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I 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 o

I 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 ago
If 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Domain 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
      I'd call, without the slightest of doubt, the latter to be squatting. Maybe ICANN should specify a shorter internal lab domain (There's already .local for your use, which I would think is plenty short, even adding a prefix), but I would most certainly say that given there's only ~50,000 2 or 3-letter domains, the price for one should be high enough to make an individual flinch.
      - henvic 7y ago
        Come on. Squatting is when you're doing som with the purpose of reselling. If you just were lucky and registered a 3 letter domain back in the 90s, why is it anyone else business? Let it be. I have got a 5-letter domain myself that I keep a website of mine that never worked out online mostly for portfolio and because I really like the domain name. I've no plans to sell the domain or free it so others can register, even though it could indeed be more useful for some other stuff. Well, if someday I want to launch a company, I might as well brand it with this name. For the time being, it's no one's business.
        GauntletWizard 7y ago
        You know, I do agree and respect that, but I also see that these are a (artificial) constrained resource - There's value in them. They're a constrained public good, and prices should be charged appropriately - And yeah, I think that the really short domain names should be $XXXX per year to renew, if not more. Squatting isn't just with the purpose of reselling. It's an overloaded phrase, from "living in someone's building illegally" to "Holding onto a good with the intent of depriving others of it's use, driving the price up (particularly if you control a large portion of the limited resource)", which are, in many ways, exact opposites (The hobo sleeping in an abandoned property and the landlord underutilizing that property so they can benefit from the scarcity of land are both "squatting") I'd say that the mild foresight that 3 letter domains are useful and then holding on to one because, even though you're barely using it, you don't want to give it up - Yeah, that's squatting. It's a minor dick move, though I'd say that dumb stuff like littering newspapers or not tipping your waiter is probably the greater offense. I'm also fine with how things are now, because I don't have any illusions that ICANN as currently stands would put that additional revenue to good use, but I'd like to see this treated... well, I'd compare it to water rights, but those are broken just as badly.
- pmart123 7y ago
  From a technical standpoint, what would the risk be if Verisign screwed up? If they could only afford low rate engineers, would the risk go up significantly?
  - anfilt 7y ago
    That depends on the failure. Plus what recovery methods, redundancy, and backups they have. However, even at current prices verasign should have no problem paying decent engineers. Especially considering the number of registrations. However, the distributed nature dns does protect against a lot blunders unless they persist for long enough for caches to invalidate. The largest concern would be bad backups of registration records. However, last I checked ICANN requires tld operators to keep backups and also submit those backups daily to ICANN. Plus other things so if the company/org goes belly up for some reason ICANN can manage it till they find someone else.
    - pmart123 7y ago
      Interesting. Thanks. Verisign's revenue per employee is definitely off the charts as is its operating margins. I remember reading this article though: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/28/seven-people-keys-worldwide-internet-security-web https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/28/seven-peo... In some ways, it seems like the potential risks warrant Verisign to have a strong financial incentive given the problems we've seen at PG&E (if Verisign can also be considered a utility). Also, it does serve as a north star in regards to properly compensating companies or individuals who provide important protocols, infrastructure layers, and FOSS projects. How much that should be though is an interesting question.
      - anfilt 7y ago
        Like considering Versign's place on the web I would hope they have strong financials. However, 7% a year that's a bit much.
gkoberger 7y ago
Another way to look at this (and this only works for domains, not things like hosting) is supply and demand. There's a limit to the number of domains out there, and there's a huge increase in people who want them. It's almost like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies... scarcity is built in to domains. At some point, they'll all be taken.
- iameli 7y ago
  How would we run out of domains? Register every single 253-character string as a domain name? Sounds expensive.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- input_sh 7y ago
  How's there a limit when there's a new TLD on an almost bimonthly basis? If you're going for something lower than 8 characters, odds are you're either paying thousands or buying something that's not .com.
  - vel0city 7y ago
    Being able to register a .ninja or .space domain does not eliminate the limit of practical .com domain names. Does an apartment building opening in Pierre South Dakota have much of an effect on the scarcity of housing in New York or San Francisco?
- wila 7y ago
  Except that you keep on forking over money every year for "owning" a domain. So if all are taken, they still have a steady income stream.
- IAmEveryone 7y ago
  just because it’s predicted by economic theory doesn’t make it harmless. Take your idea one step further, and they should start individually assessing each domain name, and charging the maximum possible. Google.com would cost a billion the first year. Then, it suddenly starts redirecting to Bing because MS outbid Google. This hasn’t happened yet, but, as far as I can tell, there are no rules preventing such behaviour, only the ever-changing power dynamics. This scenario has been a reason for me to avoid all these new TLDs. Because those are run by smaller organizations less susceptible to bad PR, I expected them to pioneer the shakedown. Which leads to the question: which registrar would you trust most? Are there any that are contractually or, better yet, bound by law to limit increases to what’s reasonable? Absent such guarantees, maybe something like .eu is the safest? Despite common cynicism about politicians and money, I tend to expect them to shy away from controversial schemes to get rich quick, and to be far more susceptible to public pressure.
mekster 7y ago
That organization took it to international stewardship in 2016 but it has no competition and seems to be just doing its monopoly thing. Related : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288279
TomGullen 7y ago
Dollars gotten cheaper over the years, I wonder what the price would be today if .coms increased with inflation. > meaning that within 10 years, .COM domains could cost approximately 70% more than the current wholesale price of $7.85 Seems reasonable over 10y period?
- konschubert 7y ago
  No, inflation isn't 5% a year in consumer prices.
  - jonas21 7y ago
    The current price cap has been in place since 2012, so prices will increase by 70% over the 19 year period from 2012 to 2031. That works out to roughly 2.9% per year, which is a bit above the current US overall inflation rate of 2.3%, but less than the US housing inflation rate of 3.2% [1]. I don't have an opinion on whether domain prices should increase with inflation, but the increase does seem to be in line with it. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
    - gowld 7y ago
      The cost to provide a domain name drops dramatically every year, like everything else in computing.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  It seems reasonable, but what about 40 years down the road. Hopefully, we’ll have moved onto something better, but I doubt it.
jolmg 7y ago
It does have the benefit that the price affects the reputation of a TLD. I know there are some cheap TLDs that people block because their cheap price makes them attractive for mass-registration by spammers. I don't like that administrators resort to blocking whole TLDs, and I don't like that there can be so much variation in profit between domains with no correlation to operational costs. Still, I can't say that it's purely a greedy move on their part. People do benefit from paying more.

