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Remind HN: .com prices increase Sep 1, 2021
VeriSign's price increase goes in effect September 1, 2021. This increase likely will be passed on by your registrar.
Good time to remind everyone that VeriSign has a monopoly granted by ICANN to raise prices indefinitely with zero competition.
- RulerOf 5y ago>Verisign ... will increase the wholesale price it charges registrars for .com registrations and renewals from $7.85 to $8.39. It's 54 cents, in case anyone else was wondering. Source: https://domainnamewire.com/2021/02/11/breaking-verisign-announces-com-price-hike-to-8-39/ https://domainnamewire.com/2021/02/11/breaking-verisign-anno...
- tjbiddle 5y agoLol - So, a 7% raise. Totally reasonable even given standard inflation.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tryptophan 5y agoIt's not reasonable at all. Literally all they do is run a database. 50% profit margin. Insane. You only see numbers like that in a monopoly. They do not need the money at all. It's pure rent seeking.
- herbst 5y agoI would argue that most, non Unicorn, tech companies run on 50% profit or more.
- ohashi 5y agoCost to operate a registry, estimates are under $1/domain - costs have been decreasing. Why should VeriSign get an indefinite monopoly with a no bid contract that renews and allows price increases? There's no benefit to the internet as a whole, where .ORG at least is plausibly going to a non profit (as hard as they tried to sell off to private equity).
- qPM9l3XJrF 5y agoJust to play devil's advocate here--if domains were cheaper to own, there would be more namesquatters
- elil17 5y agoUnlike right now, where there’s one big namesquatter called “Verisign”. Domains worth over $8 have already been namesquatted. Those worth under $8 are being held ransom by Verisign. Making domain registration cheaper (via a price cap from ICANN or something) would only reduce the price of domain names for people who want to use them.
- nikitaga 5y ago> Domains worth over $8 have already been namesquatted > Making domain registration cheaper would only reduce the price of domain names for people who want to use them. You don't see how those two statements contradict each other? Make registration $6, now domains that are worth between $6 and $8 will also be namesquatted. Reducing the price of something almost never results in less units sold, it's economics 101. Have you ever bought a domain from a namesquatter? Did you pay $8 for it? No, you didn't, you paid whatever the seller thought that domain was worth to you, which is a lot more. Nobody namesquats to sell domains for $8 or $20. Yet if Verisign had that domain, you would only have paid $8 for it. That's the difference between squatting, and listing a public price that is the same for everyone and for every domain. Verisign isn't squatting or ransoming anything no matter how much you may dislike them.
- elil17 5y agoIt costs Verisign <$1 to issue a domain and they’re charging $8. It costs a domain squatter $8 to buy a domain and they charge $9 or more. It’s the exact same grift. If there’s a domain a squatter thought they could sell for $9 they’d buy it for $8 or $6, they’d make a profit either way. The only difference in name-squatting with lower prices is that one leech (Verisign) makes less money while another leech makes more.
- agallant 5y agoFrom the registrars I've checked, many are passing on a slightly larger price increase (e.g. a nice round number like $1). Granted that's on them as well as Verisign, but as others have noted it's increasing the price of something when the objective costs of operation have decreased.
- markdown 5y agoNonsense! Costs of digital services trend downwards. Dropping 50% would be more reasonable. If they want to make money, take it from the fucking squatters selling every usable domain name for over $1k, putting them far out of reach of most humans.
- colechristensen 5y agoOne way to do this is to raise prices for everybody. Seriously who cares about paying an extra dollar for .com registration? Of all of the rent seeking exploitation in the world, this has to be among the least important.
- silisili 5y ago7% is the max allowed. Understand it means 7% per year until the contract is redone.
- bogomipz 5y agoExcept inflation is nowhere near 7% nor has it been in more than 20 years.[1][2] Further, ICANN has allowed Verisign to increase wholesale domain pricing 7% year over year for four years followed by a two-year break. And then they can continue this cycle all over again for the length of the contract. In 2029 todays $8.40 .com domain will be $13.49. [1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/inflation-rate-cpi https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/inflation-ra...
- geocrasher 5y agoShocked over a 54 cent increase? Remember: Domains used to cost $75/year.
- georgyo 5y ago.com domains NEVER cost $75/year. In the 90s bad (but popular) registrars like Network Solutions got away with massive markups. Registrars are still allowed to add a markup, just there is so much competition that doesn't really happen any more. EDIT: Correction, Network Solution was the _only_ registrar between 1995 and 1998. For three years they charged insane amounts, $100 for 2yrs. Before that it was free, and after that it was about $8 from other registrars.
