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Comment by kaslai | Hacker News Reader

Here are some quick numbers:

At the end of 2019, Verisign had 158.8 million domains registered. At a price of $7.85/year, that's about $1.247 billion in expected revenue for 2020.

If we assume that the number of domains remains static forever, this change means that after the next price hike of 7%, they will see an additional $87.26 million of annual revenue.

By the end of the decade, given the same assumptions above, they will see an additional annual revenue of $895.28 million on top of their existing $1.247 billion.

All that extra money without providing any additional value to the customer. I'm sure many a celebration was had when they got the go-ahead to raise prices like this.

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I am starting to think that maybe monopolies are bad.

It does make the supposed $20 million they slid into ICANN's back pocket seem like a really good bargain.

To be fair, due to inflation, prices need to rise each year to continue the same real revenue.

And your assumption that no new services will be added is likely untrue. Over the past decade all registrars have had to add significant security measures to combat rising domain theft scams among other features added.

Granted, 7% is high, but expecting prices to stay fixed for for the same goods goods is not reasonable.

> expecting prices to stay fixed for for the same goods goods is not reasonable.

It's actually highly reasonable for items with nearly zero marginal cost. In fact, most things in the tech world only get cheaper in nominal value as time progresses, barring peculiar circumstances.

> Over the past decade all registrars have had to add significant security measures to combat rising domain theft scams among other features added.

This is correct. Verisign is not a registrar. While some of the problems do end up on Verisign's plate, almost all of the pain of dealing with fraud, domain transfer scams, etc, falls on the shoulders of the registrars, who get a pitiful cut of the domain registration fee compared to Verisign.

> And your assumption that no new services will be added is likely untrue.

Given the fact that Verisign already sees over $1 billion of annual gross profit, I highly doubt that doubling their revenue will see much in terms of new services that wouldn't have been developed anyway at their current trajectory. An operating cost of $200 million for $1 billion gross profit is already insanely profitable. Cranking it up like this is just an obvious cash grab for the shareholders.

Technology is improving and compute and storage gets cheaper every year. Inflation is just making excuses.

Parts are. Parts are pretty stagnant, and parts increase.

Security costs are increasing, for example, as are wages for tech people to run the stack.

Yeah, this reminds me of how many 1KB core dumps that I can put into a single memory stick today at a lower price.

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