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Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39
- rovr138 5y agoThe link is not just about the amount, A section, > There are about 152 million domain name registrations .com today so Verisign will make about $82 million more in the next year following the price increase out of thin air. > Verisign will be able to increase the price of .com in the next 3 years as well. > Verisign will suck about $3 billion dollars out of the world economy just by having some powerful friends at ICANN.
- kwthrows 5y agoThey'll pass the value and savings onto the customer, obviously.
- pinkybanana 5y agoVerisign going to be the next rocket stonk
- shadilay 5y agoThe term for this is "rent seeking". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
- gunapologist99 5y agoAgree with all of these statements except this one: > Verisign will suck about $3 billion dollars out of the world economy just by having some powerful friends at ICANN. It's not a zero-sum game. If Verisign manages to extract $3B from the poverty-stricken folks who are buying up .com domains, it doesn't just disappear (unless, of course, Verizon takes it in cash and sets it on fire in the basement.) That $3B will then be spent on whatever pet projects Verizon feels like spending it on, thus re-injecting into the global economy. I personally think that Verisign should have to compete to run the .com registry, just like how we do FCC spectrum auctions, but hand-wavy statements like "suck about $3 billion dollars out of the world economy" do not help make that case.
- trafalgarcircle 5y agoApologies for the source of this, I couldn’t find a neutral organization hosting the excerpt. https://mises.org/library/broken-window https://mises.org/library/broken-window In short - the $3 billion would be spent on improving the local economy of those individuals who would otherwise retain the money. Technically nothing is being destroyed, but the point of the article stands.
- missedthecue 5y agoSuck it out of the world economy? Does Verisign collect their profits and throw it all in a furnace?
- criddell 5y agoWhat point are you trying to make? I think you know they don't burn the money.
- missedthecue 5y agoThat's it's not lost or sucked out of the economy. It is transferred to new owners who will spend it and it will go to new owners and so on and so forth.
- patrickthebold 5y agoAgreed, it's not really any different than an increase in taxes. Tax money does get spent, so it's not really lost at all.
- makotech222 5y agoCapitalism is an economic system in which private individuals capture property, make it private, make it scarce, then charge others to use it, making profit. Profit is theft from society. Stuff like this is the natural conclusion of such a system.
- minikites 5y agoExactly. Capitalism stifles innovation by taking resources from society and concentrating them into the hands of a few. If society was more equitable and if social safety nets were larger, we would see more people taking chances and innovating. Instead we have a society where people work under the duress of losing food and shelter, not exactly the best way to drive creativity.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- LightG 5y agoDownvoted by "temporarily impoverished" billionaires who've changed their middle name to Elon. I'm not full-on anti-capitalist, but market failures like this are an obvious issue.
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
- res0nat0r 5y agoThat's cheap. And I thought Route53 for $12.99 was cheap already.
- jaywalk 5y ago$12.99 for a .com registration is a hilariously overpriced ripoff.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- res0nat0r 5y agoIt's just fine when I don't have to leave the AWS console and click two buttons vs. using some other service.
- jaywalk 5y agoI understand paying extra to make your life a little easier. Doesn't change the fact that in the world of .com domain registration, it's hilariously overpriced.
- Spivak 5y agoAnd yet people pay it routinely every day which is probably why Big V’s probably not afraid of upping the wholesale rate secure that the Amazon and the like are the one’s most likely to eat their own margins to not lose customers due to a consumer facing price hike.
- jbverschoor 5y agocloudflare sells without profit
- cpach 5y agoIn that case it’s subsidized by their other offerings.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoI can't wait to see all the improvements that will result from this additional funding! /s
- rovr138 5y agoThere's another article linked to from this one that has, > The whole point here is that Verisign gets richer while ICANN does all the dirty work. All this while ICANN will receive additional funding ($20 million) from Verisign over the next 5 years. So ICANN will be spending a part our stolen money, money ICANN helped Verisign steal from us registrants, to get higher salaries and bonuses. Thanks ICANN!!!
- amichal 5y agoDevil's advocate.... what percentage of .com registrations are parked/squatted domains looking for a sucker to buy at huge markups from the registrar price? I'd be very happy if this made the math on squatting a little less desirable. Edit: Don't get me wrong. If the reported profit margins at Verisign are correct they are clearly continuing to exploit their privileged market position unreasonably
- est31 5y agoHigh fees don't prevent high value domains from being squatted. They do have an impact, but it will only be felt in low value domains.
- whichdan 5y agoI'm sure it's a huge percentage but I doubt 54c/yr/domain is really going to make a dent.
