more and more as time goes by.
- troquerre 7y agoThere are well-funded projects working on creating a better alternative to ICANN, namely https://handshake.org https://handshake.org which is creating a distributed alternative root zone. The main benefit is security (the root of trust is a distributed ledger instead of Certificate Authorities which are a huge security hole), but there are additional benefits in that anyone can register their own TLD privately without risk of that TLD being seized or censored.
- ObsoleteNerd 7y ago> How do I register a Handshake name? > Handshake leverages a blockchain based on unspent transaction output (UTXO) and proof-of-work (PoW) similar to Bitcoin for naming capabilities. The naming system features an on-chain smart contract-like functionality called covenants which restrict the future use of outputs of a transaction. Because covenants are built in at the blockchain layer via the consensus protocol, the handshake system enables different types of smart contracts which is used to develop an auction system for individuals to bid on domain naming rights. > What does the Handshake names auction process look like? > Users can buy or register domains through a Vickrey auction using HNS coins. All possible names are released weekly over the first year after launch. Users may submit blinded bids on the Handshake blockchain anytime after a name is released for auction. Bidding is open to everyone for ~5 days after the reveal period, and have ~10 days to reveal their bid price. A winner is assigned the name and, as it is a Vickrey auction, pays the second highest bid at the end of the reveal period. The winning bid amount of HNS coins is burned and permanently removed from circulation. Losing bids are returned and not burned. ... and you've lost me, as well as 99.9% of the rest of domain name owners. It seems anything that involves blockchains at all is built by people living in a bubble and completely oblivious to how the real world works.
- ohazi 7y agoThis is not going to end. ICANN has revealed their hand -- they are corrupt. But we don't actually need them. What we do need is a "Let's Encrypt" style initiative to replace the DNS roots in their entirety, run by competent, principled people. It would be difficult, but the people who are pissed off about this have clout at Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla (the web browser gatekeepers) and might actually be able to pull this off. There is no legal requirement that ICANN has to run this system. It's just a historical convention. We've successfully taken out arrogant/incompetent (billion dollar) certificate businesses -- I think trying to get ICANN to blink would be a good goal.
- ohazi 7y agoTo be clear, I don't think it will come to this. But right now, ICANN believes that they can get away with anything, and have started to act on that belief. We should begin the process of scaring them back on track. Start brainstorming. Start writing IETF proposals that prominently feature removing ICANN from the loop. Come up with ideas for migrating current domain owners to the new system. Build prototypes. Start putting those prototypes into web browsers behind feature flags. Show them what the internet could look like if it starts to fragment at the DNS level. Show them that we're serious.
- pfundstein 7y agoNameCoin [1] is an emerging consensus-based decentralized DNS system. Any replacement will need to facilitate existing domains, it could be implemented as an add-on to existing resolvers like bind or dnsmasq. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin
- ohazi 7y agoOne problem at a time. I don't think it's a good idea to toss in an ambitious redesign of the internet name system when it's not even clear that we can get everybody to agree to just stare down ICANN.
- rasengan 7y ago
- KerrickStaley 7y agoI sent this email to comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20@icann.org. Feel free to borrow/edit it: I oppose Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement. I believe that allowing wholesale prices for .com domains to rise 72% over 12 years, which is far more than the rate of inflation and also far more than Verisign's underlying costs of maintaining the registry could possibly increase by, will dramatically hurt the internet ecosystem. It will especially hurt small website operators, like myself, and will discourage internet users from creating blogs and personal pages, with the end result of reducing democratization of the internet. Verisign reported a 69.4% operating margin in Q1 2019, so they clearly do not need the extra revenue from this price hike. ICANN has granted a monopoly over .com to Verisign and ICANN has a duty to every internet user on the planet to carefully regulate this monopoly to prevent abuse by Verisign. The only conscionable thing to do right now is to freeze wholesale .com prices and re-evaluate 5-10 years from now. A policy that allows price increases tracking the rate of inflation (but no higher) may make sense in the future, but right now Verisign is already collecting far more from their .com monopoly than any company would be able to in a competitive market [1]. It's simply not right to allow them to raise prices at this time. - Kerrick [1] For example, Alphabet, a highly successful player in a very high-margin industry, has an operating margin of around 25%. Verisign's operating margin is over 2.75 times that.
