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Comment by allpratik | Hacker News Reader

Apparently there are 3 guys in picture over here.

1) ICANN - $0.18 2) Registrars - ~$1 to $2 3) Verisign - $7.85

Verisign is making huge margins here, thanks to zero competition.

Perhaps Verisign collects funds for the operation of the root nameservers. According to [1], they operate at 107 out of 514 sites. The rest of which are operated by others including 144 by ICANN itself.

Bizarre, this setup is.

[1] http://www.root-servers.org/

Each TLD has its own operator. You pay that operator an amount they usually define to have them serve your nameserver records. It's used to pay for the immense volume of DNS requests resolving your domain to your NS and to build a (profitable) company.

Root servers only point to TLDs; they do not collect money or register domains.

Yes, and in turn the TLD operator requires the rootserver operators, am I missing something? It is only appropriate that part the funds they collect be distributed to those that operate the rootservers.

By calling it bizarre, I was only reflecting on how arbitrary the parties involved in rootserver operation seemed to be.

We could imagine internet company X paying ISP y just to have X.tld resolve to the appropriate server, and other stranger scenarios.

at vBSDCon 2013 they explained the immense redundancy and diversity of their NS hosting of .com, .net, and .org. At their POPs they have:

  * Diverse switches
  * Diverse load balancers
  * Diverse servers (from different mfgrs AND hardware generations)
  * Diverse OSes (Linux & FreeBSD)
  * Diverse DNS software: BIND, NSD, and ATLAS

I don't know how they decide the exact configurations here, but the idea is that a single vulnerability or bug is unlikely to cause a full outage at the POP.

The complexity here is immense and they must have a really great system for managing the configurations and replicating DNS changes. It certainly would not be cheap to build.

Exactly. It is a complex system built from scratch from the days when it was Network Solutions which evolved into Verisign and had a contract with the US Government. Which by the way no other company was interested in at the time.

Interesting, EU domain fee for Eurid is 4 Euros (~4.33 USD) [1]. And it is non profit organisation. So Verisign margin should be ~3.5 USD? It is good to have monopoly...

P.S. I pay 5 Euros per domain in total, my domain provider takes 1 Euro, would say fair price.

[1] https://www.eurid.eu/en/registrars/become-eu-registrar/prepa...

Non profit doesn't mean they don't make any money... Non profit means that the extra money they make is used to further the goal of the nonprofit (instead of being paid out to the investors/owners). I doubt Eurid is only charging what it costs them to run the registry.

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