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This is mathematically simple to fix.

Charge US$0.50 per month ($6 per year) for every domain reservation regardless of who is reserving. The fee must be charged per month and not per year, which intentionally results in greater maintenance overhead.

I don't care if you are a registrar, government, charity, school, or whatever. US$0.50 each and every month for each and every name. Registrars can slap whatever markup they want on top of that. The free market will lower the price where competition matters and raise the price where demand is huge for a specified name.

If you are holding 100,000 domain names and doing nothing but serving ads on them you better hope you are generating greater than $800,000 (conservative estimate) in advertising revenue off those domains. That number is the cost of reserving the name plus your business expenses to maintain those names and the associated advertising content. I find this scenario to not likely to be profitable.

Unfortunately this solution won't work in reality, because everybody will bitch about their business interests and self-justifying political reasons.

Advertisers often pay 3€ - 5€ to google for one click. If your 100,000 domains are not complete garbage, you should easily get a million out of it.

> 3€ - 5€

Isn't that for 1000 clicks?

Apparently not

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/07/06/average-cost-p...

> Below are the 97 countries represented in the map, in order of highest average cost per click to lowest average cost per click, compared to the US average CPC, which is between $1 and $2 on the Search network.

Now I'm unsure if each individual click is actually billed for that much. Or if that's a sum / average of all the advertising costs until someone finally clicks.

It is what Google gets when somebody/something clicks on an ad in SERPs.

No for example in the drink space in which I work the CPC for popular cocktail terms can easily be in the 1-2$ range

eg Negroni Recipe is $2.4 in the US

That is not really accurate. I used to work with this madness. Google ad displays/impressions are the result of transactional data micro-auctions. If there is high demand for a particular and well known data market, like Las Vegas hotel booking, the ad rate will be more.

The auction rate is determined by the winning bid rate of the competing content providers. In the Las Vegas hotel booking example the hotel properties might pay up to $16 for their ad display along side Google search results and up to $24 for a click through. Most ads, though, are rated at pennies. Anything that can achieve bid rates over $0.50 is a gold mine.

So, yes, some providers will pay far more than $7.00 for a click, but that is extraordinarily rare. This is even more rare when source and context are taken into account. Impressions that look organic, like on top of search results, are worth more than those that look like spam. I highly doubt ads that look like spam on a parked domain are doing more than pennies, likely fractions of a penny. The commonality of low rates and weak impressions on online advertising is also why Facebook shares aren't worth more than they are given the traffic and dedicated eyeballs that they have.

In some industries, you may get those levels of CPC on a high value web property, but a parked/error/empty domain will not be valued by a reputed ad network in the same way as an Alexa Top 10000 website would, the CPC/CPM will not even be close.

Why wouldn't the monthly renewal be automated away?

There is liability in frequency of transactions that requires human monitoring. The more frequent a transaction is the more liability there is. If the charges were automated would you risk the presence, trademark, and health of your business that your domain will always be there due to that automation?

> There is liability in frequency of transactions that requires human monitoring. The more frequent a transaction is the more liability there is. If the charges were automated would you risk the presence, trademark, and health of your business that your domain will always be there due to that automation?

I don't understand..large companies currently outsource domain management to others, effectively relying on automation for their business. Same goes for any business that pays any bill with automation. Do you also cut a check monthly for phone and internet service?

Bills and accounting at any large company are managed by a team of accountants with the support of automation.

The difference is that utilities do not expire. If you don’t pay your bills you may lose service temporarily, but they won’t delete your account and reprocess your facility. A domain name is essentially leased property. If you let it expire not only will you lose it but then somebody else can take it and you won’t get it back. The real world equivalent is failing to pay mortgage or property taxes on your house, except consumer protection laws require a large number of failures (sometimes years without payment) before they can take ownership.

most registrars already charge a yearly fee per domain. Does ICANN not already charge a fee per domain?

ICANN charges a ridiculously low maintenance fee to the registrars at something like $0.18 per domain per year.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-ab&q=icann+...