- nrmitchi 5y agoI'm not sure if a 10% increase on registration price is going to materially change the math on squatting. My understanding is that squatting is like the VC game; you expect many of them to be complete losses, with a couple giving outsized returns. If you want to address squatting, then address squatting. If you want to address people squatting on new domains (as if there are many squat-able .com's left), then change the registration for new domain registrations only (and not renewals). A change like this will primarily affect small domain holders in a way that is financially not worth fighting back against individually. I don't really see a "devils advocate" position here.
- amichal 5y agoYeah... my intuition was/is it wouldn't make a big dent, but an interesting thought experiment. That said. I think the small renewals are the part that makes holding onto these domains for years possible... Random example. 20 years ago I had a one person local IT consulting side-gig. The domain was a not very useful, active less than a year and grabbed by a speculator as expected when I let it expire. It's been parked many places for years by various folks, current parking pages quote says they might be able get it for me for $120 [1] -- I could care less but if someone with less tech experience wanted it for their new small business they would likely bite. Is there a economic mechanism you recommend to prevent this sort of thing? [1]https://www.godaddy.com/domainsearch/find?isc=GPPTCOM&utm_source=godaddy&utm_medium=parkedpages&utm_campaign=x_dom-broker_parkedpages_x_x_invest_a_001&tmskey=dpp_dbs&domainToCheck=100-acre.com https://www.godaddy.com/domainsearch/find?isc=GPPTCOM&utm_so...
- jeffbee 5y agoWhen Network Solutions had a monopoly these were $100/2 years, later falling to $70/2 years. At this pace it will be a long, long time before we are back up to the bad old days.
- jaywalk 5y agoI remember mailing a check to Network Solutions to pay for a domain name registration.
- ianmcgowan 5y agoAnd I remember _faxing_ a letter on company letterhead signed by the CFO to prove that we were actually the entity we said we were. How the tables have turned...
- domador 5y agoYeah, those days were bad. Yet that doesn't mean the present isn't bad, either. I don't care for paying hundreds of dollars each year for domains for passion projects, especially when I suspect the actual cost of running a TLD registry is much lower. In other words, I think the .com registry should be a non-profit, public service, rather than a money-printing machine that some lucky company gets to exploit.
- pizza 5y agoWhy? Just cause they can? It's not like it costs them that much in maintenance per domain I imagine..
- jaywalk 5y agoThe executives at Verisign and ICANN need more money.
- gertrunde 5y agoThat is exactly it. They used to be price controlled, and then ICANN removed the price cap, so the predictable price rises are kicking in. This probably illustrates the community consensus on it going back a couple of years: https://www.google.com/search?q=icann+.com+price+cap https://www.google.com/search?q=icann+.com+price+cap Edit: Whoops! ICANN haven't altered their price controls for .com recently. Might be getting mixed up with the .org kerfuffle. In the current .com contract, prices were fixed at $7.85 until 30th November 2018, and are allowed to raise the cost by 7% per year after that, under certain conditions: "7.3(d)(ii) Registry Operator shall be entitled to increase the Maximum Price during the term of the Agreement due to the imposition of any new Consensus Policy or documented extraordinary expense resulting from an attack or threat of attack on the Security or Stability of the DNS, not to exceed the smaller of the preceding year's Maximum Price or the highest price charged during the preceding year, multiplied by 1.07." https://www.icann.org/en/registry-agreements/com/com-registry-agreement-1-12-2012-en https://www.icann.org/en/registry-agreements/com/com-registr...
- debrice 5y agoYes, this sounds like pure profit (and it is) but part of me wishes .com domains were 10x to 50x more expensive. It's selfish, I recognize that, but to purchase a basic domain today I'd have to pay anywhere from $10,000 to $1,000,000 to purchase an unused parked domain. Is there a solution or a place where ICANN and/or Verisign limit the massive amount of parked domains?
- newsclues 5y agoWouldn’t that just result in the domain squatters to be much wealthier and average people would be priced out, while the practice continues but the people profiting change…
- debrice 5y agoHolding 10,000 domain for $500/yr is likely to become unsustainable for any company. My suspicion is that they'd likely raise the price of very rare domains but stop parking basic ones
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoA lot of domain squatting can be argued with: If they're sitting on your trademark, you basically can take it from them. But the ICANN dispute resolution process is like $1200 minimum, so most squatters like to sell for just under that.
- ketzu 5y agoSo... What would be the fair price? Was $7.85 already outrageous? Should DNS be organized completely differently? Would such a reorganization actually make things cheaper or improve in any other way?
- Spivak 5y agoI think people want to see open bids where any company that wants to run a .tld can agree to do it for a given price until (ideally) the $/domain is bid down to near cost.