anfilt 7y ago

If 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Domain 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
    I'd call, without the slightest of doubt, the latter to be squatting. Maybe ICANN should specify a shorter internal lab domain (There's already .local for your use, which I would think is plenty short, even adding a prefix), but I would most certainly say that given there's only ~50,000 2 or 3-letter domains, the price for one should be high enough to make an individual flinch.
    - henvic 7y ago
      Come on. Squatting is when you're doing som with the purpose of reselling. If you just were lucky and registered a 3 letter domain back in the 90s, why is it anyone else business? Let it be. I have got a 5-letter domain myself that I keep a website of mine that never worked out online mostly for portfolio and because I really like the domain name. I've no plans to sell the domain or free it so others can register, even though it could indeed be more useful for some other stuff. Well, if someday I want to launch a company, I might as well brand it with this name. For the time being, it's no one's business.
      - GauntletWizard 7y ago
        You know, I do agree and respect that, but I also see that these are a (artificial) constrained resource - There's value in them. They're a constrained public good, and prices should be charged appropriately - And yeah, I think that the really short domain names should be $XXXX per year to renew, if not more. Squatting isn't just with the purpose of reselling. It's an overloaded phrase, from "living in someone's building illegally" to "Holding onto a good with the intent of depriving others of it's use, driving the price up (particularly if you control a large portion of the limited resource)", which are, in many ways, exact opposites (The hobo sleeping in an abandoned property and the landlord underutilizing that property so they can benefit from the scarcity of land are both "squatting") I'd say that the mild foresight that 3 letter domains are useful and then holding on to one because, even though you're barely using it, you don't want to give it up - Yeah, that's squatting. It's a minor dick move, though I'd say that dumb stuff like littering newspapers or not tipping your waiter is probably the greater offense. I'm also fine with how things are now, because I don't have any illusions that ICANN as currently stands would put that additional revenue to good use, but I'd like to see this treated... well, I'd compare it to water rights, but those are broken just as badly.
pmart123 7y ago
From a technical standpoint, what would the risk be if Verisign screwed up? If they could only afford low rate engineers, would the risk go up significantly?
- anfilt 7y ago
  That depends on the failure. Plus what recovery methods, redundancy, and backups they have. However, even at current prices verasign should have no problem paying decent engineers. Especially considering the number of registrations. However, the distributed nature dns does protect against a lot blunders unless they persist for long enough for caches to invalidate. The largest concern would be bad backups of registration records. However, last I checked ICANN requires tld operators to keep backups and also submit those backups daily to ICANN. Plus other things so if the company/org goes belly up for some reason ICANN can manage it till they find someone else.
  - pmart123 7y ago
    Interesting. Thanks. Verisign's revenue per employee is definitely off the charts as is its operating margins. I remember reading this article though: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/28/seven-people-keys-worldwide-internet-security-web https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/28/seven-peo... In some ways, it seems like the potential risks warrant Verisign to have a strong financial incentive given the problems we've seen at PG&E (if Verisign can also be considered a utility). Also, it does serve as a north star in regards to properly compensating companies or individuals who provide important protocols, infrastructure layers, and FOSS projects. How much that should be though is an interesting question.
    - anfilt 7y ago
      Like considering Versign's place on the web I would hope they have strong financials. However, 7% a year that's a bit much.

