8 ms·

Registrars raise alarm over proposal for big .com fee hikes

139 points by Deinos 7y ago

llovan 7y ago
ICANN seems to be a corrupt organization.
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
Do they need the money? It's always struck me it should be even cheaper than it is. Perhaps cc.tld registries should be able to register any non-cc domain. Then registrars could shop for the best service.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 7y ago
  I witnessed the last ICANN Meeting... They definitely don't need the money.
  - kome 7y ago
    story time.
- t-writescode 7y ago
  I don’t understand what you mean by ‘cc tld registries should be able to sell non-cc domain’
  - wnissen 7y ago
    Currently country code registrars can only register for the country the represent. .uk can only do UK, etc. You could allow them to register for lots of domains.
lostapathy 7y ago
I absolutely do not think ICANN, or the registries, "need" any more money, and I don't want them to have it. At the same time, one could make a very strong case that .com domains should cost more to help combat squatting and speculation. They are a limited resource and too many people (me included) sit on domains "just in case I want to develop the idea" and that has a lot of other unintended consequences we don't want.
- lozaning 7y ago
  Someone already having bought the domain you want and now you having to pay market price for it is not reason enough to force me to pay additional money to verisign every time I reg or renew a domain. Instead of me and every other .com domain owner having to pay the verisign availability tax that only potentially benefits you, why don't you just pay fair market price to whoever owns the domain you want. If I was a verisign stock holder I'd be all about your plan.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    I'm on the fence. But I would add that the low renewal price of .com domains makes the prices asked for many domains unrealistic. Because they see an opportunity to just sit on the domain and gamble that it might become more valuable. People want a thousand dollars for long, not great domains. If the renewal was higher, I think "market price" would be a little closer to market. Perhaps a higher initial fee and then renewals would remain the same. Then at least it would discourage future squatting without putting a burden on small time users.
    - lozaning 7y ago
      Let's make every new .com cost 1 million dollars to register, so prohibitivly expensive that we can be sure that CocaCola can get newcokeflavor.com whenever they decide they want to buy it, and TacoBell can get any iteration of [dorritosflavor]tacos.com whenever they need it. Still onboard? Or, what if instead of all of us paying verisign more money for zero additional value, Coke just pays a million to whoever happens to own newcoke.com if they decide they want that domain?
lkesteloot 7y ago
I feel like .com should be much more expensive than it is. Too many people squatting. I have friends who have dozens of .com, and not even "just in case", they're just collecting them because they like the sound of them. Then when you have a real idea all the good ones are taken, most unused. The .com TLD is supposed to be for commercial use, so for a real company it shouldn't be a big deal to pay $50 or $100 per year or more, and it would free up good domains to be actually used.
- minifigone 7y ago
  Forgive my lack of knowledge of the TLDs, but is there then an alternative TLD that can/should be used for personal projects or portfolios?
  - btrettel 7y ago
    I'm switching my personal website from .org to .us. There are a few major disadvantages of .us: 1. only available to people in the US, 2. private registration is not allowed. While the latter is not a major problem for my personal website, I have a project that I'd like to not have attached to my name, so .us isn't a possibility there. I don't know what TLD to use for that project yet but I'll figure something out. I'm open to suggestions.
    - NiloCK 7y ago
      Not sure if I understand the first disadvantage. People not living in the US live someplace else, with its own TLD.
      - btrettel 7y ago
        Fair point, you're correct. Private registration not being available is the main disadvantage then, which as I said is not a problem for a personal website.
      - kps 7y ago
        It is possible for some people to cross some borders.
isoprophlex 7y ago
In my mind, the registration process for TLDs shouldn't cost more than a couple of cents right? Maybe a dollar at most? This sounds like a purely artificial pricing process to me... But I'm happy to have my opinion changed on this topic.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  The incremental cost for companies is probably small. Although, it would depend on what percentage of domains registered require customer support or other manual intervention. If a customer support request costs the company $20 and 1 in 20 registrations request support, then that's a dollar extra per registration right there. And there are still large fixed costs. You need security, rock solid infrastructure, outgoing email infra, executives, attorneys, offices, janitorial staff, and all the other stuff that goes along with running a business.