All you've done is increase the registration fee by $6 per year as the registrar will happily handle the monthly aspect. The money will just increase the profit of the rent seekers who control DNS.

not necessarily, if it reduces the number of squatted domains.

I don't know, it might work. For me as an individual, my costs go up $6 per year. For a domain squatter, their costs go up hundreds of thousands.

It makes sense to me, like a property tax. You are basically renting a valuable natural resource from everybody else, so you pay a little bit to repay them and prove you're getting some use out of it.

The benefit of increasing the registration fees is actually an concept that the Swedish registry is currently following. They found that by increasing prices the new registrations did not suffer, and the renewal actually increased, with the theory being that because people pay more they value the domain name ownership more.

A cheap registration price make sense when you look to expand new registrations to a fresh market, but what most parties in this industry want now is a higher rate of renewals. For that a higher price can actually be beneficial for both registries and registers.

Couldn't agree more. Not sure why the task of operating DNS' isn't the domain of governments the world over. It's kind of like operating a post office. Post office's are the ones who have the routing information and capability to route physical messages and packages. They are still operated on a for profit model, but they are also generally very well regulated. Same thing should apply with registrars

I believe that is how the country code TLDs do work, but most nations (who are given ownership of them) they just hire a corporation to sell domains and make rent seeking gross revenue off a few characters of a URL.

But those are eclipsed by the generic TLDs where its just a happy accident registrars and rent seekers are making fortunes off of words with com or net at the end of them.

I am against privatisation of key infrastructure and I would certainly count the internet as key infrastructure. However I am not sure the government would be entirely benevolent. So I agree that some good regulations are probably a good start.

When you scan for uncorrupt institutions, how the hell do you end up on "governments the world over"?

Because some of us don't believe governments are inherently evil?

Almost no one believes governments are inherently evil, but that doesn’t mean many, or most, aren’t corrupt. How many anarchists are there in your neighborhood?

I've never understood why governments (or labor unions) default to "corrupt" and private firms default to "virtuous".

I mean, lots of people think both are corrupt.

It seems to be that if you lean Republican, governments are corrupt and private firms virtuous because freedom and the magic of the Invisible Hand of free markets make private firms virtuous (individual choice) and governments corrupt (coercive force).

If you lean Democrat, then governments are virtuous and private firms corrupt because the free market doesn't solve all the problems, and for those you need regulation (government: coercive force). In fact, the regulated free market leads huge wealth disparities, which leads to social problems, and since private firms that are seeking to maximize their wealth disparity, obviously they must be corrupt.

Naturally, neither of these pictures is right, or rather, they are both partly right.

I don’t think that’s accurate. Companies and individuals benefit from outsourcing government work, that creates a huge incentive to paint government as incompetent.

The US military which hands crazy money to private firms is viewed very highly by the Republican’s and less so by Democrats.

Power corrupts when governments extend excessive control over markets.

Power corrupts when private firms extend excessive influence over government.

The most consistent principle is to oppose concentration of power in all its forms.

because private firms make money by making things people want and every consumer is by choice.

government makes money by threatening you with violence (pay tax or go to jail) and its subjects are so rarely by choice, and if by choice, it's between one government and another.

The goal of the government is not to make money.

That's why people suggest to let the government run the nuclear power plants. Unlike a for-profit corporation, governmental organizations have little incentive to save money for maintenance by cutting corners.

it's more like both are made up of individuals with high self-interest. The difference is you can choose not to interact with a private firm.

I thought about this in the wake of the BP Deepwater oil spill. How exactly can I choose to avoid interacting with any company that produces a fungible commodity (e.g BP, Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto)?

I can stop visiting BP branded gas stations but that has nothing to do with where the oil/gasoline actually comes from.

I agree, that's an issue. Or if you wanted to stop funding exploitative mining but still wanted to own electronics, you might have a hard time. But I prefer the "you can often avoid interacting with them" option of private companies, to the "you cannot avoid them and are entirely at the mercy of their whims" option of government.

