How is this anything but rent seeking on the part of Verisign?
Edit: not surprised how this got regulatory approval... https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/09/website-domain-more...
Edit: not surprised how this got regulatory approval... https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/09/website-domain-more...
It is bothers me that the monopoly is excused this way.
At a certain price you just pony up the $200k to ICANN become your own registrar and then actually own your domains.
Easier said than done. For most people that probably means updating literally hundreds of sites (and better hope all of those have a way to change your email). Not to mention telling your contacts to use the new email, and hope they don't forget and send an important email to the wrong domain.
Like I'm flabbergasted at people complaining about the burdens of doing something nobody would do, because the cost isn't worth the effort.
Now if they raised prices to $100+/yr I could imagine, but $15/yr is negligible costs.
Yes it’s rent seeking. It’s also the way capitalism works.
If those restaurants' landlords had hiked their rent by a few dollars per year, they wouldn't have moved either. But it's not uncommon to see increases of thousands of dollars per month, even for a small restaurant, when the lease comes up for renewal.
Even seeming outs such as "invest in a gTLD" don't provide the opportunity. Aside from being the virtual equivalent of "why don't you just go build your hair salon 50 miles out of town where nobody owns anything yet for 1,000x the cost of a building in town?" gTLDs require being a well established organization, among other eligibility requirements, which creates a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
Both do have a 3rd component of "group good overhead" but the IANA fees of ~18 cents don't seem to be the problem so there's no sense in comparing/contrasting these differences.
Capitalism is fine when it benefits the overall economy, but when it starts self-imploding because of interests of a few, then government jumps in usually - that's why we have anti-monopoly laws, because monopoly hurts the progress...
(As an aside, I'd pay for a better-curated DNS infrastructure. For instance, google's font domains of whatever could just resolve to something federated, and that has TLS certs that are trusted by the alternative infrastructure. Google's chain of trust could be on a certificate revocation list.)
Exceeding the current limits and the abuses that derive from it is certainly something extremely difficult to achieve, but I think there's a market in trying to fix the status quo.
All TLDs in this case would be equivalent to all car brands.
(All car brands => Ford) <=> (All TLDs => .com)Would you trust myshop.com or myshop.xyz more?
Seriously. It’s not an issue of brand recognition. It’s an issue of decades of basic phishing defense.
A real-life "we have TLDs at home" from someone who has probably never seen the related meme.
What has it got to do with namecheap when they dont own the registry of .COM or .XYZ?
Instead, they are passing it on 100%.
Why are they entitled to have their profit margins protected no matter what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage-price_spiral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation
Certain businesses get made obsolete over time. Namecheap decided to pass along 100% of the cost, what if their competitor passes along 50%?
Of course there is an argument in US and Tech today ( as shown in many of the comment ) that margin is somehow evil. And should be as low as possible. I guess that is a different argument.
They're passing it through by 209%, not 100%.
https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/com/c...
I was under the impression that the other $6 comes from Namecheap, no? Maybe I misunderstood it.
I'm fine with an individual holding a handful of unused domains, but the legislation should eliminate anyone holding domains as their primary source of income.
While I generally agree with you --this smells like potential rent-seeking--, in order to be able to conclusively label it as such we have to know about the real cost structure that drives a company like Verisign. All of that information is here:
https://investor.verisign.com/financial-information/annual-r...
I wish I had the time to dive into this. I just don't. I generally try to avoid making assertions without having done some work in support of them. That's why I can't reach this conclusion --I can suspect it to be true though.
As a reminder, "rent" in "rent seeking" isn't the colloquial "rent", as in what you pay to rent a car or a house. Economic rent, as a term of trade, is related to financial gains obtained without increases in productivity. As such it has been "fuzzified" to make it apply to all kinds of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with economic rent-seeking. As an example of real rent-seeking, an article in Forbes describes how writing an essay in college to obtain a grant (and maybe even admission or tuition discounts) is classic rent-seeking. Same with a company lobbying government for subsidies --they didn't make their process or product better in exchange for the financial gain.
In other words, the question here is squarely centered around the real cost structure at Verisign. Frankly, I don't know everything they do and how much it costs to support the TLD's they administer. I still remember when domains were free --as a fool, I didn't register a pile of them back then.
It sure feels like rent-seeking. That doesn't mean it is. Without the proper analysis of their accounting this characterization might not be correct. In other words, it might be quite possible that they can fully justify the increase in rates due to increases in costs.
Not to go too far, wages have gone up across the board (in numerical, not real terms) and inflation has made everything more expensive. Power, taxes, food, transportation, labor, etc. Every single business has had their cost structure increase, in some cases dramatically so. Given this framework, I'd be cautious about ascribing nefarious intent to any business increasing their pricing.
Put a different way: A rent-seeking claim needs to include a "Minimum Viable Financial Analysis" in support of this conclusion. Prices going up isn't enough evidence of this at all. Not liking price increases is no evidence at all.
So far I've seen them hand waive about inflation and "demand for domains".
As of 2022, their operating margin was about 65%... That doesn't indicate a company that needs to increase prices.
There's nothing whatsoever hand-wavy about inflation. It's as real as can be, and it affects everyone and everything.
> As of 2022, their operating margin was about 65%... That doesn't indicate a company that needs to increase prices.
It indicates nothing. That isn't even close to proper analysis of their financials. As is often the case with chat room discussions, people just love to grab onto one number or one fact and use it to flog everyone to death. Well, I have news, reality --as opposed to fantasy-- is a complex multivariate problem. A single number is meaningless.
Note that I am not at all defending Verisign. I know nothing about their operations and don't have the time to dive into it. For all I know this actually is 100% rent-seeking, in the full economic sense of the term.
I am defending reason and the requirement for solid analysis and justification before accusing anyone of anything. This, in sharp contrast with the typical lynching mob mentality that permeates online conversations.
What I am sick of and will not do, is people just jumping at labelling things (people, businesses, etc.) because they don't like something rather than through critical thinking, demonstrable and reproducible analysis of facts in full context. You know, like calling someone "racist" because they bought vanilla ice cream (not making light of real racism, but one has to admit we have taken that term to insane lengths and depths).
Maybe this is rent-seeking. Don't know. What I do know is that the claim has been made in this thread and the only real support is feelings, not well-presented evidence.
Also, saying someone makes 65% operating margin as a measure of evil-ness is ridiculous. Who put anyone in charge of deciding how much margin makes someone worthy? 5%? 10%? 25%? 0%? What happens to that fake virtuous badge when things go wrong (pandemic, economic downturn) and the company has to fire half the staff because they were labeled evil for making more than 5%? Yeah, the people who lost their jobs are going to think very highly of the virtue police on that day.
As someone who has founded and operated multiple businesses in the last four decades, this kind of thing really drives me up a wall. People who have never risked a dime of their own trying to make a non-trivial business go actually think they understand business. It's both the saddest and the funniest thing seen online and, with some frequency, on HN.
Who made the claim?
Also, saying someone makes 65% operating margin as a measure of evil-ness is ridiculous
You said evil, not me. Projection?
If .name was just as good as .com then if verisign increased the price, they would lose customers who would use .name instead. So the fact that verisign can increase the price when .com is _already_ more expensive than other TLDs is evidence that they do have a monopoly.