51–60 of 132 posts
Possible positive side effect is reducing profitability of Domain Squatters, leading to more names available. If you've ever tried to get a domain you know what a hassle it is to find a decent .com
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an owner of thousands of domains, I can tell you a minor price increase is not going to change the economics of the business.
It might be a start though. If domains were taxed at say 1% of their value it would go a long way towards evicting squatters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might be a start though. If domains were taxed at say 1% of their value it would go a long way towards evicting squatters.
And the poor or nonprofits having a valuable domain would have to give them up, terrible idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an owner of thousands of domains, I can tell you a minor price increase is not going to change the economics of the business.
It might be a start though. If domains were taxed at say 1% of their value it would go a long way towards evicting squatters.
Possible positive side effect is reducing profitability of Domain Squatters, leading to more names available. If you've ever tried to get a domain you know what a hassle it is to find a decent .com
I thought most squatters 'kite' the domains so they don't have to pay for them? Eg they buy the domain and get a refund just before the month is up, then buy it again, ad nauseum.
I know very little about the technical and business side of DNS and Domain Registrars. That being said, have things actually gotten more expensive for them to operate? I'm pretty confident the answer is no and these price increases just reflect the need for a handful of entities to charge more for an essential service with no viable alternative.
Another way to look at this (and this only works for domains, not things like hosting) is supply and demand. There's a limit to the number of domains out there, and there's a huge increase in people who want them. It's almost like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies... scarcity is built in to domains. At some point, they'll all be taken.
But we don't actually need them. What we do need is a "Let's Encrypt" style initiative to replace the DNS roots in their entirety, run by competent, principled people.
It would be difficult, but the people who are pissed off about this have clout at Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla (the web browser gatekeepers) and might actually be able to pull this off.
There is no legal requirement that ICANN has to run this system. It's just a historical convention. We've successfully taken out arrogant/incompetent (billion dollar) certificate businesses -- I think trying to get ICANN to blink would be a good goal.
I oppose Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement. I believe that allowing wholesale prices for .com domains to rise 72% over 12 years, which is far more than the rate of inflation and also far more than Verisign's underlying costs of maintaining the registry could possibly increase by, will dramatically hurt the internet ecosystem. It will especially hurt small website operators, like myself, and will discourage internet users from creating blogs and personal pages, with the end result of reducing democratization of the internet.
Verisign reported a 69.4% operating margin in Q1 2019, so they clearly do not need the extra revenue from this price hike. ICANN has granted a monopoly over .com to Verisign and ICANN has a duty to every internet user on the planet to carefully regulate this monopoly to prevent abuse by Verisign. The only conscionable thing to do right now is to freeze wholesale .com prices and re-evaluate 5-10 years from now. A policy that allows price increases tracking the rate of inflation (but no higher) may make sense in the future, but right now Verisign is already collecting far more from their .com monopoly than any company would be able to in a competitive market [1]. It's simply not right to allow them to raise prices at this time.
- Kerrick
[1] For example, Alphabet, a highly successful player in a very high-margin industry, has an operating margin of around 25%. Verisign's operating margin is over 2.75 times that.
I know very little about the technical and business side of DNS and Domain Registrars. That being said, have things actually gotten more expensive for them to operate? I'm pretty confident the answer is no and these price increases just reflect the need for a handful of entities to charge more for an essential service with no viable alternative.
Another way to look at this (and this only works for domains, not things like hosting) is supply and demand. There's a limit to the number of domains out there, and there's a huge increase in people who want them. It's almost like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies... scarcity is built in to domains. At some point, they'll all be taken.
Take your idea one step further, and they should start individually assessing each domain name, and charging the maximum possible. Google.com would cost a billion the first year. Then, it suddenly starts redirecting to Bing because MS outbid Google.
This hasn’t happened yet, but, as far as I can tell, there are no rules preventing such behaviour, only the ever-changing power dynamics.
This scenario has been a reason for me to avoid all these new TLDs. Because those are run by smaller organizations less susceptible to bad PR, I expected them to pioneer the shakedown.
Which leads to the question: which registrar would you trust most? Are there any that are contractually or, better yet, bound by law to limit increases to what’s reasonable? Absent such guarantees, maybe something like .eu is the safest? Despite common cynicism about politicians and money, I tend to expect them to shy away from controversial schemes to get rich quick, and to be far more susceptible to public pressure.
This is not going to end. ICANN has revealed their hand -- they are corrupt. But we don't actually need them. What we do need is a "Let's Encrypt" style initiative to replace the DNS roots in their entirety, run by competent, principled people. It would be difficult, but the people who are pissed off about this have clout at Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla (the web browser gatekeepers) and might actually be able to pu…
We should begin the process of scaring them back on track. Start brainstorming. Start writing IETF proposals that prominently feature removing ICANN from the loop. Come up with ideas for migrating current domain owners to the new system. Build prototypes. Start putting those prototypes into web browsers behind feature flags.
Show them what the internet could look like if it starts to fragment at the DNS level.
Show them that we're serious.