Good time to remind everyone that VeriSign has a monopoly granted by ICANN to raise prices indefinitely with zero competition.
It's 54 cents, in case anyone else was wondering.
Source: https://domainnamewire.com/2021/02/11/breaking-verisign-anno...
They do not need the money at all. It's pure rent seeking.
> Making domain registration cheaper would only reduce the price of domain names for people who want to use them.
You don't see how those two statements contradict each other? Make registration $6, now domains that are worth between $6 and $8 will also be namesquatted. Reducing the price of something almost never results in less units sold, it's economics 101.
Have you ever bought a domain from a namesquatter? Did you pay $8 for it? No, you didn't, you paid whatever the seller thought that domain was worth to you, which is a lot more. Nobody namesquats to sell domains for $8 or $20. Yet if Verisign had that domain, you would only have paid $8 for it. That's the difference between squatting, and listing a public price that is the same for everyone and for every domain.
Verisign isn't squatting or ransoming anything no matter how much you may dislike them.
If there’s a domain a squatter thought they could sell for $9 they’d buy it for $8 or $6, they’d make a profit either way. The only difference in name-squatting with lower prices is that one leech (Verisign) makes less money while another leech makes more.
If a squatter manages to sell e.g. 10% of the domains they own in a given year, they'll break even – not even make a profit – if they sell those domains for $80 on average. In reality most squatted domains sell for more than that, easily hundreds or thousands of dollars. Such prices is why everyone hates squatters.
How much profit Verisign is making has zero relation to how much the domains should cost. ICANN could require Verisign to give most of their domain registration profit to some charity or even just require them to buy and shred currency if you don't trust charities. Either way that would remove excessive profit from Verisign without inviting even more squatters by reducing the price of domains.
You mean "domains worth over $8/yr".
That's a big difference.
And ICANN has managed pricing quite well. Unlike SSL certificates were.
now you're scaring me
Dropping 50% would be more reasonable. If they want to make money, take it from the fucking squatters selling every usable domain name for over $1k, putting them far out of reach of most humans.
Seriously who cares about paying an extra dollar for .com registration? Of all of the rent seeking exploitation in the world, this has to be among the least important.
[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/inflation-ra...
Or maybe we could treat domains similarly to how many US states treat houses, giving people a break on their first domain, and ramping up the taxes as they purchase more?
It's like saying you want to raise the price of housing to keep landlords from buying up all of the properties and forcing locals to rent.
You're not hurting the people abusing the system by doing that.
Edit: one is https://www.opennic.org/
With how many TLDs there are now, it's easy to find an unused domain name especially if you use your countries local tld.
For instance, you make the property less alienable so the "seller" in a transfer is still just as legally liable if the new "owner" gets in court somehow due to the new content at the domain.
Then people wouldn't sell it, that's the point. They may transfer it in an acquisition or name change and in those cases, such legal liability is redundant. If company A buys B then company B Is company A
Another example: for abandonment it's not the first person that sees it snatching it up. Instead say, the first 60 days after lapse, interested parties register in a pool and then one is randomly selected.
There's vastly superior ways to do this then relying on naive price signals
There’s no decentralized method to prevent scalping. Scalping can happen whether it’s first-come-first-serve or auction.
”Handshake is a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol where every peer is validating and in charge of managing the root DNS naming zone with the goal of creating an alternative to existing Certificate Authorities and naming systems. Names on the internet (top level domains, social networking handles, etc.) ultimately rely upon centralized actors with full control over a system which are relied upon to be honest, as they are vulnerable to hacking, censorship, and corruption. Handshake aims to experiment with new ways the internet can be more secure, resilient, and socially useful with a peer-to-peer system validated by the network's participants.”
I disagree with the others who’ve stated it’s just a small increase and maybe domain prices should increase, for non dollar currencies you’re pricing people out
I use the following:
- Dotomator - nothing like it, https://www.dotomator.com/
- Namechk - social media check, https://namechk.com/
Maybe look at .net and .se domains. If you can’t think of a name, just go through old Greek words or something like that. You’ll find something that works well enough! (^_^)
Registrars are still allowed to add a markup, just there is so much competition that doesn't really happen any more.
EDIT: Correction, Network Solution was the _only_ registrar between 1995 and 1998. For three years they charged insane amounts, $100 for 2yrs. Before that it was free, and after that it was about $8 from other registrars.
[EDIT] I must have paid for two years (maybe first time registrations had to be two years, at the time?) at a $34.99/yr rate, to get that $70 figure I had in my head, in 2002.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000510064309/http://www.direct...
I don't remember the exact year from handoff from NetSol to ICANN approved registars, but some of that work started in September 1998. I found some sources that state sometime during 2001 was when NetSol had it's exclusive registrar service ended.