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If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

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Re: If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

#91

Post by anarazel »

wmf wrote: post #45
hk__2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the data centers across the world, the network connectivity, the DDoS hardware, servers, custom software and staff to run it all must be expensive. We’re just talking about the DNS part here; not the hosting. Maintaining a bunch of DNS servers doesn’t cost $9 per domain.

Somebody put in a proposal to run the .org registry at cost for $2/domain/year a while back, but it was rejected because their infrastructure was only something like triple-redundant Postgres instead of quintuple-redundant Oracle. This is known as a "beauty contest"; ICANN picks whoever has the most over-engineered solution and when you cross that with "cost plus" thinking leftover from the military-industrial comple…

.org runs on postgres.

Re: If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

#92

Post by [deleted] »

thedevil wrote: post #39

An idea I've been tossing around: What if domains cost $100 if more than one person wants it? The idea here is to squeeze the squatters with 000s of domains. Whenever I want a domain, most of the ones I want are taken. Not by people who are making use of it, but by people who are squatting in hopes of extorting anyone who would actually use the domain to produce value. I'd actually be happy if Verisign or any other p…

[deleted]

Re: If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

#93

Post by dorfsmay »

thedevil wrote: post #39

An idea I've been tossing around: What if domains cost $100 if more than one person wants it? The idea here is to squeeze the squatters with 000s of domains. Whenever I want a domain, most of the ones I want are taken. Not by people who are making use of it, but by people who are squatting in hopes of extorting anyone who would actually use the domain to produce value. I'd actually be happy if Verisign or any other p…

Isn't the problem squatters sitting on domains for free via domain tasting?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting

Re: If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

#94

Post by zhte415 »

thedevil wrote: post #39

An idea I've been tossing around: What if domains cost $100 if more than one person wants it? The idea here is to squeeze the squatters with 000s of domains. Whenever I want a domain, most of the ones I want are taken. Not by people who are making use of it, but by people who are squatting in hopes of extorting anyone who would actually use the domain to produce value. I'd actually be happy if Verisign or any other p…

As someone who's personal domain is my own name, I highly dislike this idea. It hosts my email identity and personal cloud, and would be a pain (and insult) to give up.

And I've had requests for it. Quite a lot of requests, even though it's not a very common name. What would follow, $100 moving to $1000, $1000 moving to $10000? Offer me $100k and I'll not give it up. For companies that own a trademark, this would also be an issue, because trademarks are not general, but product specific, see nissan.com

Re: If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

#95

Post by zhte415 »

ericd wrote: post #78
forgottenpass wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear good arguments against this Squeezing out squatters also squeezes out anyone without means from domains they're not using for commercial purposes. I already spend too much money keeping things online. Of the handful of domains I don't do much with, one is just for my primary email account. The same name is registered on other TLDs so there would probably be some demand for it. Am I making a "useful"…

It's a limited shared resource, and if someone else would do something with it that's worth the fairly reasonable sum of $8/mo, when it's not worth that to you, then yeah, I'd rather they have it, especially if it also means that good names aren't all camped on by rent seekers who do literally nothing with the domain. That said, I think we should just price all .com's higher, regardless of demand for specific domains…

The thing about seeking rent, is that's domain names are not a limited resource, even .COM. Domain squatters are seeking rent, but not in a traditional sense of a limited amount of land.

A creative individual can come up with a new, memorable name. If you have a service about pets, then pets.com doesn't have to be your name.

For example, a friend really wanted [firstname][lastname].com, but there happened to be a hugely popular singer with this name, so he went with 1[firstname].com, resulting in a short, catchy registration.

In terms of land, you can't just create it (and in terms of reclaiming land from the sea for example, that land is considered capital).

Re: If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

#96

Post by rms_returns »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #84
thedevil wrote: post #39

An idea I've been tossing around: What if domains cost $100 if more than one person wants it? The idea here is to squeeze the squatters with 000s of domains. Whenever I want a domain, most of the ones I want are taken. Not by people who are making use of it, but by people who are squatting in hopes of extorting anyone who would actually use the domain to produce value. I'd actually be happy if Verisign or any other p…

The reason squatters work is in fact, the dispute resolution cost. A friend of mine passed away, and along with him went control of the domain of a site I was a part of. He had, prior to his death, left a note that me and another friend were supposed to keep the site running. And I own two of the other TLDs of this domain. Domain squatting is supposedly against ICANN rules, and we have a clear brand we're trying to p…

There should be an easy way through which you can complain against the squatters online. Maybe Google should act as a mediator here as they can blacklist any domain from their searches and thus hold about as much power as the registrars/ICANN.

