VeriSign Jacks Up .com, .net Prices To the Max

se7en writes "VeriSign is jacking up prices for the .com and .net domains for the second year running, increasing both by the maximum 7% allowed under its exclusive contract with ICANN. 'Assuming that VeriSign continues the 7 percent rise each year (which seems reasonable given the company's history), registrars will be looking at $9.00 for .com domains by the time the current contract ends in 2012 — a 50 percent increase in six years.' Registrars have no choice but to pony up, and chances are they'll pass the pain on to customers."

Re:And?

[Brian Gordon]

hmm 7%.. verisign is just trying to catch up with the rate of inflation :)

Re:And?

[Brian Gordon]

Maybe slashdot should be worried about scaring off customers with its stupid lingo in the title..

Well, in Australia

[Psychotria]

I would love to pay just $9.00 for a registration fee. Try > $100 here for a .com.au :/

Re:And?

[Martin Blank]

It's one of the reasons I'm considering leaving my company. While I do generally worship at the altar of the almighty dollar, there are some sects that are a little too eager to keep the money for a chosen select few without anything more than lip-service about the sweat of the parishioners. I don't mind working for a publicly-traded company, as long as their stated commitment to their people is a commitment to all of their people.

How soon people forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that domains used to cost $140 a year. We only DREAMED of $10 domains back in 1999.

The contract does not end in 2012

[karl.auerbach]

The contract with Verisign does not end in 2012.

ICANN granted to Verisign a perpetual right of renewal.

In other words, unless Verisign goes out and illegally clubs baby seals (and maybe even if they do) they get the right to renew the contract again and again and again and again...

Has ICANN ever bothered to consider the actual costs that Verisign incurs to deliver those domain name registrations? No.

It has been estimated that the amount may be as low as $0.02 per year. In which case ICANN has created a guaranteed profit to Verisign of about $420,000,000 eavery year - with you and me paying.

Re:And?

[MrCawfee]

How would a domain registry possibly function without it being a monopoly? Well it probally couldn't. Someone has to publish the root zones, and maintain those servers, and do you really want one company running one root server and another company running another? Well it really can't.

The system we have now is fine as it is, yeah Verisign controls ICANN (they are pretty much the only ones who talk at registrar meetings), but anything they do that is extremely controversial gets rejected.

And as far as competition goes, that has moved to the registrars, who end up finding that gTLDs are not profitable enough without other services making money.

Now another thing that verisign is trying to get passed is to charge 0.15 per domain name for bulk deletions, which may have the effect of killing the recycling business, which is most of these registrar's bread and butter.

Either way, the atm fee i paid at the gas station today is more than this fee increase.. although it does make verisign an extra 30 million

Re:Well, in Australia

[neonmonk]

.com.au is restricted to businesses in Australia. You have to actually supply an Australian Business Number (ABN) to register it.

$100 is a bit of an exaggeration. I paid $70 for two years and registered a .net.au & .com.au (so $35 for two years)

You just have to shop around.

Read the Contract

[Anonymous Coward]

The contract is on the ICANN site. People should read it before making statements that aren't true. Verisign can not raise the fee every year, only four of the six years in a contract period. Look at the payments they need to make to ICANN: $1.5 million rising to $3 million a quarter over the contract. Look at the SLAs for .com and .net (5-100 milliseconds), 100% availability per year on some services or penalties. How many company's can provide that level of service for the millions or billions of queries they get a day, especially from the squatters that register hundreds of thousands of names a day and release them during the grace period. Verisign doesn't make any money from the squatters yet has to store and report on all of that data. If people think the business is such a cash cow and easy to do, why didn't they bid on the contract? They could be billionaires by now.

http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/net/ [icann.org]
http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/com/ [icann.org]

Re:Well, in Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

I pay ~$5/year incl. VAT for my .de domain. The .de CCTLD is the largest country code domain and the second largest domain after .com. The registry is run by a cooperative of ISPs.

Re:Will this make spamsites unprofitable?

[shanen]

Don't confuse challenge/response with whitelisting--but it doesn't matter since SMTP doesn't verify the sender. Any technical response to a fundamentally economic problem is only going to be a bandaid at best.

However, we're getting too far off topic, if'n you ask me. The part that is relevant to this discussion is how much of the spammers' costs are related to domain acquisition, and the answer is 'precious little' and there are always other ways to work around it. In particular, some of the most annoying spammers around here are hosting their own websites and using dynamic DNS services to route their suckers without ever buying any domains of their own.

Re:How soon people forget...

[GeorgeMcBay]

And yet other people forget that before $140 domains, domain registrations were free, first-come first-served. I still own a couple of domains that I registered for free and didn't pay any fees on for the first few years I owned them.

Re:Will this make spamsites unprofitable?

[arth1]

Applying a Turing test to the sender is only successful if you assume that (a) machines can't send wanted mail, and (b) you receiving the e-mail is important enough for the human senders to jump through an extra hoop.

The first one is obviously false. There are newsletters I want, and automated alerts, like a bill becoming due. And I want to continue to receive these even if the sending company changes the sender address.

The second is false too. I can quite well imagine e-mails with something important to the recipient and not the sender, and if the sender gets a reply back asking them to identify themselves, they won't follow up. Because it wasn't important to them. No matter how important it might have been for the recipient.
An example: If I had tickets to a concert I can't go to after all, and knowing you're a fan, I sent you an e-mail offering them to you. If I got a reply back saying I need to identify myself as a human, I'd mutter "and the horse you rode in on", and either give the tickets to someone else or simply throw them away.

Re:The USA: Land of Competition

[the_womble]

The US used to be the land of competition - which is why it became so economically successful.

Things have changed: they broke up Standard Oil and AT & T, but they have not broken up Microsoft, and current regulation of telecoms is pretty poor.

It is not just a US problem either. "Business friendly" governments and regulators all over the world are prepared to accept fairly weak arguments for tolerating monopolies, and seem to be quite happy to regard oligopoly [moneyterms.co.uk] as an adequate level of competition.

Re:Will this make spamsites unprofitable?

[v(*_*)vvvv]

Except for emails sent by automatons. A server that sent an order confirmation email is not going to "reply" to any emails. Many important emails are sent from non-observed email boxes.

Sometimes an email may be sent from alternate or temporary accounts. This is more often the case when something is urgent.

Also my mom won't react to such an email. Most people assume that an email sent is an email sent, and any emails requesting some further action are always going to have problems.

Re:Will this make spamsites unprofitable?

[amirulbahr]

I think GP was referring to the proliferation of crap on the Web rather than spam emails.

Re:Will this make spamsites unprofitable?

[stevey]

I am an off-site mail filterer [mail-scanning.com], and our stats show that 99% of incoming mail is spam.