8 ms·

If ICANN only charges $0.18 per domain name, why am I paying $10?

127 points by jpatokal 13y ago

sytelus 13y ago
A other answers have said, large portion of your money goes to Verisign. Verisign is essentially government sponsored monopoly over .com and .net domains. You may ask how did that happened when US supposed to so despise monopolies? Here's how: Early on registries were free, funded by government and run by InterNIC. Then government decided to privatize it. The contract to manage .com registry was granted to a company called Network Solutions, Inc (NSI). At that time govt actually paid [$5.9M][1] NSI to do this but then NSI managed to convince that registrations should be charged to cover the cost. Eventually Verisign bought Network Solutions and become the entity who manages .com registry. Everyone was starting to realize that NSI/Verisign was becoming monoloy for some very important function of modern economy. ICANN was formed in 1998 which was charted to introduce competition in this area. But instead they ended up doing almost exactly the opposite thing in next series of events. Early in 2003 Verisign introduced a service called [Site Finder][2] which redirected users to search engine if domain didn't exist. ICANN said this was "overstepping the contract terms". Verisign shutdown the service but also sued ICANN for preventing it to bring any improvements. Eventually ICANN had to settle with Verisign and the prize of [settlement][3] was that Verisign would be awarded renewal of contract without any bidding plus right to raise prices without showing cost justifications. There were even terms that indicated Verisign can even continue its monopoly for longer term. If you ask me this is blunder and incompetence by ICANN at mega scale. [Industry was furious][4]. Lot of people [commented][5] on ICANN's proposal of settlement by saying that .com registry is not the property that ICANN owns to leverage in settlements. Others said no other government agency knowingly consented to unchecked price increase without cost justification. But it all went to vein and ICANN directors voted 5-9 in favor of settlement. Due to industry outrage US Dept of Commerce had to intervene and eliminate the clause for Verisign's right to increase prices by 7%. You can say that Verisign showed benevolence for not increasing prices to what was already considered ridiculous. In cases like this typically competitors brings in anti-trust suits. It did happened against Verisign in 2010 but they [escaped][6] without a bruise because the organization CFIT which had filed this case wasn't considered as competitor or the one who had financial injuries. It also surprises me that real competitors haven't come forward against Verisign to bring in large scale anti-trust suit. So when you pay that $10, it's ICANN's massive blunders of last decade to allow Verisign continue absolute monopoly. Verisign has benefitted dearly with this. They have $2 billion in cash and $1 billion of yearly revenues from all the payments you hand out to them. Verisign's financial indicates that this is their highest margin business. One light at the end of the tunnel is that US government has [announced][7] plan to relinquish the control of Internet which means ICANN might not have authority to hand out monopolies any longer. Their stock too big hit when US government announced this. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions#History [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign#2003_Site_Finder_legal_case [3]: http://www.cio.com/article/18286/ICANN_OKs_VeriSign_Settlement [4]: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/godaddycomr-outraged-over-icannr-giving-verisignr-monopoly-55213652.html [5]: http://forum.icann.org/lists/com-renewal/ [6]: http://domainincite.com/4676-breaking-verisign-settles-cfit-lawsuit-for-free [7]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/us-to-relinquish-remaining-control-over-the-internet/2014/03/14/0c7472d0-abb5-11e3-adbc-888c8010c799_story.html
- smutticus 13y ago
  You get your history right, but I don't agree with our analysis. The NTIA's transition of IANA will most likely just result in increased autonomy for ICANN. Which will result in them being granted increased power in delegating monopolies to registries. ICANN made $400,000,000 in revenue in 2013. It's not just the .com TLD, every gTLD that ICANN issues is a monopoly to its registry. The bright side is that with ~1,300 new gTLDs being issued in 2014 the power a single registry such as Verisign can wield will decrease. If Verisign wants to charge $1,000 for a .com domain, you can just but a different domain under a different TLD. Expect to see more new websites not using .com in the future as these new gTLDs start propogating. Also, expect many more IDN gTLDs in coming years as unicode character sets become preferable for people in countries that don't use a latin character set.
stevewilhelm 13y ago
Value based pricing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing
patio11 13y ago