Not to say government isn't necessary - it is. But I don't understand why people treat it as virtuous, especially when those same people will express distrust in politicians. I suppose it's because government is the only way to legitimately force one's will on others.

I prefer the ability to get rid of a government by voting elsewhere.

Mainly because most governments around the globe have the monopoly of public force, creating the perfect ground for arbitrary decisions. Its not black and white, by those defaults seems accurate.

Are there private firms that don't make arbitrary decisions?

Private firms aren't inherently "virtuous," but their motivations are at least clear. A business seeking to maximize financial returns for its owners isn't "corrupt," it's "working as expected."

The corruption of governments and labor unions often results in unexpected financial and non-financial returns for various people in ways that are more difficult to detect and measure.

With the government, you get a vote. With other institutions, you have to hope their stakeholders' interests align with yours.

I can have a vote, but government will still force me to pay tributes at gunpoint. On the other hand, im not forced to buy most of private goods. At the end, the evil organizations are those that became monopolies, no matter if it is public or private.

Sure, I'm not forced to buy food, or medicine, or heat, or for somewhere to live, I could just decide to starve, or freeze, or die of plague.

> I can have a vote, but government will still force me to pay tributes at gunpoint

No, at most you'll get a letter in a mail and a lien if you aren't actively trying to evade taxes. No reason to engage in hyperbole.

And then if you don’t leave your house you get put in the last socially acceptable debtors prison. And if you try leave that they will kill you. Ultimately the threat of murder and kidnapping are there

Or you could just be a decent person and pay your taxes.

We're talking about "governments the world over", and they are typically not fairly run democracies.

The responses below are kind of funny. The government already runs key infrastructure. I'm not sure if the argument is government vs. Corp. Frankly governments are more likely to consider public interest than corps are. That's not to say that they always do, but corps almost never do. This is why government sells things like spectrum or land for railways if they don't own the rail themselves. They also own things like roads. It's important to realise that there is no incorruptible institution in the world. Maybe domain name management is actually a great use case for blockchain or some other truly democratic distributed accounting/ledger system.

>It's kind of like operating a post office.

The reason that there is a namespace problem in the first place is that most people don't want the kind of domain name that post office numbering would give them.

When the internet was newer, my school email address was @schooldistrict.k12.state.ca.us, by the time I graduated highschool it was @schoolname.org.

I agree that ICANN is either corrupt or useless, but you still have the problem of scarcity to address. Domain names are important assets for businesses, and ‘good’ ones are going to be in high demand. Squatters add essentially no value to the system, but there’s no fair way to determine who gets a domain name that multiple parties want, aside from letting the market take care of it. This is a flaw in the system itself, but I can’t see many realistic ways of addressing it.

Domains already require your real life info. Just give something like 5 free domain names per person and tie it to their ID.

There exists more than enough useful domains for everyone its just most go unused

That’s a completely impractical suggestion, that ignores how domain names are actually used. Domain names are used primarily by organisations, not individuals. But even for individuals this wouldn’t work. Vanity domains are still going to be scarce, and the names in demand for organisations are still going to be scarce. And why should there be any limit on the number of domains you can buy? What if I have 6 projects I want to host? What if I own a company and want to buy my name in multiple TLDs to prevent phishing? What if I want to have a different domain for my dev/test/sandbox/prod environments?

“For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Businesses can still buy all the domain names they want just like they can now. The owner of a small business just needs 1 domain for their cafe and maybe one more for personal email.

You know these speculators are businesses right? What problem do you think your suggestion is solving?

I propose a .pubkey TLD that doesn't need any registration and can be administered by the owner of an associated public key.

The mapping to the nameservers could be maintained on a blockchain (to fund the storage costs).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin ( 2011 )

Domain names could be auctioned, then it would not be allowed to resell them. For example you make a bid on how much you want to pay per year, then you pay that amount until you no longer need the domain name, without the ability to resell it.

Then how do you sell your business? What if inflation or deflation happens?

