VeriSign Increases Domain Name Pricing

BillGatesLoveChild writes "CNET reports VeriSign has made its move, increasing domain name prices by 7%. From October 15 2007, .com domains will now cost $6.42 (up from $6) and .net domains $3.85 per annum. ICANN had previously voted to support the increase. Despite annual income of $323.4M from .com domain names alone, VeriSign claims it needs the increase to provide "a high level of security and reliability for .com." This increase comes in the face of complaints by customers, registrars and senators alike that VeriSign is abusing its ICANN monopoly. Yet the furrowed brows and promises of senators of investigations have come to nothing, even though the only people seemingly in favor of the monopoly are ICANN and VeriSign. With complaints about the pair running back to 2002, what can we the public do to get our elected representatives to take the great domain name ripoff seriously?"

Re:Ripoff?

[AchiIIe]

> This is ONLY a concern to the people interested in owning thousands of names.

I agree. This increase will not harm people like you and me who own one or two domain names. It will however harm people who buy domains in bulk and do not make use of them. Even worse they try to sell them to you at much higher prices.

The bottom line: This increase is good for consumers, bad for domain sharks.

Re:Ripoff?

[ScrewMaster]

I have a couple of domains, and when I first registered them NetSol was the only option. So I pay my $34.95 a year for each of them, and I haven't had any problems of any kind in the ten years or so I've had them. No real reason to switch, and saving thirty or forty bucks a year wasn't worth the effort. I've had friends who saved some money with JumpDomain and RegisterFly, although in both cases they wish they hadn't.

Re:Ripoff?

[rs79]

"Personally we should go back to $100 with a money pot that reinvest $90 of that to infrastructure or something of the sort.

Problem is that the money rarely goes where you think it's going. Too many people find ways to dip their hands into any revenue stream."

Ah yes, the intellectual infrastruture fund.

Back when the NSF directed netsol to begin charging for domains (to be more clear, the NSF set the price, not netsol) one third of that $100 was set aside in a fund for "intellectual infrastructure". What is that? People. It was specifically meant to "keep the IETF process pure" - it was meant for workshops, paying for people to attend technical meetings that coiuld not otherwise afford to go and the like.

My source for this was NSF staffer Don Mitchell whose name you'll find on the early NSF/Netsol contracts.

People from all over the world paid into this fund for years.

What happened to it? As a result of lobbying the early ICANN wonks got congress to give it to their pet projects - internet2 which was of benefet only to US universities.

So lets not do that again shall we?

abuse of domain names, and sliding pricing

[SuperBanana]

what can we the public do to get our elected representatives to take the great domain name ripoff seriously

Stop buying domain names. 90% of the people (who aren't domain squatters) who have them, don't need them.

Seriously. It used to be that people used (gasp) hostnames under domain names, and subdirectories under those.

I know people who have three domain names for different kinds of personal websites; one domain name has their "video blog", another has their homepage, a third has their "buisness"(hobby.)

Realistically, there should be quotas- individuals aren't really the problem, but cap them at perhaps a dozen domains, globally. Corporations? Maybe a few dozen, tops.

Or, perhaps an exponential pricing curve based on the global number of domains you have registered; individuals won't need more than a couple for almost any reason I can think of, and companies which are making money using domain names can afford to pay quite a bit more.

DNS will be faster, domain name squatting will cease to be a problem, etc.

Re:abuse of domain names, and sliding pricing

[qwijibo]

You think the large scale domain squatters won't just register in the names of every homeless person they can find or make up? In your world, are these people honest, upstanding members of the community? I always found that they overlapped quite a bit with spammers and other con artists. Your plan sounds good on the surface, but would have no positive impact whatsoever if it were applied in reality.

However, you're right about subdomains, directories, etc. Why does every movie need to have its own domain? MoneyGrubber2TheSearchForMoreMoneyTheMovie.com could be movies.sony.com/MoneyGrubber2 just as easily, and it would add the parent company's brand into the link, which some marketing exec should be drooling over.

My personal favorite is having people tell me my domain isn't used because I don't have a web page with anything interesting to them. They email me at the domain to tell me that I'm not using it and they would like me to give it to them. The irony escapes them.

Re:Voting Power

[EnglishTim]

You're making no sense. Sure, a company's web presence rests on their domain name, but the cost doesn't scale with the size of the business. It's such a drop in the ocean. You should be much more worried about the cost of paper clips, as it's likely to have a much higher impact on a company's bottom line.