rectang 7y ago
> But Verisign itself doesn't have competitors; if you want to register a .com address, you have to do business with Verisign. Sounds like Verisign is a rent-seeking monopoly.
kaslai 7y ago
Here are some quick numbers: At the end of 2019, Verisign had 158.8 million domains registered. At a price of $7.85/year, that's about $1.247 billion in expected revenue for 2020. If we assume that the number of domains remains static forever, this change means that after the next price hike of 7%, they will see an additional $87.26 million of annual revenue. By the end of the decade, given the same assumptions above, they will see an additional annual revenue of $895.28 million on top of their existing $1.247 billion. All that extra money without providing any additional value to the customer. I'm sure many a celebration was had when they got the go-ahead to raise prices like this.
- foob4r 7y ago
  I am starting to think that maybe monopolies are bad.
  - Craighead 7y ago
    Regulatory capturing monopolistic systems is worse
- ChrisLomont 7y ago
  To be fair, due to inflation, prices need to rise each year to continue the same real revenue. And your assumption that no new services will be added is likely untrue. Over the past decade all registrars have had to add significant security measures to combat rising domain theft scams among other features added. Granted, 7% is high, but expecting prices to stay fixed for for the same goods goods is not reasonable.
  - ampdepolymerase 7y ago
    Technology is improving and compute and storage gets cheaper every year. Inflation is just making excuses.
    - ChrisLomont 7y ago
      Parts are. Parts are pretty stagnant, and parts increase. Security costs are increasing, for example, as are wages for tech people to run the stack.
stevenicr 7y ago
I've been moving domains to uniregistry to get away from godaddy's constant price increases. In the middle of transferring another 60 domains over I get a notice that goaddady is taking over uniregistry. then later that day I see these stories about icann raising the prices even more. maybe the article about this handshake un-censor-able domains thing will provide some good news for this space. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22310604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22310604 What is the most uncensored registrar for .coms now? I refuse to let the names I've been working on be taken over by godaddy.
- exhilaration 7y ago
  Namecheap and Gandi.net get a lot of love from HN.
  - larrik 7y ago
    I don't think Gandi.net is still loved by HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822
    - jtl999 7y ago
      That was an issue with their hosting service, and didn't affect domains. As for myself personally I keep my own backups of my own externally hosted content but I don't disagree that this issue was a big doozy for Gandi.
  - ticmasta 7y ago
    >> ... Gandi.net get a lot of love from HN. not lately!
  - stevenicr 7y ago
    namecheap is all like "contain nudity, pornography or other content deemed adult related" - and I'm like, that's a fine choice, but I need a place that would protect Larry Flynt, otherwise I can't count on them to protect me. More censorship, not trying to put my eggs in that basket.
harikb 7y ago
> ... ICANN and Verisign's oversight of the .com domain is itself overseen by the US Department of Commerce. Indeed, ICANN argues that it is merely complying with the wishes of the Department of Commerce, which authorized ICANN to raise the price caps by 7 percent annually back in 2018. Finally, it will all turn out to be some $2B profit earned somewhere from having ordered the right Prime Rib dinner at Mar-a-lago. Unless HN enmass makes the visit there, this will go over just like the .org change
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
I don’t get domains. There seems to be plenty of competition between them, especially with the introduction of gtlds. So why isn’t there downward price pressure on domains? Why do I pay someone at least $10 a year for a tiny few bytes of data? How can we break this? Should we do a crowdfunded gtld for a not-for-profit permanent gtld?
- donmcronald 7y ago
  The new gTLDs have a pricing problem IMO. All of them are more expensive than .com, which is the "best" domain, so they look overpriced. Plus, the premium registrations are incredibly poorly thought out. For example, you can buy wifi.cloud for $55,000 up front plus $1,100 per year or you can go to afternic where the minimum offer on wificloud.com is $2000. Which would you rather own (neither IMO, but...)? I think the new gTLDs would have done better if they'd have positioned themselves as a small business alternative to domain squatters. A small business would be excited to have pc.tech for their website, but not for $10k/year. IMO, you'd be better off buying a good, generic .com off afternic for $100k at that point because you'd be breaking even in about 15 years (assuming 6% interest) plus it has some resale value if you don't make it 15 years.