- handrous 5y agoHuh—my first domain name shows it was registered in 2002, and I was sure NetSol was the only option at the time, as in, not that I looked and didn't find others, but I looked and the answer was a definitive "NetSol is the only one". IIRC I paid around $70. My recollection was that all the new, cheap registers didn't come about until later rule changes, maybe a couple years later, not all the way back in '98. I'm also pretty sure I remember reading about the change on Slashdot, and I don't think I was reading it yet before 2000. [EDIT] I must have paid for two years (maybe first time registrations had to be two years, at the time?) at a $34.99/yr rate, to get that $70 figure I had in my head, in 2002.
- dylan604 5y agoI've noticed a lot of registrars try this where they select a multi-year option as default.
- selcuka 5y agoI'm sure Directnic was around in 1998 offering .com domain names for $15/year. Unfortunately archive.org only goes back to 2000 [1]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000510064309/http://www.directnic.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000510064309/http://www.direct...
- edoceo 5y agoWasnt there like two FOSS projects trying to make an alternate DNS? It was so anyone (almost) could register anything (almost) Edit: one is https://www.opennic.org/ https://www.opennic.org/
- SilverRed 5y agoThere was namecoin. The problem with anyone registering anything for free is that people will immediately hoard every usable name and try to resell them on for a profit. With domain name fees, you can only hoard the ones you reasonably believe will be in high demand and sell for a profit. With how many TLDs there are now, it's easy to find an unused domain name especially if you use your countries local tld.
- kristopolous 5y agoThere's probably decent economic models to prevent "scalping" or at least make it way harder. For instance, you make the property less alienable so the "seller" in a transfer is still just as legally liable if the new "owner" gets in court somehow due to the new content at the domain. Then people wouldn't sell it, that's the point. They may transfer it in an acquisition or name change and in those cases, such legal liability is redundant. If company A buys B then company B Is company A Another example: for abandonment it's not the first person that sees it snatching it up. Instead say, the first 60 days after lapse, interested parties register in a pool and then one is randomly selected. There's vastly superior ways to do this then relying on naive price signals
- paxys 5y ago.com and domain registration in general has a lot of problems, but an $8/year fee isn't one of them.
- MattGaiser 5y agoOff I go to think of another domain to buy that I likely won’t use.
- systemvoltage 5y agoI can't be the only one! What websites do you use to find good domains? I use the following: - Dotomator - nothing like it, https://www.dotomator.com/ https://www.dotomator.com/ - Namechk - social media check, https://namechk.com/ https://namechk.com/
- edoceo 5y agoI wrote a tool in Go that looks up SOA, NS and A records across all TLDs
- systemvoltage 5y agoVery cool, are these public APIs that anyone can access?
- ChrisArchitect 5y ago.com aside, I've been on the hunt lately for something general purpose for some misc projects and been really dismayed at difficulty in finding something available. Like there are a thousand TLDs now but for the extensions that are shorter/general all the reasonably also-shorter names are taken or offered at stupid premium prices. Really sucks holding me back from executing some side projects because hung up on the domain choice. Was just thinking to myself how it's shitty when some new project I saw by someone today was cool work but had to live on some .pizza domain and thought that could be better. Sigh.
- ralmidani 5y agoVeriSign’s obvious greed aside, I actually wish .com domain registration cost more. For a party that has a genuine interest in operating a .com website, something like $30/year is usually a drop in the bucket. Tripling the cost of buying a domain will be most damaging to those who snap them up just so they can turn around and sell them. Or maybe we could treat domains similarly to how many US states treat houses, giving people a break on their first domain, and ramping up the taxes as they purchase more?
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoTrust me, you're not hurting those folks. You're hurting those who have legitimate uses to lease domain names. It's like saying you want to raise the price of housing to keep landlords from buying up all of the properties and forcing locals to rent. You're not hurting the people abusing the system by doing that.
- postalrat 5y agoIt's more like saying you want to raise the property taxes to keep landlords from buying up all the properties.
- ohashi 5y agoWe're seeing that doesn't work that effectively in most places. It also is giving the same pricing to every human being across the globe. In the richer countries, sure, maybe $30/year isn't a lot, but in poorer ones that could be an onerous barrier to entry.
- Anunayj 5y agoOh I agree, though I think this can be solved by having a alternative TLD that employs some tactics to combat domain squatting + provides domains for cheap/free and the .free TLD is a good contender for it.
- oxplot 5y agoIf you have a domain that you know won't be going away, you can renew it for up to 10 years in advance. Cloudflare currently has the lowest price for .com.
- retrobox 5y agoAlthough with the caveat that you have to use their DNS, unless I’m missing something: https://developers.cloudflare.com/registrar/setup-domain-transfers https://developers.cloudflare.com/registrar/setup-domain-tra...
- quintes 5y agoThanks for sharing this. I disagree with the others who’ve stated it’s just a small increase and maybe domain prices should increase, for non dollar currencies you’re pricing people out