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Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

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Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#71

Post by moehm »

ted0 wrote: post #58
nceqs3 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ted, I've used namecheap for years and I love it. One thing though, when I visit namecheap while using a VPN it makes me fill out a cloudflare captcha. Any way to stop that? Considering I have already paid you money, you have my address, name, phone number, etc. it seems a bit ridiculous to ask for a captcha when visiting using a VPN.

Captcha is likely being triggered by Cloudflare. We have heard this feedback in this past and have listened but it's always a tricky balance of fighting abuse/bots and presenting an extra step for the user.

Since we are at the topic of Cloudflare captchas, Namecheaps blog rss feed is "protected" by a captcha as well, defeating the purpose of a rss feed.

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#72

Post by ted0 »

qeternity wrote: post #67
RKearney wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we of course need to markup on top of that to cover our processing costs, overhead to offer great support, mitigate abuse, etc Why "of course"? Cloudflare is able to provide domains transfers and renewals at wholesale rates.

Loss leader. The markup from legacy registrars is probably excessive, but with Google, Cloudflare, etc getting into the game, they can likely offer wholesale pricing to support the rest of their (very) profitable product lines.

Exactly. Depends how you define legacy registrars but I can agree with you to an extent. Namecheap's retail pricing is not excessive by any means — domains on their own are essentially commoditized — it all depends how much you value service and trust. Try calling Google if your domain is hijacked, your account is locked, or you have any number of other issues with a high value domain.

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#73

Post by suprfsat »

tux3 wrote: post #50
Loic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elsevier had/has also a profit margin at about 35%. As a small structure you can achieve that but at a very large scale, this is effectively the sign that natural competition is not working as expected.

I'm curious what the business expenses of a digital publisher like Elsevier look like. Peer review is not their purview, right? And I don't believe they pay the original authors a portion of each sale. Or that they need much of an advertising budget. What's the cost structure look like for a company like this one? With all due cynicism, has their been public research on the sort of clever accounting tricks a company…

Lobbying against open access, suing SciHub, threatening authors for self-publishing, yachts,

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#74

Post by ted0 »

rovr138 wrote: post #70
ted0 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the end, it's under ICANN's purview and in this case, also allowed by a decision made by the Trump administration in 2018. Verisign has a Cooperative Agreement with the US Government. The gist: "The amendment repeals Obama-era price controls and provides Verisign the pricing flexibility to change its .com Registry Agreement with ICANN to increase wholesale .com prices. Specifically, the flexibility permits Verisig…

Thank you Ted. I wanted to also mention that I appreciate what you and everyone at Namecheap do and the transparency when fighting things.

Thank you. That means a lot!

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#75

Post by tzs »

cpach wrote: post #35
jbverschoor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cloudflare sells without profit

In that case it’s subsidized by their other offerings.

How can you infer that? I can see how you could infer it if they were selling them at a loss, but not from selling them without profit.

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#76

Post by therealEleix »

Loic wrote: post #27
tryptophan wrote: post #19

Please note that Verisign has a profit margin of 50%. Ie, 50% of their revenue becomes pure profit. This is an insane level. Apple is at 23%. Facebook at 35%. Profit margins that high only come from rent seeking backed by the full force of the law.

Elsevier had/has also a profit margin at about 35%. As a small structure you can achieve that but at a very large scale, this is effectively the sign that natural competition is not working as expected.

"Natural Competition" in this space can never be. What you're seeing is exactly how this space turns out. Verisign controls the registry for the .com TLD. They run the centralized authority that ultimately says if a .com domain is "legit" or not.

The Registrars like Namecheap and friends are just the messengers authorized to register .com domains into this larger database and they pay Verisign for the privilege to do so.

While it's possible for anyone to go out and stand up their own .COM zone in DNS, any domains created by that registrar don't actually exist in the eyes of the larger Internet and will not work.

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#77

Post by debrice »

newsclues wrote: post #21
debrice wrote: post #16

Yes, this sounds like pure profit (and it is) but part of me wishes .com domains were 10x to 50x more expensive. It's selfish, I recognize that, but to purchase a basic domain today I'd have to pay anywhere from $10,000 to $1,000,000 to purchase an unused parked domain. Is there a solution or a place where ICANN and/or Verisign limit the massive amount of parked domains?

Wouldn’t that just result in the domain squatters to be much wealthier and average people would be priced out, while the practice continues but the people profiting change…

Holding 10,000 domain for $500/yr is likely to become unsustainable for any company. My suspicion is that they'd likely raise the price of very rare domains but stop parking basic ones

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#78

Post by LightG »

makotech222 wrote: post #4

Capitalism is an economic system in which private individuals capture property, make it private, make it scarce, then charge others to use it, making profit. Profit is theft from society. Stuff like this is the natural conclusion of such a system.

Downvoted by "temporarily impoverished" billionaires who've changed their middle name to Elon.

I'm not full-on anti-capitalist, but market failures like this are an obvious issue.

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#79

Post by ted0 »

moehm wrote: post #71
ted0 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Captcha is likely being triggered by Cloudflare. We have heard this feedback in this past and have listened but it's always a tricky balance of fighting abuse/bots and presenting an extra step for the user.

Since we are at the topic of Cloudflare captchas, Namecheaps blog rss feed is "protected" by a captcha as well, defeating the purpose of a rss feed.

I have no clue about our blog RSS feeds to be honest but I can ask the team.

Re: Verisign will increase the .com price from $7.85 to $8.39

#80

Post by teddyh »

hetspookjee wrote: post #56
rovr138 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you’re closer to this and this has been asked in other comments, Is there a reason for doing this besides ‘we can’? Not sure if there’s something we aren’t seeing or aren’t privy to.

To add to that, why can they actually? Why doesn't the EU just start a new .com registry that the rest of the world can actually refer to? I don't have a complete understanding of the TLD world but I can imagine it's much like the AS world with BGP. If the rest of world decides that one registry (Verizon's .com registry) isn't the leading authority, but rather the EU's .com registry for example, is. Than what "can" v…

Here’s a starting point for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
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