keenmaster 7y ago
Proposal: Why don't we make domain names more like names on the App Store? Here's how it would work. If you go to x.com, you'll visit the actual x.com, which literally just shows an x. However, you'll see a suggestion for the top companies that are "secondarily registered" (for free) to that domain, in order of popularity and some other metrics. You can make one of those secondary x.com's the default, so that when you visit x.com, you visit their alternative website instead. There are some issues to sort out with that system, such as whether secondary registration (or at least the auto-suggest) should be allowed for the likes of Facebook and other established, popular, trademarked brands. Another question would be that, if x.com is parked by a squatter, should the more visited x.com's be able to bid for your domain? Here's how bidding would work. Only established companies with a name that corresponds to the domain name would be able to bid. Bidding would only be open for a pre-specified time frame. The domain name owner would be free to notify everyone with an established company that goes by that name to get in on the bidding action. Users would be able to flag websites operated by dead/zombie companies, and an independent committee would convene (digitally) to vote on whether bidding should be re-opened. Naming is actually an issue with startups. We should reduce friction as much as possible for entrepreneurs because it's already hard to start a company as it is. It would be great if you can just pick the best name that isn't taken by a major brand and move on to more important matters. Down the line, you can give customers a small reward for defaulting your version of the domain.
- kingludite 7y ago
  I like the automated ranking. The issue you see with popular websites could be fixed by asking for a panel to review your website against a fee. Reviewing who should own google.com would cost 5 euro, other more complex reviews would be more expensive. The conclusion could also be that there should be an index page listing all of the tools on [say] video-converter.com which in turn could be claimed by a website that reviews video converters. Any converter company can request that website to be reviewed (for a large fee) afterwhich it may revert back to a flat list type of index that also lists the review website. The review should be subject to specific rules and regulations and aim to serve the end user. Now if only I could figure out who reviews the reviewers...
twhb 7y ago
These comments are either irrational or full of domain squatters and registrars. This price increase costs a person who own a single domain $3.22 per year. That's conservatively adjusted for inflation, in 2020 dollars, and after 10 years not while it's still increasing. At minimum wage, this price increase is costing you an extra 3.4 to 6.1 seconds per work day, depending on the state. In other words, if you own a single domain, this increase does not affect you. It does affect you, though, if you own thousands of domains that you aren't using. The word for that is "domain squatter". It also affects you if you're a registrar and you're aware that most domains are held by squatters, therefore that most of your revenue comes from squatters. This price increase doesn't affect me or other legitimate domain holders, has already made my trigger-happy friends tell me they're going to review their domains and let go of the ones they probably won't use, and may even make some types of domain squatting unprofitable. This price increase is good for the internet.
- donmcronald 7y ago
  Yeah, it's not much in raw dollars, but the percentage increase is significantly above inflation. Imagine if everything you pay for increased in price by 7% every year while you're getting a measly 1% or 2% raise like most people.
  - twhb 7y ago
    Yeah, that's my point exactly. It's not much if you only pay it a few times, but just imagine if domains were a significant portion of everything you pay for.
    - donmcronald 7y ago
      Just imagine if everything you buy increased in price by 7% per year for no good reason. Domain squatting wouldn't be an issue if domains were $5 / year with a thousand gTLDs. Instead, there are premium pricing games on every gTLD and Google, etc. are doing their best to de-emphasize domain names and URLs.
- kaslai 7y ago
guru4consulting 7y ago
Instead of relying on a single authority for a tld, why not make the ownership distributed and let multiple organizations compete among themselves? May be they could share data over blockchain or a similar database. This is still centralized control but at least distributed to few organizations instead of just one monopoly. Or even better, same policy of distributed control could be applied to ICANN. I don't understand the intricacies of their work, but I hope they get some serious competition.