- tryptophan 5y agoPlease note that Verisign has a profit margin of 50%. Ie, 50% of their revenue becomes pure profit. This is an insane level. Apple is at 23%. Facebook at 35%. Profit margins that high only come from rent seeking backed by the full force of the law.
- Loic 5y agoElsevier had/has also a profit margin at about 35%. As a small structure you can achieve that but at a very large scale, this is effectively the sign that natural competition is not working as expected.
- tux3 5y agoI'm curious what the business expenses of a digital publisher like Elsevier look like. Peer review is not their purview, right? And I don't believe they pay the original authors a portion of each sale. Or that they need much of an advertising budget. What's the cost structure look like for a company like this one? With all due cynicism, has their been public research on the sort of clever accounting tricks a company with Elsevier's business model must surely be using to keep their profit margin as low as 35% ..?
- suprfsat 5y agoLobbying against open access, suing SciHub, threatening authors for self-publishing, yachts,
- jpeloquin 5y ago> I'm curious what the business expenses of a digital publisher like Elsevier look like. Me too. Their investor relations report [0] is the best source I know of, but it's pretty vague. I only see breakdowns of revenue, no details regarding operating costs. PLOS One is transparent regarding their costs though [1]: - 46% publishing, editorial - 18% publishing, production - 15% publishing, technology - 16% general & admin - 5% publication fee rebates [0] https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/results/results-presentations/2020-results-presentation.pdf https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/re... [1] https://plos.org/financial-overview/ https://plos.org/financial-overview/
- domador 5y agoWhat is the real yearly cost of managing each .com domain? To put it differently, what would be the profit margin for a .com registry maintainer that operated at reasonable efficiency (which might or might not reflect Verisign's own efficiency)? A related question: what would be the base, fixed costs for running a reasonably efficient .com registry and what would be the additional per-domain costs?
- mavhc 5y agoServers to register and get money. DNS server. ICANN fee per domain (of which about 10% is spent on running ICANN servers, rest is other stuff) So less than $1 I'd bet
- dsr_ 5y agoIt's a database with CRUD operations and some authentication, and a report generator that runs effectively a part-of-all-rows dump every so often. The size of the database for .com is about 150 million records. At 4KB per record (generous), that's 600MB. It fits n RAM on a laptop you wouldn't consider suitable for using at the office. Number of transactions other than reports is roughly 1 per year per record plus 10% growth, so about 5 per second.
- iancarroll 5y ago150,000,000 records * 4000 bytes per record = 600GB.
- dsr_ 5y agoAh, math. Thanks. OK, it fits in RAM on a single modern commodity server, and is updated at a rate which can easily be handled by such a server.
- alex_young 5y agoHow does a company with a monopoly on something like this and a net profit margin of 46% on a billion dollars of annualized revenue justify an increase in an already very high wholesale price? https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/vrsn/financials https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/vrsn/financial...
- rovr138 5y ago“Because we can” They have a monopoly and they’re allowed to do it.
- hetspookjee 5y agoWhy does the world allow the USA govern the domain space at all? Some months ago the USA seized the domains used by Iran's IRGC, in addition the .org was almost up for grabs a while back, and now a sudden pricehike of the .com tld. Obviously the internet has grown way beyond the powers of a relatively tiny non-profit that is ICANN so why not upgrade it into something more proper that is governed worldwide.
- mkr-hn 5y agoYou're not the first person to have this thought. Something like a summary of the discussion/chaos on the matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_governance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_governance
- dec0dedab0de 5y agoAnyone can use any DNS servers they want. These ones are run by the US Government because the US Government created them. It would be almost trivial for a country, or group of countries to set up their own root servers and mandate that operating system vendors include them if they want to continue selling in their country. Then if there was something hosted on their servers everyone wanted to get to, it would spread outside of those countries by demand. ...But it isn't even necessary now with all the extra TLDs. If a government or organization wants to start a non profit TLD that just charges the bare minimum, they can do it without fragmenting themselves. edit: In about 2004 a group of friends and I ran our own servers with SOAs for our own TLDs that we replicated to each other. It had a total of 3 useless websites, and 5 users, and only lasted a few months, but it was neat.
- ted0 5y agoOnly upvoting this for visibility. This decision hurts the consumer/registrant in the end, making future registrations and renewal costs less accessible to a lot of markets. For clarity, this $8.39 amount will become the wholesale cost to the registrar — we of course need to markup on top of that to cover our processing costs, overhead to offer great support, mitigate abuse, etc. Registrars do the heavy lifting in delivering the core user experience — we see none of this margin and the consumer does not see any incremental value from this hike by the registry. Namecheap stands against removing price caps and allowing these incremental price hikes that only hurt the consumer. -Ted from Namecheap
- rovr138 5y agoSince you’re closer to this and this has been asked in other comments, Is there a reason for doing this besides ‘we can’? Not sure if there’s something we aren’t seeing or aren’t privy to.
