Between this, and the .org fiasco, I have lost any faith I had in ICANN's stewardship of the web.
ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money
41–50 of 132 posts
Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money
#42Possible 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
Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anything costs should have gone down. Bandwidth is cheaper, and processing power has gone up. However, even with that DNS has been pretty distributed by design. Lowering system load at the top level to begin with. Like some country code domains are managed by a pretty small number people to begin with. So it's not like you need a large amount of staff either.
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.
Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money
#44Possible 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
Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How's there a limit when there's a new TLD on an almost bimonthly basis? If you're going for something lower than 8 characters, odds are you're either paying thousands or buying something that's not .com.
Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anything costs should have gone down. Bandwidth is cheaper, and processing power has gone up. However, even with that DNS has been pretty distributed by design. Lowering system load at the top level to begin with. Like some country code domains are managed by a pretty small number people to begin with. So it's not like you need a large amount of staff either.
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.
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.
Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money
#47Even 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?
Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money
#48I 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.
I don't like that administrators resort to blocking whole TLDs, and I don't like that there can be so much variation in profit between domains with no correlation to operational costs. Still, I can't say that it's purely a greedy move on their part. People do benefit from paying more.
Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money
#49Possible 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
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.
Re: ICANN Allows .COM Price Increases, Gets More Money
#50Is 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?