Running a registrar has close to a $500k a year minimum salary bill, which is 50k $10 domains even if you model them as having 0 COGS, which is in fact highly contrary to fact. That's tricky to get to organically, so you start doing things like paid marketing, and then realize that GoDaddy (et al) will happily spend $X0 to acquire $10 a year worth of domain business, both because it has a relatively high LTV and, more importantly, because it has a "backend." (e.g. GoDaddy made a $16 sale for me on bingocardcreator.com back in 2006 and then sold me another ~$5,000 of domains and SSLs over the years, and I don't even use the products where they really make a killing, like hosted shopping carts and what have you.) Relevantly to HNers: you'll run into math like this for most software businesses. Upfront costs are quite low and COGS may well be near zero, but if you want to actually sustain the business, you get to pay market wages to people, and it is very hard to pay market wages to technologists $1 at a time. There was a story on HN today about a business which just learned this to its sadness. They were not the first to figure it out and they will not be the last.
- kijin 13y ago
  One of the answers on SE also says something along the same lines. Although I have no doubt that running a registrar costs a lot of money, this is the wrong answer to the original question. .com domains cost $10 because Verisign charges $7.85 for each of them in addition to the $0.18 ICANN fee. Large registrars, of course, get volume discounts, and they might even sell new domains at a loss when they think they can rip you off on add-ons and renewals. But by no means are they pocketing the entire $9.82 as the question mistakenly assumes.
  - smcl 13y ago
    I'm not massively clued in on this so apologies if this is a bad question, but what's Verisign's role in this? That's a decent amount of cash, what is the service they provide for that?
    - 0x0 13y ago
      They run the .com registry and zone, among other TLDs.
mkuhn 13y ago
I am glad that domains are not $0.18. Imagine how many domains would be available if domains were that cheap... I gather that at that price domain grabbers would just start to register everything (within reason). Then we would deal with some kind of secondary market where domains would be priced by their attractiveness and not sold as a common good (this obviously is already the case for many good domains).
- marincounty 13y ago
  Yea, but what if they put a limit of, say 4 per IP address? If you wanted a new domain, you would need to forfeit one? Or, even go farther, and tie a name and social security number to the domain in order to keep track?
  - mkingston 13y ago
    Unless I'm missing some greater context, certainly your latter suggestion is completely impossible in a global context.
- icedchai 13y ago
  Before 1997, they used to be free.
supermatt 13y ago
+ $0.18 ICANN Fee + $7.85 Registry Fee (a.k.a Verisign's Ripoff fee) + $1.97 Registrar (who you register the domain through) Fee = $10.00 Retail Price Amazingly, Verisign aren't the worst offender. The infrastructure to support the registry MUST cost a fraction of that price - as proven by 'low-fee' registries. I don't know how Verisign can continue to justify their price hikes. So you are aware, Verisign make just shy of $1 billion a year through this fee. Thats a lot of salaries and infrastructure... The scumbags even tried to increase the cost by 7% per annum to "ensure that .com directories run smoothly amid increases in Internet traffic and heightened security threats." before they forcibly had their prices frozen by the federal government in 2012. Make no mistake, Verisign have certainly been taking advantage of their position as registry of .coms. That said, I still think the price of TLDs is too low, as proven by the proliferation of squatters. How to solve this, and where the money should go is another question though...
- BorisMelnik 13y ago
  exactly, not to mention a lot of registrars charge way more than $10 for a .com. last I checked Network Solutions charged $30+ for a .com! also how much do you think Verisign and other registrars contributed to OpenSSL this year?
- dsl 13y ago
  Increasing the price of domain names has little effect on "squatting" (a term I highly dislike). Parked domains create a large volume of available inventory in ad markets, driving down costs in SEM.
  - Reedx 13y ago
    If it cost $500 to register a domain (or even $100 as they used to be), I cannot imagine that it wouldn't significantly decrease the amount of parked domains. So many are squatted because you only have to make back ~$10 in order to pay for it, right? That's a small gamble. Buy a dozen domains and only 1 needs to do decently well in order to pay for the others. Additionally, $10 is almost an impulse buy, so a lot of domains are picked up in the event that it might be useful someday (I'm guilty of this). It's so annoying when you have the perfect name for a product only to find that the domain is uselessly parked. And it seems to be 95% of the time.
andrewstuart 13y ago
