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ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money

namecheap.com

71–80 of 132 posts

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

#71

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…

If we really want higher prices, how about we at least get more features for it. Such as built-in privacy protection.

Or how about we restructure the whole relationship so that wildly excessive amounts of money don't end up in either Verisign or ICANN regardless of what the price is.

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

#72
post #60
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…

To be clear, I don't think it will come to this. But right now, ICANN believes that they can get away with anything, and have started to act on that belief. 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 p…

NameCoin [1] is an emerging consensus-based decentralized DNS system.

Any replacement will need to facilitate existing domains, it could be implemented as an add-on to existing resolvers like bind or dnsmasq.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin

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

#73
post #46
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 support you using any domain for any purpose, as you are the owner. Nobody else should be telling you or punishing you for using a shorter domain for non-web use.f

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

#74
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Come on. Squatting is when you're doing som with the purpose of reselling.

If you just were lucky and registered a 3 letter domain back in the 90s, why is it anyone else business? Let it be.

I have got a 5-letter domain myself that I keep a website of mine that never worked out online mostly for portfolio and because I really like the domain name. I've no plans to sell the domain or free it so others can register, even though it could indeed be more useful for some other stuff. Well, if someday I want to launch a company, I might as well brand it with this name. For the time being, it's no one's business.

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

#75
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…

Perhaps ICANN will accelerate the solution to this self-correcting problem. ;-)

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

#76
post #44

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 haven't looked for a .com in a long time, but when people are looking for .com's, do they really find that their choices are mostly taken by squatters and not by other people with legitimate uses for the domains? I would think that .com's are just saturated because it's the standard TLD and also because it was only recently that new TLDs appeared.

All squatters. This price change won't affect anything in terms of squatters though, they'll keep buying even if the prices almost double over 10 years. This just means more money for ICANN / Verisign.

Most squatters I know of today are holding domains simply so competitors can't have them. They don't do anything with them. They just sit there and point back to the registrar. I have many clients who own a ton of domains for just this purpose. Some think they may actually use the domain someday, some actually think if they point their domains to their website they'll get more business (nope), but still, they own a lot of domains that other people could probably use.

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

#77

Is there a TLD/gTLD that isn't run by people intent on profiteering and corruption? Even if everyone were to abandon .com/net/etc, and moved to .whatever, you're still supporting ICANN through IANA, no? So basically we have no choice but to support them, or revert to sharing IP addresses?

> or revert to sharing IP addresses

I've been seeing this more and more as time goes by.

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

#78
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>There's already .local for your use,

No? Yeah at one point a lot of us used that one, but it was never official and has long since been eaten by mDNS. And with ICANN happily selling off whatever TLDs anyone wants you can’t count on anything unused and unreserved either. Local only DNS TLD use has been explicitly discouraged if anything, which has long been intensely irritating and argued over. Ones like .test are reserved but aren’t intended and don’t read as being for permanent deployment purposes on intranets. Official req has been to buy a legit TLD and use that.

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

#79
post #44

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 haven't looked for a .com in a long time, but when people are looking for .com's, do they really find that their choices are mostly taken by squatters and not by other people with legitimate uses for the domains? I would think that .com's are just saturated because it's the standard TLD and also because it was only recently that new TLDs appeared.

A huge percent of the ones I looked at last year were just squatters, yes.

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

#80
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 leaders…

Either that, or they'll try to get Congress to pass laws that force everyone to use ICANN, in the name of security or some other.
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