ICANN extracts $20m signing fee for $1bn dot-com price increases
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
If you want the hardcore game theory version, check out The Logic of Political Survival by the same authors: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/gov2126/files/bueno_mesquita...
What other options are there that you're aware of?
That doesn't work for anyone who wants their site accessible to the public though, since it won't resolve. Maybe once a few ISPs switch and Google, OpenDNS etc. change their resolvers it'll be a possibility.
[1] https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-decentralizing-d... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995969
Could probably be done by Microsoft, Apple & Google getting together and deciding how to split the billions and how much they toss the Linux Foundation & Firefox to come along for the ride. It doesn't have to be a great deal, just a better one than ICANN and its landlords provide.
See the theft of dot org or the opening of TLDs.
What a scam.
We're living in an era of walled gardens, where your Twitter and Instagram handle matter more than a domain name.
The ICANN acting in a hostile manner is only going to push them closer to irrelevance.
I’m also not sure it’s even a bad thing to have registration costs increasing. DNS is a highly dysfunctional system, especially for the popular TLDs. If you want an alternative system to take its place, then rising registration costs will only increase the demand for that.
That's rent seeking. They provide no value, they simply try to corner the market and jack up the prices.
In 2014 the Obama Admin decided to cede control of ICANN.
ICANN is run like a classic Italian mafia org, with corruption at every level and zero accountability.
This year the Trump Admin rubber stamped a price increase on .com because.... reasons?
The price of domains should trend down. not up. This is a classic case of regulation being abused by those in power to give each other a bonus.
Running a global address book has gotten cheaper and easier with automation and yet we're allowing these orgs to just increase prices willynilly instead of trying to make internet hosting more accessible.
Why? The value of a dollar goes down over time, but the value of a domain does not.
The value of high-demand domain names should increase on the secondary markets. But, the price of unregistered names should be decreasing.
Domains are more like real estate. They can become almost arbitrarily expensive on the global market because they represent a somewhat exhaustible resource of phrases that people can actually remember.
As with any system where you have private resource owners controlling a basic need you should expect corruption and abuse of the customer base. From Water Barons to Landlords to Cable/Broadband companies the pattern repeats itself time and time again. This is why we have regulated industries.
Value and Cost are very different things. ICANN is a governing organization, and once they're allowed to extract funds greater than what it costs them to operate, just means they're abusing their power.
Their value doesn't, so why should renewals go down?* It's not like registration is related to anything like cost of operation...
*: I'm not in favour of this, but living in a capitalist market, I'm surprised things haven't gotten much worse, e.g. a sliding scale cost for domains, so Amazon would have to pay $50,000,000/year for its domain, for example.
It would seem like it should.
If ICANN really wants more money, they'd increase the renewal fee for parked domains every year until it's actually put into use.
and how do you differentiate a parked domain from a non-parked domain?
at which point the government suddenly feels an urgent need to step in.
It’s small but has outsized impact on how the internet works.
That said maybe devolution was eventually inevitable.
I agree, but even that is far from ideal because which government should control it?
I feel like that's the way ICANN should have gone, and it is probably worth it to just buy out the organization and put it under the UN. Either that or some version of decentralized DNS is going to start looking really attractive and ICANN will become the equivalent of a failed state.
The Obama admin's intent was to increase faith in ICANN by pulling it away from strictly American interests.
That does not appeared to have worked out.
The legal doctrine that established a nexus in the US simply because ICANN was controlled by the US government had long-term geopolitical repercussions. In the lead up, the FBI seized the domains belonging to sites that otherwise had no ties to the US under this doctrine. I suspect the long-term fear was that other countries would deploy their own root name server, which would not in the American national interest.
Was it ICANN that sued/was sued by one of its own _board members_ to not have to show them their finances?
> This is a classic case of regulation being abused by those in power to give each other a bonus.
He dropped regulation and oversight, and the result is we now suffer because of regulation?
I actually rather liked just memorizing IP's. I thought it had a nice parity with phone numbers, which we were all kind of used to anyway.
The whole "buy a name" thing struck me as little more than a land grab for speculators anyway. You already have a unique identifier to the overall network... Just use it!