In a capitalist economy, companies buy goods and services at a lower price than they sell them for. Positioning, branding and establishment of value allow some sellers to sell at a higher price. Other sellers compete by selling at a lower price and make a lower margin on the sale. Technical folks such as those at Hacker News are focused on other things typically than this sort of stuff but it's what gets salaries paid. If you work at a commercial organisation you'll find the cost of producing the goods or services that your company sells are (hopefully) less than the price they are sold for. If there is a wide disparity between cost and price then companies think this is a good thing as it results in greater profit but typically attracts greater competition.
- vacri 13y ago
  Hacker News is supposed to be half business - that's the point of it. Startups is where tech meet business.
- zo1 13y ago
  "In a capitalist economy" And yet the only reason the price is this high is because there is a monopoly involved. Yes, government-granted, and given to Verisign.
imjustsaying 13y ago
How did Verisign get the .com TLD monopoly in the first place? I was a wee lad when this all started and don't remember the history. Can someone drop a good link describing why there wasn't a more distributed approach to the .com TLD (and still isn't for new TLDs?)
- zhte415 13y ago
  Verisign acquired Network Solutions, the administrators of .com. The name registry was initially government funded, but privatized and sold off in the early / mid 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions http://mediafilter.org/caq/internic http://mediafilter.org/caq/internic
DigitalSea 13y ago
It's like an employee of a company earning $70k per year working on a project that will bring in $500k wondering why they're not getting paid more if the company is making much more than their yearly salary in one go and the answer is: overheads. The domain aspect of a registrar is one very small part. You factor in insurance, employee salaries, utilities, leasing of office space, purchasing office equipment and computers, storage, maintenance (network and building). A registrar is like any other business, it has to factor in its overheads into the cost of their products. On-top of that, all businesses ensure they bring in a little more than they're spending (ideally) and reinvest that back into the business to improve service offerings and existing products. Having said all that ICANN aren't the only registrar out there, Verisign are probably the worse in my opinion. There are many men in the middle driving the cost up as well. It's very much a shark industry.
busterc 13y ago
My related Ask HN: Would you prefer a non-profit domain name registrar? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7156997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7156997
- jawns 13y ago
  Since I can't reply in that thread, I'll reply here ... When you say non-profit, you could mean multiple things, at least here in the U.S. You might be talking about a 501(c)(3) non-profit, like Mozilla or Wikipedia. Typically, when people think of 501(c)(3)s, they think of organizations such as the Red Cross or Catholic Charities, but obviously (as with Mozilla or Wikipedia) it can be practically anything directed toward the public good. One common critique I've heard about nonprofits in the tech space is that they have a hard time competing for the best talent (at least when it comes to salary/benefits), but if you have a large volunteer base, and a lot of people who truly want the project to flourish, then that's not a critical problem. Or, you might be talking about a cooperative. A co-op is a non-profit in the sense that (unlike a normal for-profit business) its primary goal is not to make money, but to provide some benefit to its members. So, in the case of a cooperative registrar (such as nic.coop), the members wholly own the registrar, and it exists for their benefit. They may not care about generating a profit, so long as the business satisfactorily provides a necessary service.
smutticus 13y ago
I follow this space and am currently doing some research into the renewal/transition of the IANA contract. http://www.ntia.doc.gov/press-release/2014/ntia-announces-intent-transition-key-internet-domain-name-functions http://www.ntia.doc.gov/press-release/2014/ntia-announces-in... For a good start read this and the linked PDF: http://www.circleid.com/posts/20140426_the_illusion_of_internet_governance/ http://www.circleid.com/posts/20140426_the_illusion_of_inter... TLDR; The DNS industry has an oversized representation in ICANN. ICANN makes a ton of money, and no one really seems to care. You can read the actual contract ICANN has with the government(NTIA) here: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/sf_26_pg_1-2-final_award_and_sacs.pdf http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/sf_26_pg_1-2... Mueller is someone who regularly criticizes ICANN. I don't always agree with him, but I think he's right on with this one. http://www.internetgovernance.org/2014/04/16/icann-anything-that-doesnt-give-iana-to-me-is-out-of-scope/ http://www.internetgovernance.org/2014/04/16/icann-anything-...
pushkargaikwad 13y ago
Domain business is one of the most shadiest business on the web. I wasn't aware of the verisign fees but honestly, it is about time to either disrupt whole domain industry or start democratizing it. Every registrar company take its users for a ride.

