Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money

namecheap.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 132 posts

Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money

#61

Post by Eric_WVGG »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #30

Well, even if .com lost its credibility tomorrow, it couldn't come at a better time with other tlds gaining credibility over the years. Only downside is that a 7% increase is too slow to kill .com. Would be nice if it died fast enough for the zeitgeist to actually consider another DNS system which I don't think will ever happen without a distinct exodus event. Until then, this kind of news doesn't really penetrate be…

I'm not sure that an "exodus" is really possible.

Let's just say that, for example, the ACLU decided to bail out of aclu.org to aclu.io. Whomever ends up with that domain now gets all incoming *@aclu.org emails, which would include a massive amount of sensitive, privileged information.

Has there ever been an instance of an online company with a serious presence that changed domains? Even del.icio.us didn't let icio.us out of their hands. (in fact, delicious.com wound up being the domain they eventually parted with)

and regarding alternative TLDs "gaining credibility," well first, THANK GOODNESS we all lived long enough to be able to use other TLDs finally finally finally; but who's to say this won't just happen to any other TLD?

ICANN needs to be reined in or replaced.

Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money

#62

Post by KorematsuFred »

ohazi wrote: post #57

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…

> run by competent, principled people.

That is a root cause of a lot of problem. Whatever org you build eventually honest competent people will be replaced by callous assholes.

Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money

#65

Post by aeden »

Marsymars wrote: post #26

I'm really considering abandoning my firstlast.com domain (used for email and personal blog) and transitioning to firstlast.ccTLD so that I can stop giving Verisign money.

Just make sure you pick a ccTLD that has not already been bought/taken from the country in question. If you don't, it could be operated by Verisign anyhow (see .cc, .tv, etc)

Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money

#66

Post by ohazi »

KorematsuFred wrote: post #62
ohazi wrote: post #57

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…

> run by competent, principled people. That is a root cause of a lot of problem. Whatever org you build eventually honest competent people will be replaced by callous assholes.

I think we can accomplish a lot by demonstrating that we're serious about routing around bad behavior. If people start seriously talking about migrating away from today's ICANN, I suspect that one of two things are likely to happen:

1. ICANN might see this as an existential threat, realize that they can't act with impunity, and will start to change their behavior. I am pretty pessimistic about ICANN's current leadership, and think this is less likely to happen.

2. The powers that be will start to see what a disaster this would be, and will find a way to replace the current ICANN leadership. I think this is more likely to happen.

Either way, the result is a better outcome for everyone, at least for a while. But that's how governance works -- leadership tries to get away with whatever they can, and people need to get angry enough to threaten their ability to continue down that path. This process doesn't end.

Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money

#67

Post by gscott »

icedchai wrote: post #35
arkitaip wrote: post #10

"Verisign will be allowed to increase the wholesale price to registrars for .COM domains by 7% each year in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. After a two year “freeze”, Verisign can increase prices by 7% annually during 2026-2029, then another two year “freeze”. This cycle will continue, meaning that within 10 years, .COM domains could cost approximately 70% more than the current wholesale price of $7.85 — and the sky is t…

Absurd, especially considering domains used to be free (before 1997.) They did, on the other hand, sometimes take a month to register.

Then .com became $100 a year... maybe they are hoping to get back to that level.

Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money

#68

Post by giovannibonetti »

Bear with me for a moment: I firmly believe that in order for good .com domains to be available for a smaller price the registry fee should be far higher.

The reason for that is speculation: even though a .com registration is dirty cheap, getting a decent .com domain is very expensive because for many companies it is worth it to keep the domains parked, and when someone wants to buy one of them it gets very expensive - quite often it costs thousands of dollars.

However, if registration prices went 10x overnight these domain hosting companies would be forced to get rid of many "second class" domains, which would be soon available for regular users without intermediaries. Off course "premium" domains would still be expensive, but it's an advancement anyway.

Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money

#69

Post by [deleted] »

losteric wrote: post #13
arkitaip wrote: post #10

"Verisign will be allowed to increase the wholesale price to registrars for .COM domains by 7% each year in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. After a two year “freeze”, Verisign can increase prices by 7% annually during 2026-2029, then another two year “freeze”. This cycle will continue, meaning that within 10 years, .COM domains could cost approximately 70% more than the current wholesale price of $7.85 — and the sky is t…

70%?! Wow, that's enough to fund all kinds of innovation in the domain name space.

[deleted]

Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money

#70

Post by GauntletWizard »

dsl wrote: post #46
AJ007 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is lower registration prices mean more registrations and renewals, aka squatting. It is hard to say what direction or price point is either optimal or fair.

> more registrations and renewals, aka squatting People falsely equate any domain they can't register and doesn't have a website with squatting. I get at least one angry email from someone a month trying to buy a domain that only has MX (mail) records. Another is a 3 letter .com I use for my internal lab environment, and I explicitly don't want it to resolve on the public Internet.

I'd call, without the slightest of doubt, the latter to be squatting.

Maybe ICANN should specify a shorter internal lab domain (There's already .local for your use, which I would think is plenty short, even adding a prefix), but I would most certainly say that given there's only ~50,000 2 or 3-letter domains, the price for one should be high enough to make an individual flinch.

Post reply on HN