gkoberger 7y ago

Another way to look at this (and this only works for domains, not things like hosting) is supply and demand. There's a limit to the number of domains out there, and there's a huge increase in people who want them. It's almost like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies... scarcity is built in to domains. At some point, they'll all be taken.

iameli 7y ago
How would we run out of domains? Register every single 253-character string as a domain name? Sounds expensive.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
input_sh 7y ago
How's there a limit when there's a new TLD on an almost bimonthly basis? If you're going for something lower than 8 characters, odds are you're either paying thousands or buying something that's not .com.
- vel0city 7y ago
  Being able to register a .ninja or .space domain does not eliminate the limit of practical .com domain names. Does an apartment building opening in Pierre South Dakota have much of an effect on the scarcity of housing in New York or San Francisco?
wila 7y ago
Except that you keep on forking over money every year for "owning" a domain. So if all are taken, they still have a steady income stream.
IAmEveryone 7y ago
just because it’s predicted by economic theory doesn’t make it harmless. Take your idea one step further, and they should start individually assessing each domain name, and charging the maximum possible. Google.com would cost a billion the first year. Then, it suddenly starts redirecting to Bing because MS outbid Google. This hasn’t happened yet, but, as far as I can tell, there are no rules preventing such behaviour, only the ever-changing power dynamics. This scenario has been a reason for me to avoid all these new TLDs. Because those are run by smaller organizations less susceptible to bad PR, I expected them to pioneer the shakedown. Which leads to the question: which registrar would you trust most? Are there any that are contractually or, better yet, bound by law to limit increases to what’s reasonable? Absent such guarantees, maybe something like .eu is the safest? Despite common cynicism about politicians and money, I tend to expect them to shy away from controversial schemes to get rich quick, and to be far more susceptible to public pressure.

mekster 7y ago

That organization took it to international stewardship in 2016 but it has no competition and seems to be just doing its monopoly thing. Related : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288279

TomGullen 7y ago

Dollars gotten cheaper over the years, I wonder what the price would be today if .coms increased with inflation. > meaning that within 10 years, .COM domains could cost approximately 70% more than the current wholesale price of $7.85 Seems reasonable over 10y period?

konschubert 7y ago
No, inflation isn't 5% a year in consumer prices.
- jonas21 7y ago
  The current price cap has been in place since 2012, so prices will increase by 70% over the 19 year period from 2012 to 2031. That works out to roughly 2.9% per year, which is a bit above the current US overall inflation rate of 2.3%, but less than the US housing inflation rate of 3.2% [1]. I don't have an opinion on whether domain prices should increase with inflation, but the increase does seem to be in line with it. [1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
  - gowld 7y ago
    The cost to provide a domain name drops dramatically every year, like everything else in computing.
colejohnson66 7y ago
It seems reasonable, but what about 40 years down the road. Hopefully, we’ll have moved onto something better, but I doubt it.

jolmg 7y ago

It does have the benefit that the price affects the reputation of a TLD. I know there are some cheap TLDs that people block because their cheap price makes them attractive for mass-registration by spammers. I don't like that administrators resort to blocking whole TLDs, and I don't like that there can be so much variation in profit between domains with no correlation to operational costs. Still, I can't say that it's purely a greedy move on their part. People do benefit from paying more.