- hetspookjee 5y agoTo add to that, why can they actually? Why doesn't the EU just start a new .com registry that the rest of the world can actually refer to? I don't have a complete understanding of the TLD world but I can imagine it's much like the AS world with BGP. If the rest of world decides that one registry (Verizon's .com registry) isn't the leading authority, but rather the EU's .com registry for example, is. Than what "can" verizon actually do against it? Sure, the internet would break with namesquatting but atleast it's better than paying a ransom.
- teddyh 5y agoHere’s a starting point for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
- hetspookjee 5y agoThank you!
- 1B05H1N 5y agoCan anyone fill me in on what Verisign actually does? It's my understanding that ICANN ensures that the namespace/numerical space infra is secure and stable.
- dec0dedab0de 5y agoThey used to be the only registrar for com., or at least Network Solutions was, before they got bought. Verisign owns one of the root servers, and I believe they are in charge of adding SOAs for all the com. domains. Though I suppose the other root servers could go rogue at any time if they wanted to. I think that all other registrars have to go through Verisign in order to register sub domains off of com., but there may be other ways. I haven't really kept up with it in the last 20 years.
- profmonocle 5y agoRegistries basically: * Manage the database of all domain registrations in a TLD, and manage the infrastructure that registrars (the companies that customers actually interface with) use to create and update those records. * Manage whois, although IIRC .com and .net use a "thin whois" model where the TLD whois server redirects to a whois server run by that domain's registrar. * Run the authoritative DNS servers. This is the most critical component, since if the authoritative servers for .com and .net went down, it would basically be an "Internet outage" - an enormous amount of things would break if recursive DNS servers couldn't resolve .com or .net domains. It's an important function, but as others have pointed out, it doesn't justify the price increase, Verisign's profit margins are huge. And the fact is that Verisign doesn't actually own .com or .net, they're basically a contractor for ICANN.
- JamesAdir 5y agoThis is an article from February. Why is it posted now?
- moehm 5y agoI got an email from my registrar this morning.
- dec0dedab0de 5y agoAccording to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ $7.85 in 2012 is $9.20 in 2021. So it is cheaper than it was after the last price increase. They should probably just raise the price every year on a steady schedule to avoid the news. EDIT: would you work somewhere that could never give you a raise because they are not legally allowed to raise prices?
- therealEleix 5y agoI would also love to remind everyone that this is the same company who controls not 1 but 2 core root DNS server addresses. A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET J.ROOT-SERVERS.NET That means Verisign controls 15% of the global roots while everyone else holds a meager 7%. IANA got the optics on this one all sorts of messed up.
- akvadrako 5y agoThe root servers are not all equal and there is no real advantage to holding two. There are 63 Js, 14 As, but 165 Ls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server
- therealEleix 5y agoI don't doubt that, it's also trivial for anyone to spin up their own local root mirror to resolve against, I'm just pointing out that maybe Verisign shouldn't be holding onto two. It's even pointed out on their Wikipedia page like some kind of trophy like "Oh hey look, we don't just run 1 we run *2*, that makes us a big deal". :eyeroll:
- profmonocle 5y ago> it's also trivial for anyone to spin up their own local root mirror to resolve against This is a bit of a tangent, but the idea of doing this has always made me nervous. Sure, the root zone is only a couple MB and you can easily set up a cron job to sync it regularly. But if that cron job breaks, it would be very easy not to notice, since it's not like the authoritative servers + glue records for the major TLDs change every day. (Or every decade.) Imagine if that cron job has been broken for 9 months, the IT guy who set it up left 4 months ago, and suddenly a tiny TLD like ".tech" switches to a different authoritative DNS provider. Since it's not a very common TLD you'll never notice... unless some app uses "companyname.tech" for its mobile API - or one of a million other scenarios. It's probably fine if big DNS server operators like Google/Cloudflare or major ISPs mirror the root zone, since they have the resources to make it robust. But small(-ish) IT operations running their own DNS - just use the root servers.
- chaz6 5y agoAs computers get more powerful as times go on, surely the cost of running the service should be going down not up? I wonder if the contract to run the COM registry is every re-tendered, or will it stay with Verisign forever.
- dec0dedab0de 5y agoI put this in another comment, but if you take inflation into account it is cheaper than 2012 when they set the price to $7.85
- benhurmarcel 5y agoSo it makes sense to renew for many years now I guess.