139 points by Deinos 7y ago

ICANN seems to be a corrupt organization.

Do they need the money? It's always struck me it should be even cheaper than it is. Perhaps cc.tld registries should be able to register any non-cc domain. Then registrars could shop for the best service.

bitxbitxbitcoin 7y ago
I witnessed the last ICANN Meeting... They definitely don't need the money.
- kome 7y ago
  story time.
t-writescode 7y ago
I don’t understand what you mean by ‘cc tld registries should be able to sell non-cc domain’
- wnissen 7y ago
  Currently country code registrars can only register for the country the represent. .uk can only do UK, etc. You could allow them to register for lots of domains.

lostapathy 7y ago

I absolutely do not think ICANN, or the registries, "need" any more money, and I don't want them to have it. At the same time, one could make a very strong case that .com domains should cost more to help combat squatting and speculation. They are a limited resource and too many people (me included) sit on domains "just in case I want to develop the idea" and that has a lot of other unintended consequences we don't want.

lozaning 7y ago
Someone already having bought the domain you want and now you having to pay market price for it is not reason enough to force me to pay additional money to verisign every time I reg or renew a domain. Instead of me and every other .com domain owner having to pay the verisign availability tax that only potentially benefits you, why don't you just pay fair market price to whoever owns the domain you want. If I was a verisign stock holder I'd be all about your plan.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  I'm on the fence. But I would add that the low renewal price of .com domains makes the prices asked for many domains unrealistic. Because they see an opportunity to just sit on the domain and gamble that it might become more valuable. People want a thousand dollars for long, not great domains. If the renewal was higher, I think "market price" would be a little closer to market. Perhaps a higher initial fee and then renewals would remain the same. Then at least it would discourage future squatting without putting a burden on small time users.
  - lozaning 7y ago
    Let's make every new .com cost 1 million dollars to register, so prohibitivly expensive that we can be sure that CocaCola can get newcokeflavor.com whenever they decide they want to buy it, and TacoBell can get any iteration of [dorritosflavor]tacos.com whenever they need it. Still onboard? Or, what if instead of all of us paying verisign more money for zero additional value, Coke just pays a million to whoever happens to own newcoke.com if they decide they want that domain?

lkesteloot 7y ago

I feel like .com should be much more expensive than it is. Too many people squatting. I have friends who have dozens of .com, and not even "just in case", they're just collecting them because they like the sound of them. Then when you have a real idea all the good ones are taken, most unused. The .com TLD is supposed to be for commercial use, so for a real company it shouldn't be a big deal to pay $50 or $100 per year or more, and it would free up good domains to be actually used.

minifigone 7y ago
Forgive my lack of knowledge of the TLDs, but is there then an alternative TLD that can/should be used for personal projects or portfolios?
- btrettel 7y ago
  I'm switching my personal website from .org to .us. There are a few major disadvantages of .us: 1. only available to people in the US, 2. private registration is not allowed. While the latter is not a major problem for my personal website, I have a project that I'd like to not have attached to my name, so .us isn't a possibility there. I don't know what TLD to use for that project yet but I'll figure something out. I'm open to suggestions.
  - NiloCK 7y ago
    Not sure if I understand the first disadvantage. People not living in the US live someplace else, with its own TLD.
    - btrettel 7y ago
      Fair point, you're correct. Private registration not being available is the main disadvantage then, which as I said is not a problem for a personal website.
    - kps 7y ago
      It is possible for some people to cross some borders.

isoprophlex 7y ago

In my mind, the registration process for TLDs shouldn't cost more than a couple of cents right? Maybe a dollar at most? This sounds like a purely artificial pricing process to me... But I'm happy to have my opinion changed on this topic.

jjeaff 7y ago
The incremental cost for companies is probably small. Although, it would depend on what percentage of domains registered require customer support or other manual intervention. If a customer support request costs the company $20 and 1 in 20 registrations request support, then that's a dollar extra per registration right there. And there are still large fixed costs. You need security, rock solid infrastructure, outgoing email infra, executives, attorneys, offices, janitorial staff, and all the other stuff that goes along with running a business.

