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Comment by vxNsr | Hacker News Reader

So let's get the players straight:

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.

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I think something like this should have remained within government. Deregulation here wasn’t necessary.

It’s small but has outsized impact on how the internet works.

That said maybe devolution was eventually inevitable.

> something like this should have remained within government.

I agree, but even that is far from ideal because which government should control it?

Maybe an organisational structure like the WTO?

For the uninitiated, the World Trade Organization is run by its member governments. Unlike FIFA, IOC, and ICANN, it does not sell a product to consumers. It facilitates the production of laws and agreements between member states. If you buy Bueno de Mesquita's selectorate theory, the WTO has a very small set of residents, which is identical to the selectorate and the winning coalition. The FIFA, IOC, and ICANN have a very large set of residents, a very small selectorate, and a very secure winning coalition, which is a recipe for corruption.

What’s your take on something like the ITU? My first reaction would be that because there’s a lot more riding on it, it’d be susceptible to intractable politics... but maybe I’m overthinking it.

ITU is under the United Nations, so it's more like the WTO.

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.

Who else do you think? Globalists of course.

> should have remained within government

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.

I guess that raises the question, was there a problem with its governance in the first place?

> I think something like this should have remained within government. Deregulation here wasn’t necessary.

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.

> ICANN is run like a classic Italian mafia org, with corruption at every level and zero accountability.

Was it ICANN that sued/was sued by one of its own _board members_ to not have to show them their finances?

> In 2014 the Obama Admin decided to cede control of ICANN.

> 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?

> The price of domains should trend down.

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's not like registration is related to anything like cost of operation.

It would seem like it should.

I was actually thinking about this the other day. Domains are too easy to get, and too cheap to hold on to. I like being able to go to Namecheap and buy a domain name for under $10... what I don't like is the hours or days I spend trying to find a domain name that isn't already taken and parked. And even if you paid $3k for that parked domain, it might now have years of history with search engines as a parked domain that you have to fight against.

If ICANN really wants more money, they'd increase the renewal fee for parked domains every year until it's actually put into use.

>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?

Yeah, people always use domains for non-website purposes, like email etc with nothing coming up if browsed. Also, with no dns on main except cnames, which can not be easily found as easily mx or txt records can be seen on a gived direct domain.

That’s not really a parked domain then is it? You know when you’ve hit a parked domain when it loads a page covered in ads that says “buy this domain for $30,000” at the top.

That’s for ICANN to figure out.

They’d just make more sophisticated parking pages.

> e.g. a sliding scale cost for domains, so Amazon would have to pay $50,000,000/year for its domain

at which point the government suddenly feels an urgent need to step in.

> The price of domains should trend down. not up.

Why? The value of a dollar goes down over time, but the value of a domain does not.

I'd bet Moore's law has outpaced inflation.

The value of high-demand domain names should increase on the secondary markets. But, the price of unregistered names should be decreasing.

It's not about the value of the name, it's about the cost of running a TLD.

The cost of running the system is trivial.

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.

But the governing org shouldn't be the one extracting that value. their job is govern and to some extent regulate. anything else is outside their domain.

If not the governing org then who? It's not in the public interest to facilitate or encourage rent seeking. To the extent that price differences are inevitable in a market based system (where we assume the party most worthy of a domain is the one willing to put the most money into acquiring it), it only makes sense that the money be used for the public good.

Who gives a TLD it’s value? I don’t think it’s ICANN.

>The value of a dollar goes down over time.

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.

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