- gowld 7y agoWrite to your government, not ICANNN. ICANN is accountable to no one, except the US government where their offices sit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN#Democratic_input https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN#Democratic_input
- drenvuk 7y agoFuck ICANN. It's time to move out of their control. There's no reason we have to follow their rules or even use DNS.
- giovannibonetti 7y agoBear with me for a moment: I firmly believe that in order for good .com domains to be available for a smaller price the registry fee should be far higher. The reason for that is speculation: even though a .com registration is dirty cheap, getting a decent .com domain is very expensive because for many companies it is worth it to keep the domains parked, and when someone wants to buy one of them it gets very expensive - quite often it costs thousands of dollars. However, if registration prices went 10x overnight these domain hosting companies would be forced to get rid of many "second class" domains, which would be soon available for regular users without intermediaries. Off course "premium" domains would still be expensive, but it's an advancement anyway.
- raquo 7y agoIf we really want higher prices, how about we at least get more features for it. Such as built-in privacy protection. Or how about we restructure the whole relationship so that wildly excessive amounts of money don't end up in either Verisign or ICANN regardless of what the price is.
- mdorazio 7y agoThank you for saying this. I think a lot of people probably haven't felt the pain of actually acquiring a trademark and branded domain these days. My personal opinion is that .com domains should be a minimum $100 per year. At this price point the number of available domains would skyrocket effectively overnight as it became untenable for squatters to hold on to them. If you can't afford $100/year for a domain to be used for something actually useful, you probably don't need that domain in the first place. Of course at that price point, HTTPS should be the default and the extra profits should go somewhere other than ICANN.
- IceWreck 7y agoYoure thinking about yourself. Students etc who have .com domains cant afford $100 a year for their domain? Should they be forced to give up their domains because people like you couldnt get their chosen domains from squatters/
- giancarlostoro 7y agoHow long until ICANN becomes audited over all these shenanigans I wonder?
- leshokunin 7y agoWe've moved from a market where people would be able to just pick a name for something, to one where most names are taken. Essentially, good .com names are now like prime real estate. Search engines and browsers have done a bad job at making other TLDs as accessible, so there's a natural bias towards them. If domains are like land, I wonder why the market hasn't moved from a parking system where domains are resold at a premium, to a leasing system?
- daun 7y agoIf you're a California resident and are affected by the price changes, you can file a complaint with the California Attorney General. If you're a US resident outside of California you can file a complaint with the Department of Commerce as well as the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. And if you really want to get revenge against ICANN you can contact Senator Ted Cruz's office and let them know what you think of ICANN's recent actions since their 2016 IANA takeover. He was the loudest political voice to oppose it when it happened.
- wahern 7y agoSenator Cruz opposed the transfer when it appeared ICANN's governance model was going to be like the U.N., where countries might have veto power over strong transparency, security, privacy, freedom of speech, financial accessibility, etc. Senator Cruz and many in his party are disdainful of the U.N. and similar multilateral international institutions; they oppose them on principal. But ICANN ended up being run more like a private company in a free market. The fact that it also resulted in poor financial accessibility or any of the other feared consequences is irrelevant to Senator Cruz unless it somehow furthered the vilification of social media outlets and his attempts to repeal Communications Decency Act Section 230 protections. Don't forget, Cruz also opposes net neutrality, believing it to be "the biggest regulatory threat to the Internet".
- nikolay 7y agoIt's about time for the US Government to intervene and dissolve ICANN and transfer the domain business to Mozilla! She should not piecemeal the problem - we should solve it once and for all. We should start a Whitehouse petition and ask the government to end this legalized scam! Everything regarding domains is designed to scam the regular folk and pour money into registrars and domainers! Imagine you forgot to pay your phone bill, and then all your competitors start bidding, and they get your number in 30 days. This cannot happen in the real world, because it's wrong, but it happens with much more valuable ones (yet cheap in terms of annual cost) - the domains. All this is designed to steal money from all of us and pour it into the greedy bellies of some of the sketchiest folks in the digital space - the domainers. I'd say that even the SEO scammers are much more sophisticated and nice than the domainers! Yet, ICANN allows them to exist, and guarantees their profits!