A business is usually a separate entity, and it's that entity that have made a contract with the domain issuer. It's however possible that a domain squatter would setup bare corporate with only the domain as asset, which can also be done when selling goods to avoid VAT. It is however too much paperwork to be worth it. And if it's abused there can be a specific rule to prevent it. The price can be adjusted for inflation and deflation ... Came to think about my old employer feeling generous for increasing salaries, while he had actually lowered them as inflation had went up more then the pay raise.

One of the worst squatters right now is www.hugedomains.com

They buy up expired domains and immediately put them up for sale for $XXXX

At that price, they can sit on the domains for decades and still make a profit when it's sold.

Eg: https://www.hugedomains.com/domain_search.cfm?domain_name=cs...

This is something I’m terrified of.

I feel like I can never let a domain that I may want to use again in the future ever laps or someone will buy it and extort some exorbitant price from me to get it back.

That would be correct. Why are you terrified? Set up autorenewal in two places.

how can you do that ... via two different registrars?

They really are the worst. I got in touch with them to buy one, as unfortunately they had one that I needed for business (speculatively registered on their part). When I asked how much they wanted for it, they then doubled the price to $10000 (9 characters, not commonly used words).

In the end I went with an alternative TLD. it isn't as good, and I'd have been willing to pay a decent amount for the one I wanted (even their original price, reluctantly), but I refused on principle when they got silly.

They are just parasites.

There are grassroots efforts to make DNS more fair springing up. Handshake.org is one example (with backing from A16Z, Sequoia, and SV Angel) — they're aiming to decentralize the root zone and allow anyone to own their own TLD.

Disclaimer: I'm building a registrar for Handshake called namebase.io.

I've always wondered if they could somehow price domains logorithmically.

First domain is cheap and then cost goes up x% per additional domain. Stop people holding swaths of domains at each gTLD level.

Would people end up just having a bunch of shelf corps...

It costs $360 to incorporate at minimum, at least here in Ontario, so that would still be substantially more expensive than it is currently.

The CIRA (Canadian Internet Registration Authority) at least, probably others, used to give away domains for free but stopped the practise due to squatting.

There are plenty of countries where it's cheaper though.

But one company can deal with multiple domains.

> Would people end up just having a bunch of shelf corps...

Yes. They already do something similar when registering in a ccTLD which requires a “local presence” in that country – they simply pay somebody in that country to be a proxy.

I wish there was a system where each individual is entitled to a few domain names for no cost on their local cctld. That way real users get the domains they want and hoarders have to pay.

Wait, what??? Think really long and hard about how that would play out. This is a scarce resource, that like many digital items feels cheaper than it really is. I personally think that domain registration should cost more. That would a) stop casual speculation and b ) make those speculators feel like holding on to a domain less appealing. I own way more domain names than I have time to work on and until there is any reason to stop renewing them probably won’t.

Perhaps you could have a ratcheting cost, where the first 100 domains are $10 each, the next 100 are $20 each, and so on up to some upper bound, with provisions for shell companies that solely register domains.

That is part of how FreeNom [0] (ex dot.tk) advertise themselves. They have had serious issues in the past, and most of the domains of the countries involved are automatically treated like spam by a lot of internet services.

> With the free domain model, partner countries can offer their local internet population the tools to get online quickly and at no cost. This proven and innovative model dramatically encourages the creation of local content and stimulates the registrar.

This started out with Tokelau, a New Zealand territory, IIRC.

I love the idea, but it seems the commercial world hates it.

[0] https://www.freenom.com

Several ISPs do that actually. Not many but I've seen this a few times.

One need only look at the $185,000 "application fees" paid to icann by companies like donuts, and play follow the money, for all these new insipid GTLDs.

I'm still waiting for ICANN to approve some scammer that realizes he can buy the rights to the .conn TLD and phish the entire world with apple.conn / google.conn etc... talk about juicy ROI

Hmm, .corn would be even better. With modified kerning, links will look like .com.

Yes that would be even more devious!