127 points by jpatokal 13y ago

A other answers have said, large portion of your money goes to Verisign. Verisign is essentially government sponsored monopoly over .com and .net domains. You may ask how did that happened when US supposed to so despise monopolies? Here's how: Early on registries were free, funded by government and run by InterNIC. Then government decided to privatize it. The contract to manage .com registry was granted to a company called Network Solutions, Inc (NSI). At that time govt actually paid [$5.9M][1] NSI to do this but then NSI managed to convince that registrations should be charged to cover the cost. Eventually Verisign bought Network Solutions and become the entity who manages .com registry. Everyone was starting to realize that NSI/Verisign was becoming monoloy for some very important function of modern economy. ICANN was formed in 1998 which was charted to introduce competition in this area. But instead they ended up doing almost exactly the opposite thing in next series of events. Early in 2003 Verisign introduced a service called [Site Finder][2] which redirected users to search engine if domain didn't exist. ICANN said this was "overstepping the contract terms". Verisign shutdown the service but also sued ICANN for preventing it to bring any improvements. Eventually ICANN had to settle with Verisign and the prize of [settlement][3] was that Verisign would be awarded renewal of contract without any bidding plus right to raise prices without showing cost justifications. There were even terms that indicated Verisign can even continue its monopoly for longer term. If you ask me this is blunder and incompetence by ICANN at mega scale. [Industry was furious][4]. Lot of people [commented][5] on ICANN's proposal of settlement by saying that .com registry is not the property that ICANN owns to leverage in settlements. Others said no other government agency knowingly consented to unchecked price increase without cost justification. But it all went to vein and ICANN directors voted 5-9 in favor of settlement. Due to industry outrage US Dept of Commerce had to intervene and eliminate the clause for Verisign's right to increase prices by 7%. You can say that Verisign showed benevolence for not increasing prices to what was already considered ridiculous. In cases like this typically competitors brings in anti-trust suits. It did happened against Verisign in 2010 but they [escaped][6] without a bruise because the organization CFIT which had filed this case wasn't considered as competitor or the one who had financial injuries. It also surprises me that real competitors haven't come forward against Verisign to bring in large scale anti-trust suit. So when you pay that $10, it's ICANN's massive blunders of last decade to allow Verisign continue absolute monopoly. Verisign has benefitted dearly with this. They have $2 billion in cash and $1 billion of yearly revenues from all the payments you hand out to them. Verisign's financial indicates that this is their highest margin business. One light at the end of the tunnel is that US government has [announced][7] plan to relinquish the control of Internet which means ICANN might not have authority to hand out monopolies any longer. Their stock too big hit when US government announced this. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions#History [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign#2003_Site_Finder_legal_case [3]: http://www.cio.com/article/18286/ICANN_OKs_VeriSign_Settlement [4]: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/godaddycomr-outraged-over-icannr-giving-verisignr-monopoly-55213652.html [5]: http://forum.icann.org/lists/com-renewal/ [6]: http://domainincite.com/4676-breaking-verisign-settles-cfit-lawsuit-for-free [7]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/us-to-relinquish-remaining-control-over-the-internet/2014/03/14/0c7472d0-abb5-11e3-adbc-888c8010c799_story.html

smutticus 13y ago
You get your history right, but I don't agree with our analysis. The NTIA's transition of IANA will most likely just result in increased autonomy for ICANN. Which will result in them being granted increased power in delegating monopolies to registries. ICANN made $400,000,000 in revenue in 2013. It's not just the .com TLD, every gTLD that ICANN issues is a monopoly to its registry. The bright side is that with ~1,300 new gTLDs being issued in 2014 the power a single registry such as Verisign can wield will decrease. If Verisign wants to charge $1,000 for a .com domain, you can just but a different domain under a different TLD. Expect to see more new websites not using .com in the future as these new gTLDs start propogating. Also, expect many more IDN gTLDs in coming years as unicode character sets become preferable for people in countries that don't use a latin character set.

