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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

#111

Post by profmonocle »

1B05H1N wrote: post #43

Can anyone fill me in on what Verisign actually does? It's my understanding that ICANN ensures that the namespace/numerical space infra is secure and stable.

Registries basically:

* Manage the database of all domain registrations in a TLD, and manage the infrastructure that registrars (the companies that customers actually interface with) use to create and update those records.

* Manage whois, although IIRC .com and .net use a "thin whois" model where the TLD whois server redirects to a whois server run by that domain's registrar.

* Run the authoritative DNS servers. This is the most critical component, since if the authoritative servers for .com and .net went down, it would basically be an "Internet outage" - an enormous amount of things would break if recursive DNS servers couldn't resolve .com or .net domains.

It's an important function, but as others have pointed out, it doesn't justify the price increase, Verisign's profit margins are huge. And the fact is that Verisign doesn't actually own .com or .net, they're basically a contractor for ICANN.

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

#112

Post by makotech222 »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #99
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.

Profit is reward for taking a risk. Don't like that a .com costs more? Use another TLD.

Sure, its very risky to build an oil well. I'm sure Exxon is really sweating over their new arctic drilling platforms.

Profit is the money that an owner of private property demands from those he rents it to.

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

#113

Post by profmonocle »

therealEleix wrote: post #108
akvadrako wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root servers are not all equal and there is no real advantage to holding two. There are 63 Js, 14 As, but 165 Ls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server

I don't doubt that, it's also trivial for anyone to spin up their own local root mirror to resolve against, I'm just pointing out that maybe Verisign shouldn't be holding onto two. It's even pointed out on their Wikipedia page like some kind of trophy like "Oh hey look, we don't just run 1 we run *2*, that makes us a big deal". :eyeroll:

> it's also trivial for anyone to spin up their own local root mirror to resolve against

This is a bit of a tangent, but the idea of doing this has always made me nervous. Sure, the root zone is only a couple MB and you can easily set up a cron job to sync it regularly. But if that cron job breaks, it would be very easy not to notice, since it's not like the authoritative servers + glue records for the major TLDs change every day. (Or every decade.)

Imagine if that cron job has been broken for 9 months, the IT guy who set it up left 4 months ago, and suddenly a tiny TLD like ".tech" switches to a different authoritative DNS provider. Since it's not a very common TLD you'll never notice... unless some app uses "companyname.tech" for its mobile API - or one of a million other scenarios.

It's probably fine if big DNS server operators like Google/Cloudflare or major ISPs mirror the root zone, since they have the resources to make it robust. But small(-ish) IT operations running their own DNS - just use the root servers.

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

#114

Post by patrickthebold »

missedthecue wrote: post #104
criddell wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What point are you trying to make? I think you know they don't burn the money.

That's it's not lost or sucked out of the economy. It is transferred to new owners who will spend it and it will go to new owners and so on and so forth.

Agreed, it's not really any different than an increase in taxes. Tax money does get spent, so it's not really lost at all.

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

#115

Post by iancarroll »

dsr_ wrote: post #55
domador wrote: post #26

What is the real yearly cost of managing each .com domain? To put it differently, what would be the profit margin for a .com registry maintainer that operated at reasonable efficiency (which might or might not reflect Verisign's own efficiency)? A related question: what would be the base, fixed costs for running a reasonably efficient .com registry and what would be the additional per-domain costs?

It's a database with CRUD operations and some authentication, and a report generator that runs effectively a part-of-all-rows dump every so often. The size of the database for .com is about 150 million records. At 4KB per record (generous), that's 600MB. It fits n RAM on a laptop you wouldn't consider suitable for using at the office. Number of transactions other than reports is roughly 1 per year per record plus 10%…

150,000,000 records * 4000 bytes per record = 600GB.

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

#116

Post by jpeloquin »

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…

> I'm curious what the business expenses of a digital publisher like Elsevier look like.

Me too. Their investor relations report [0] is the best source I know of, but it's pretty vague. I only see breakdowns of revenue, no details regarding operating costs.

PLOS One is transparent regarding their costs though [1]:

- 46% publishing, editorial

- 18% publishing, production

- 15% publishing, technology

- 16% general & admin

- 5% publication fee rebates

[0] https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/re...

[1] https://plos.org/financial-overview/

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

#117

Post by commoner »

ted0 wrote: post #38

Only upvoting this for visibility. This decision hurts the consumer/registrant in the end, making future registrations and renewal costs less accessible to a lot of markets. For clarity, this $8.39 amount will become the wholesale cost to the registrar — we of course need to markup on top of that to cover our processing costs, overhead to offer great support, mitigate abuse, etc. Registrars do the heavy lifting in de…

I migrated all of my domains away from Namecheap after their support told me that my (non-Namecheap) VPN needed to be disabled before I could log in. Namecheap now sells their own VPN service, so there is some conflict of interest in the VPN restriction.

Cloudflare does not require me to turn off my third-party VPN before logging in, and sells domains at cost (at lower rates than Namecheap). For example, Cloudflare charges $8.03/year for a .com domain ($7.85 Verisign rate + $0.18 ICANN fee), which will go up to $8.39 + whatever the new ICANN fee is after the Verisign/ICANN price hike. Namecheap currently charges $8.88 for the registration year and $12.98 every year after that, with the rates also going up after the price hike. Porkbun also charges less for renewals than Namecheap, and covers TLDs that Cloudflare doesn't.

Cloudflare pricing for .com: https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/

Namecheap pricing for .com: https://www.namecheap.com/domains/

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

#118

Post by trafalgarcircle »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #45
rovr138 wrote: post #2

The link is not just about the amount, A section, > There are about 152 million domain name registrations .com today so Verisign will make about $82 million more in the next year following the price increase out of thin air. > Verisign will be able to increase the price of .com in the next 3 years as well. > Verisign will suck about $3 billion dollars out of the world economy just by having some powerful friends at I…

Agree with all of these statements except this one: > Verisign will suck about $3 billion dollars out of the world economy just by having some powerful friends at ICANN. It's not a zero-sum game. If Verisign manages to extract $3B from the poverty-stricken folks who are buying up .com domains, it doesn't just disappear (unless, of course, Verizon takes it in cash and sets it on fire in the basement.) That $3B will th…

Apologies for the source of this, I couldn’t find a neutral organization hosting the excerpt. https://mises.org/library/broken-window In short - the $3 billion would be spent on improving the local economy of those individuals who would otherwise retain the money. Technically nothing is being destroyed, but the point of the article stands.

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

#119

Post by trafalgarcircle »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #99
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.

Profit is reward for taking a risk. Don't like that a .com costs more? Use another TLD.

Verisign did not take a risk by developing the dns system - network solutions did that. Verisign maintains a perfect monopoly over the addition of records to a central database, with minimal operational costs. Their business is almost pure profit by operating a mandatory service with highly inflexible demand. If they were forced to compete on providing access to a core internet infrastructure (e.g. allow competitors to also add records to the .com registry) the price would lower to the actual cost of providing the service, which for an update/add query, I suspect would be in the pennies.
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