In any case, what happened afterwards? Did you get back your domain or is it still being squatted?

Re: If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

#97

Post by rms_returns »

zhte415 wrote: post #94
thedevil wrote: post #39

An idea I've been tossing around: What if domains cost $100 if more than one person wants it? The idea here is to squeeze the squatters with 000s of domains. Whenever I want a domain, most of the ones I want are taken. Not by people who are making use of it, but by people who are squatting in hopes of extorting anyone who would actually use the domain to produce value. I'd actually be happy if Verisign or any other p…

As someone who's personal domain is my own name, I highly dislike this idea. It hosts my email identity and personal cloud, and would be a pain (and insult) to give up. And I've had requests for it. Quite a lot of requests, even though it's not a very common name. What would follow, $100 moving to $1000, $1000 moving to $10000? Offer me $100k and I'll not give it up. For companies that own a trademark, this would als…

Too bad, the owner of Nissan Computers had to go through a lot of hardships[1], just because his family name happened to be the same as that of a crony capitalist.

Such stories make me sad, especially since there are extremely few who could empathize with those who suffered and even understand the problem faced by them. I really hope there are people in the US who would support Mr. Uzi Nissan.

[1]: http://www.nissan.com/Lawsuit/The_Story.php

Re: If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

#98

Post by ocdtrekkie »

rms_returns wrote: post #96
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason squatters work is in fact, the dispute resolution cost. A friend of mine passed away, and along with him went control of the domain of a site I was a part of. He had, prior to his death, left a note that me and another friend were supposed to keep the site running. And I own two of the other TLDs of this domain. Domain squatting is supposedly against ICANN rules, and we have a clear brand we're trying to p…

There should be an easy way through which you can complain against the squatters online. Maybe Google should act as a mediator here as they can blacklist any domain from their searches and thus hold about as much power as the registrars/ICANN. In any case, what happened afterwards? Did you get back your domain or is it still being squatted?

It's still being squatted. I own other TLDs for it we can operate the site off of. I'm hoping eventually they abandon the domain, since it's unlikely anyone else will want it.

Re: If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

#99

Post by rms_returns »

toast0 wrote: post #66
the_ancient wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am sure the load is high, everytime you look up a .com you are not connecting to Verisign Server. DNS does not work that way, Major DNS companies like RackSpace and AWS's Route 53 I suspect have higher load DNS than the Root Registries, and they offer the service for free...

> While I am sure the load is high, everytime you look up a .com you are not connecting to Verisign Server. It depends on what's in your resolver cache. If coming from a cold cache, you would start from the root hints file[1] -- if you ask them for an A record for news.ycombinator.com, they give you the NS records for com. ([a-m].gtld-servers.net, and some A and AAAA records for those); these are the Verisign servers…

> if you ask them for an A record for news.ycombinator.com, they give you the NS records for com.

Why does it have to go to the .com registry? Why can't the NS servers of the registrar (GoDaddy/Namecheap/etc.) themselves provide that resolution (ycombinator.com == xx.xx.xx.xx IP) ? After all the registrars are assigned for that specific purpose, aren't they?

Looks like a centralized bureaucracy to me if each request has to go to the root com/org/net DNS servers.

Re: If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

#100

Post by rms_returns »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #98
rms_returns wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be an easy way through which you can complain against the squatters online. Maybe Google should act as a mediator here as they can blacklist any domain from their searches and thus hold about as much power as the registrars/ICANN. In any case, what happened afterwards? Did you get back your domain or is it still being squatted?

It's still being squatted. I own other TLDs for it we can operate the site off of. I'm hoping eventually they abandon the domain, since it's unlikely anyone else will want it.

Did you try complaining to ICANN about it via any means? An alternative is to throw a DMCA on them through Google, that's much faster (though its intended use is reporting of copyright violations, not sure how it'll work for reporting of squatting of domain names).
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