rectang 7y ago

> But Verisign itself doesn't have competitors; if you want to register a .com address, you have to do business with Verisign. Sounds like Verisign is a rent-seeking monopoly.

kaslai 7y ago

Here are some quick numbers: At the end of 2019, Verisign had 158.8 million domains registered. At a price of $7.85/year, that's about $1.247 billion in expected revenue for 2020. If we assume that the number of domains remains static forever, this change means that after the next price hike of 7%, they will see an additional $87.26 million of annual revenue. By the end of the decade, given the same assumptions above, they will see an additional annual revenue of $895.28 million on top of their existing $1.247 billion. All that extra money without providing any additional value to the customer. I'm sure many a celebration was had when they got the go-ahead to raise prices like this.

foob4r 7y ago
I am starting to think that maybe monopolies are bad.
- Craighead 7y ago
  Regulatory capturing monopolistic systems is worse
ChrisLomont 7y ago
To be fair, due to inflation, prices need to rise each year to continue the same real revenue. And your assumption that no new services will be added is likely untrue. Over the past decade all registrars have had to add significant security measures to combat rising domain theft scams among other features added. Granted, 7% is high, but expecting prices to stay fixed for for the same goods goods is not reasonable.
- ampdepolymerase 7y ago
  Technology is improving and compute and storage gets cheaper every year. Inflation is just making excuses.
  - ChrisLomont 7y ago
    Parts are. Parts are pretty stagnant, and parts increase. Security costs are increasing, for example, as are wages for tech people to run the stack.

stevenicr 7y ago

I've been moving domains to uniregistry to get away from godaddy's constant price increases. In the middle of transferring another 60 domains over I get a notice that goaddady is taking over uniregistry. then later that day I see these stories about icann raising the prices even more. maybe the article about this handshake un-censor-able domains thing will provide some good news for this space. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22310604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22310604 What is the most uncensored registrar for .coms now? I refuse to let the names I've been working on be taken over by godaddy.

exhilaration 7y ago
Namecheap and Gandi.net get a lot of love from HN.
- larrik 7y ago
  I don't think Gandi.net is still loved by HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822
  - jtl999 7y ago
    That was an issue with their hosting service, and didn't affect domains. As for myself personally I keep my own backups of my own externally hosted content but I don't disagree that this issue was a big doozy for Gandi.
- ticmasta 7y ago
  >> ... Gandi.net get a lot of love from HN. not lately!
- stevenicr 7y ago
  namecheap is all like "contain nudity, pornography or other content deemed adult related" - and I'm like, that's a fine choice, but I need a place that would protect Larry Flynt, otherwise I can't count on them to protect me. More censorship, not trying to put my eggs in that basket.

harikb 7y ago

> ... ICANN and Verisign's oversight of the .com domain is itself overseen by the US Department of Commerce. Indeed, ICANN argues that it is merely complying with the wishes of the Department of Commerce, which authorized ICANN to raise the price caps by 7 percent annually back in 2018. Finally, it will all turn out to be some $2B profit earned somewhere from having ordered the right Prime Rib dinner at Mar-a-lago. Unless HN enmass makes the visit there, this will go over just like the .org change

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

I don’t get domains. There seems to be plenty of competition between them, especially with the introduction of gtlds. So why isn’t there downward price pressure on domains? Why do I pay someone at least $10 a year for a tiny few bytes of data? How can we break this? Should we do a crowdfunded gtld for a not-for-profit permanent gtld?

donmcronald 7y ago
The new gTLDs have a pricing problem IMO. All of them are more expensive than .com, which is the "best" domain, so they look overpriced. Plus, the premium registrations are incredibly poorly thought out. For example, you can buy wifi.cloud for $55,000 up front plus $1,100 per year or you can go to afternic where the minimum offer on wificloud.com is $2000. Which would you rather own (neither IMO, but...)? I think the new gTLDs would have done better if they'd have positioned themselves as a small business alternative to domain squatters. A small business would be excited to have pc.tech for their website, but not for $10k/year. IMO, you'd be better off buying a good, generic .com off afternic for $100k at that point because you'd be breaking even in about 15 years (assuming 6% interest) plus it has some resale value if you don't make it 15 years.

