Verisign Retains .com Control Until 2012

Several readers wrote to note that the U.S. Department of Commerce, in a controversial deal, has extended Verisign's control of the .com domain. Verisign got the right to raise prices in four of the six years of the contract, by up to 7% each time. From the article: "Verisign has control of .com and .net locked up for the next several years, but there will still be a modicum of oversight. [Commerce] retains final approval over any price hikes, and has said that any subsequent renewal of the contract will occur 'only if it concludes that the approval will serve the public interest in the continued security and stability of the Internet domain name system... and the provision of registry services at reasonable prices, terms and conditions.'"

It's a good thing if you ask me

[AchiIIe]

While I understand why some might dislike higher prices for domain naimes, I welcome this. With higher domain prices the cost of domain squatting increases and hopefully we can end up with less junk registered.

Higher prices

[Anonymous Coward]

They make it sound like the contract may not be renewed if they are too agressive with the price hikes. In reality, higher prices means more money to bribe.. er lobby the folks who will be renewing the contract. What is the justification for higher prices? The whole system is automated isn't it?

Whine whine whine

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing prevents anyone from setting up competing DNS servers/services/config (It's quite helpful in removing things like microsoft.com and its assorted secondaries from your DNS lookups). It's getting others to use them that's the problem.

Is it a coincidence?

[zappepcs]

or is this not when the Mayan calendar predicts that the world as we know it will end?

Re:Why .com?

[MoxFulder]

Well, some languages are not national languages :-) I mean, let's say you want the Apple web page in Malayalam... that's a language that's spoken by 40 million people in India. What URL would you go to for that page? By comparison, Danish is spoken by only 6 million people, but since it's the national language of Denmark you can easily find it at www.apple.dk

I'd rather see web sites make consistent use of LANGUAGE codes rather than COUNTRY codes, like wikipedia does, e.g: en.wikipedia.org for English, nah.wikipedia.org for Nahuatl, etc.

It's actually not that big of a price jump

[ragingmime]

I, too, am less than thrilled about Verisign having exclusive control. The Internet is designed to be decentralized - we have numerous root DNS servers and a plethroa of ISPs, and it works just fine. I'd like to see a handful of "Official" registrars that can compete with each other are monitored by ICANN.

That said, don't forget that numerous important registrars (e.g. eNom) exist in addition to Verisign. I admit I'm not quite sure how this works - I guess eNom and others buy domains cheap from Verisign, and then resellers sell them again. As you probably know, they're cheaper - around 10 or 15 bucks - if you get 'em from a reseller like GoDaddy (er, if you like a healthy heaping of spam with your domains) or register4less.com (if you don't). I actually got a $5 domain with a 1-year hosting plan from ICDSoft [icdsoft.com]. I'm not connected with any of those companies, just sayin'.

So, what if they do go for all four 7% price increases (presumably to cover increasing costs, inflation, etc.)? Let's do the math: $10 * (1.07^4) = $13.11 by 2012. That's assuming they bump up the price as much as possible during their 6 year control of the domain. Granted, that's also assuming that their weird structure of domain resellers stays in place. I'm honestly not sure how that works, but it hasn't shown any signs of disappearing so far, and I think there would be an outcry if it did.

Again, I'm not a fan of the situation from a stability/fairness standpoint, but I don't think the asking price for a domain is too high right now, and I don't think four 7% increases in six years is too much to ask of us.