stevewilhelm 13y ago

Value based pricing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing

patio11 13y ago

Running a registrar has close to a $500k a year minimum salary bill, which is 50k $10 domains even if you model them as having 0 COGS, which is in fact highly contrary to fact. That's tricky to get to organically, so you start doing things like paid marketing, and then realize that GoDaddy (et al) will happily spend $X0 to acquire $10 a year worth of domain business, both because it has a relatively high LTV and, more importantly, because it has a "backend." (e.g. GoDaddy made a $16 sale for me on bingocardcreator.com back in 2006 and then sold me another ~$5,000 of domains and SSLs over the years, and I don't even use the products where they really make a killing, like hosted shopping carts and what have you.) Relevantly to HNers: you'll run into math like this for most software businesses. Upfront costs are quite low and COGS may well be near zero, but if you want to actually sustain the business, you get to pay market wages to people, and it is very hard to pay market wages to technologists $1 at a time. There was a story on HN today about a business which just learned this to its sadness. They were not the first to figure it out and they will not be the last.

kijin 13y ago
One of the answers on SE also says something along the same lines. Although I have no doubt that running a registrar costs a lot of money, this is the wrong answer to the original question. .com domains cost $10 because Verisign charges $7.85 for each of them in addition to the $0.18 ICANN fee. Large registrars, of course, get volume discounts, and they might even sell new domains at a loss when they think they can rip you off on add-ons and renewals. But by no means are they pocketing the entire $9.82 as the question mistakenly assumes.
- smcl 13y ago
  I'm not massively clued in on this so apologies if this is a bad question, but what's Verisign's role in this? That's a decent amount of cash, what is the service they provide for that?
  - 0x0 13y ago
    They run the .com registry and zone, among other TLDs.

mkuhn 13y ago

I am glad that domains are not $0.18. Imagine how many domains would be available if domains were that cheap... I gather that at that price domain grabbers would just start to register everything (within reason). Then we would deal with some kind of secondary market where domains would be priced by their attractiveness and not sold as a common good (this obviously is already the case for many good domains).

marincounty 13y ago
Yea, but what if they put a limit of, say 4 per IP address? If you wanted a new domain, you would need to forfeit one? Or, even go farther, and tie a name and social security number to the domain in order to keep track?
- mkingston 13y ago
  Unless I'm missing some greater context, certainly your latter suggestion is completely impossible in a global context.
icedchai 13y ago
Before 1997, they used to be free.

supermatt 13y ago

+ $0.18 ICANN Fee + $7.85 Registry Fee (a.k.a Verisign's Ripoff fee) + $1.97 Registrar (who you register the domain through) Fee = $10.00 Retail Price Amazingly, Verisign aren't the worst offender. The infrastructure to support the registry MUST cost a fraction of that price - as proven by 'low-fee' registries. I don't know how Verisign can continue to justify their price hikes. So you are aware, Verisign make just shy of $1 billion a year through this fee. Thats a lot of salaries and infrastructure... The scumbags even tried to increase the cost by 7% per annum to "ensure that .com directories run smoothly amid increases in Internet traffic and heightened security threats." before they forcibly had their prices frozen by the federal government in 2012. Make no mistake, Verisign have certainly been taking advantage of their position as registry of .coms. That said, I still think the price of TLDs is too low, as proven by the proliferation of squatters. How to solve this, and where the money should go is another question though...

BorisMelnik 13y ago
exactly, not to mention a lot of registrars charge way more than $10 for a .com. last I checked Network Solutions charged $30+ for a .com! also how much do you think Verisign and other registrars contributed to OpenSSL this year?
dsl 13y ago
Increasing the price of domain names has little effect on "squatting" (a term I highly dislike). Parked domains create a large volume of available inventory in ad markets, driving down costs in SEM.
- Reedx 13y ago
  If it cost $500 to register a domain (or even $100 as they used to be), I cannot imagine that it wouldn't significantly decrease the amount of parked domains. So many are squatted because you only have to make back ~$10 in order to pay for it, right? That's a small gamble. Buy a dozen domains and only 1 needs to do decently well in order to pay for the others. Additionally, $10 is almost an impulse buy, so a lot of domains are picked up in the event that it might be useful someday (I'm guilty of this). It's so annoying when you have the perfect name for a product only to find that the domain is uselessly parked. And it seems to be 95% of the time.

