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Comment by ohashi | Hacker News Reader

Verisign continues to run a monopoly on .COM/.NET with basically no checks or balances to its power. ICANN has effectively surrendered to it. A significant amount of ICANN's budget is coming from Verisign. ICANN refuses to exercise any oversight, it's likely an example of regulatory capture at this point.

Verisign is going to push every possible way to extract more money from .COM/.NET monopoly. They maximize price increases at every opportunity on their contracts (which has automatic renewal and no competition). For what? No added value to customers or the ecosystem as a whole.

SiteFinder was just one of many moves in a long series of bad for everyone but Verisign moves. Remember when .ORG had its price caps removed and then private equity tried to buy it? Guess where a lot of that backing came from...

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Richard Barnes wanted ISOC to get an endowment by selling .ORG. having .ORG is great for the nonprofits but really isn't something ISOC can leverage to support IETF etc.

I believe the registry contracts are bid out every few years. However it's a very difficult business with fixed prices that depends on lots of operational efficiencies.

Having .ORG was the endowment. Selling off something they don't/shouldn't 'own' is bullshit. They were granted an endowment to manage .ORG to use the profits to support IETF.

They simply outsource the backend and collect a large profit. It's not a difficult business at all. The margins are insanely good in fact. They're doing at least 60% if not closer to 90% I suspect on the actual operations side if they competitively bid out their backend.

Registry contracts aren't bid out every few years for the most part, that's a giant problem. Why Verisign has a monopoly on com/net.

I don't really understand why people care specifically about .com when they're still one of the cheapest TLDs you can buy. Like if you wanted to pin this on Verisign specifically you're gonna have to explain why every other domain costs about the same or more. Like tech darlings .io=$71, .tv=$32, .me=$25. Even the worst domain ever .info is $23.

Because .COM has history before Verisign. Because businesses and people are locked in forever to renewing. It's the defacto TLD for the world. Why don't you care that a monopoly contract that extracts profit for shareholders alone with zero public good is in the best interest of the internet as a whole? Why does Verisign of all entities get to manage it?

There are cheaper TLDs, everytime they go up for bid, the costs to run them comes out and it's under a dollar per domain. And you're comparing .COM an original gTLD to country code TLDs, which are owned by countries. Countries that can make their own rules and charge their own prices.

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