keenmaster 7y ago

Proposal: Why don't we make domain names more like names on the App Store? Here's how it would work. If you go to x.com, you'll visit the actual x.com, which literally just shows an x. However, you'll see a suggestion for the top companies that are "secondarily registered" (for free) to that domain, in order of popularity and some other metrics. You can make one of those secondary x.com's the default, so that when you visit x.com, you visit their alternative website instead. There are some issues to sort out with that system, such as whether secondary registration (or at least the auto-suggest) should be allowed for the likes of Facebook and other established, popular, trademarked brands. Another question would be that, if x.com is parked by a squatter, should the more visited x.com's be able to bid for your domain? Here's how bidding would work. Only established companies with a name that corresponds to the domain name would be able to bid. Bidding would only be open for a pre-specified time frame. The domain name owner would be free to notify everyone with an established company that goes by that name to get in on the bidding action. Users would be able to flag websites operated by dead/zombie companies, and an independent committee would convene (digitally) to vote on whether bidding should be re-opened. Naming is actually an issue with startups. We should reduce friction as much as possible for entrepreneurs because it's already hard to start a company as it is. It would be great if you can just pick the best name that isn't taken by a major brand and move on to more important matters. Down the line, you can give customers a small reward for defaulting your version of the domain.

kingludite 7y ago
I like the automated ranking. The issue you see with popular websites could be fixed by asking for a panel to review your website against a fee. Reviewing who should own google.com would cost 5 euro, other more complex reviews would be more expensive. The conclusion could also be that there should be an index page listing all of the tools on [say] video-converter.com which in turn could be claimed by a website that reviews video converters. Any converter company can request that website to be reviewed (for a large fee) afterwhich it may revert back to a flat list type of index that also lists the review website. The review should be subject to specific rules and regulations and aim to serve the end user. Now if only I could figure out who reviews the reviewers...

twhb 7y ago

These comments are either irrational or full of domain squatters and registrars. This price increase costs a person who own a single domain $3.22 per year. That's conservatively adjusted for inflation, in 2020 dollars, and after 10 years not while it's still increasing. At minimum wage, this price increase is costing you an extra 3.4 to 6.1 seconds per work day, depending on the state. In other words, if you own a single domain, this increase does not affect you. It does affect you, though, if you own thousands of domains that you aren't using. The word for that is "domain squatter". It also affects you if you're a registrar and you're aware that most domains are held by squatters, therefore that most of your revenue comes from squatters. This price increase doesn't affect me or other legitimate domain holders, has already made my trigger-happy friends tell me they're going to review their domains and let go of the ones they probably won't use, and may even make some types of domain squatting unprofitable. This price increase is good for the internet.

donmcronald 7y ago
Yeah, it's not much in raw dollars, but the percentage increase is significantly above inflation. Imagine if everything you pay for increased in price by 7% every year while you're getting a measly 1% or 2% raise like most people.
- twhb 7y ago
  Yeah, that's my point exactly. It's not much if you only pay it a few times, but just imagine if domains were a significant portion of everything you pay for.
  - donmcronald 7y ago
    Just imagine if everything you buy increased in price by 7% per year for no good reason. Domain squatting wouldn't be an issue if domains were $5 / year with a thousand gTLDs. Instead, there are premium pricing games on every gTLD and Google, etc. are doing their best to de-emphasize domain names and URLs.
kaslai 7y ago

guru4consulting 7y ago

Instead of relying on a single authority for a tld, why not make the ownership distributed and let multiple organizations compete among themselves? May be they could share data over blockchain or a similar database. This is still centralized control but at least distributed to few organizations instead of just one monopoly. Or even better, same policy of distributed control could be applied to ICANN. I don't understand the intricacies of their work, but I hope they get some serious competition.