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Comment by RulerOf | Hacker News Reader

>Verisign ... will increase the wholesale price it charges registrars for .com registrations and renewals from $7.85 to $8.39.

It's 54 cents, in case anyone else was wondering.

Source: https://domainnamewire.com/2021/02/11/breaking-verisign-anno...

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Lol - So, a 7% raise. Totally reasonable even given standard inflation.

It's not reasonable at all. Literally all they do is run a database. 50% profit margin. Insane. You only see numbers like that in a monopoly.

They do not need the money at all. It's pure rent seeking.

I would argue that most, non Unicorn, tech companies run on 50% profit or more.

Cost to operate a registry, estimates are under $1/domain - costs have been decreasing. Why should VeriSign get an indefinite monopoly with a no bid contract that renews and allows price increases? There's no benefit to the internet as a whole, where .ORG at least is plausibly going to a non profit (as hard as they tried to sell off to private equity).

Just to play devil's advocate here--if domains were cheaper to own, there would be more namesquatters

Unlike right now, where there’s one big namesquatter called “Verisign”. Domains worth over $8 have already been namesquatted. Those worth under $8 are being held ransom by Verisign. Making domain registration cheaper (via a price cap from ICANN or something) would only reduce the price of domain names for people who want to use them.

> Domains worth over $8 have already been namesquatted

> 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.

It costs Verisign <$1 to issue a domain and they’re charging $8. It costs a domain squatter $8 to buy a domain and they charge $9 or more. It’s the exact same grift.

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.

You don't know what you're talking about. Squatters don't buy $8 domains to resell for $9, if they did, they would go out of business because the probability that their $8 domain will be purchased from them within a year (or ever) is far lower than 100%.

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.

>Domains worth over $8 have already been namesquatted.

You mean "domains worth over $8/yr".

That's a big difference.

Actually I agree, ~$8 isn't bad for domain + Anyone who currently owns a domain can pay in advance for the next 10 years at the current price.

And ICANN has managed pricing quite well. Unlike SSL certificates were.

As someone with industry knowledge, it's way, way under $1 per domain. It's little more than an xml parser, simple business logic and cron jobs, a database, and support. I imagine a single motivated person could do it themselves, minus support. Honestly, sending a single email is more tech intensive than registering a domain.

> xml parser

now you're scaring me

Sadly, EPP is an XML protocol.

There were a lot of people who thought like you and thought they could just whip up some perl scripts to do it. Then they all got hacked, and since when you hack a domain registry, you hack every domain it manages too, they'd usually snag a google.whatever domain and say haha we hacked google. Eventually Google got so angry about this happening that they sent a crack team of security experts to build a top-level domain registry the right way, and made it open source. https://github.com/google/nomulus It wasn't easy.

Um... none of that is even remotely true...source? There's no Perl script registry. There's very few registries in existence, and they don't get hacked on any cadence. In fact, Google was practically sending begging emails to my company asking for source trying to even understand the business.

From the registrars I've checked, many are passing on a slightly larger price increase (e.g. a nice round number like $1). Granted that's on them as well as Verisign, but as others have noted it's increasing the price of something when the objective costs of operation have decreased.

Nonsense! Costs of digital services trend downwards.

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.

One way to do this is to raise prices for everybody.

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.

7% is the max allowed. Understand it means 7% per year until the contract is redone.

Except inflation is nowhere near 7% nor has it been in more than 20 years.[1][2] Further, ICANN has allowed Verisign to increase wholesale domain pricing 7% year over year for four years followed by a two-year break. And then they can continue this cycle all over again for the length of the contract. In 2029 todays $8.40 .com domain will be $13.49.

[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/inflation-ra...

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