andrewstuart 13y ago

In a capitalist economy, companies buy goods and services at a lower price than they sell them for. Positioning, branding and establishment of value allow some sellers to sell at a higher price. Other sellers compete by selling at a lower price and make a lower margin on the sale. Technical folks such as those at Hacker News are focused on other things typically than this sort of stuff but it's what gets salaries paid. If you work at a commercial organisation you'll find the cost of producing the goods or services that your company sells are (hopefully) less than the price they are sold for. If there is a wide disparity between cost and price then companies think this is a good thing as it results in greater profit but typically attracts greater competition.

vacri 13y ago
Hacker News is supposed to be half business - that's the point of it. Startups is where tech meet business.
zo1 13y ago
"In a capitalist economy" And yet the only reason the price is this high is because there is a monopoly involved. Yes, government-granted, and given to Verisign.

imjustsaying 13y ago

How did Verisign get the .com TLD monopoly in the first place? I was a wee lad when this all started and don't remember the history. Can someone drop a good link describing why there wasn't a more distributed approach to the .com TLD (and still isn't for new TLDs?)

zhte415 13y ago
Verisign acquired Network Solutions, the administrators of .com. The name registry was initially government funded, but privatized and sold off in the early / mid 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions http://mediafilter.org/caq/internic http://mediafilter.org/caq/internic

DigitalSea 13y ago

It's like an employee of a company earning $70k per year working on a project that will bring in $500k wondering why they're not getting paid more if the company is making much more than their yearly salary in one go and the answer is: overheads. The domain aspect of a registrar is one very small part. You factor in insurance, employee salaries, utilities, leasing of office space, purchasing office equipment and computers, storage, maintenance (network and building). A registrar is like any other business, it has to factor in its overheads into the cost of their products. On-top of that, all businesses ensure they bring in a little more than they're spending (ideally) and reinvest that back into the business to improve service offerings and existing products. Having said all that ICANN aren't the only registrar out there, Verisign are probably the worse in my opinion. There are many men in the middle driving the cost up as well. It's very much a shark industry.

busterc 13y ago

My related Ask HN: Would you prefer a non-profit domain name registrar? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7156997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7156997

jawns 13y ago
Since I can't reply in that thread, I'll reply here ... When you say non-profit, you could mean multiple things, at least here in the U.S. You might be talking about a 501(c)(3) non-profit, like Mozilla or Wikipedia. Typically, when people think of 501(c)(3)s, they think of organizations such as the Red Cross or Catholic Charities, but obviously (as with Mozilla or Wikipedia) it can be practically anything directed toward the public good. One common critique I've heard about nonprofits in the tech space is that they have a hard time competing for the best talent (at least when it comes to salary/benefits), but if you have a large volunteer base, and a lot of people who truly want the project to flourish, then that's not a critical problem. Or, you might be talking about a cooperative. A co-op is a non-profit in the sense that (unlike a normal for-profit business) its primary goal is not to make money, but to provide some benefit to its members. So, in the case of a cooperative registrar (such as nic.coop), the members wholly own the registrar, and it exists for their benefit. They may not care about generating a profit, so long as the business satisfactorily provides a necessary service.

smutticus 13y ago

I follow this space and am currently doing some research into the renewal/transition of the IANA contract. http://www.ntia.doc.gov/press-release/2014/ntia-announces-intent-transition-key-internet-domain-name-functions http://www.ntia.doc.gov/press-release/2014/ntia-announces-in... For a good start read this and the linked PDF: http://www.circleid.com/posts/20140426_the_illusion_of_internet_governance/ http://www.circleid.com/posts/20140426_the_illusion_of_inter... TLDR; The DNS industry has an oversized representation in ICANN. ICANN makes a ton of money, and no one really seems to care. You can read the actual contract ICANN has with the government(NTIA) here: http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/sf_26_pg_1-2-final_award_and_sacs.pdf http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/sf_26_pg_1-2... Mueller is someone who regularly criticizes ICANN. I don't always agree with him, but I think he's right on with this one. http://www.internetgovernance.org/2014/04/16/icann-anything-that-doesnt-give-iana-to-me-is-out-of-scope/ http://www.internetgovernance.org/2014/04/16/icann-anything-...

pushkargaikwad 13y ago

Domain business is one of the most shadiest business on the web. I wasn't aware of the verisign fees but honestly, it is about time to either disrupt whole domain industry or start democratizing it. Every registrar company take its users for a ride.