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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. W
by smutticus 12y 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.