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Comment by mgw | Hacker News Reader

One idea I‘ve been toying with is to set up a non-profit registrar funded by donations. It would just pass through the registration fees from the registries without markup. Similar to Let‘s Encrypt but for domains. Of course it would be more complicated because the entity would handle money, but nothing that couldn‘t be solved from what I can see.

Does anyone with experience in the field have any insights on what roadblocks would be encountered?

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What would your pitch to donors be? Let's Encrypt was transformative by combining free and automated. Would your registrar be doing anything besides subsidizing domains for people who are willing/able to pay $9.15 (.com price without markup) but not $10.37 (Porkbun .com price)?

Also, registrants will not understand that you are just an intermediary who is making no profit. Since they paid you, they will hold you responsible for any problems they have, and won't shy away from disputing credit card transactions if you don't provide the level of support they expect. That's a lot harder to deal with than a free service, which can get away with providing no support.

Cloudflare claim to do this - https://developers.cloudflare.com/registrar/

> Buy and renew domains through Cloudflare Registrar at cost, without markup fees. You only pay what is charged by registries and ICANN

The problem is, running a registrar is complicated. It costs money. People get angry with you when things break - especially if they've paid you money.

You also have to deal with abuse reports, copyright complaints, and a legal demands. Good luck finding people who want to volunteer for that particular job!

Cloudflare does sell domains at cost but the catch is that domains registered through them must use CFs nameservers, so they can try to upsell you to their paid services. In that regard they are like most other registrars which treat domains as a loss leader for other products, except they take it to the limit of making nothing on the domains rather than a few cents.

Having to use cloudflare name servers is a huge drag.

I don't have a lot of deep experience here, but I registered by first domain the old fashioned way, send an email, get an invoice from NetworkSolutions, and mail it back with a check. And I setup two low volume OpenSRS reseller accounts for two companies in 2000, IIRC.

Registrar markup is not really that much. As I understand it, PIR, the operator of the .org registry charges registrars $9.05 / domain year [1], and low cost registrars typically charge end users $10 / domain year. I know there was a dust up over PIRs management recently, but I don't remember the details and couldn't find them in a quick look; if these aren't the actual numbers, they're pretty close. After payment processing, costs of included registrar provided services, customer service and operations, there's not really huge profits being made by registrars; providing service as a pass through at direct cost wouldn't be that compelling.

You'd need some other reason to encourage people to use your services, but I'm not sure what that would be. I've used specialty registrars at work, and they've got features like presence services where they have real people in the jurisdiction that satisfy the requirements of TLDs that require someone in the country to register a domain and corporate registrars that will work with the registry to enable registry locking that makes it incredibly difficult to change domain settings [2]. These are compelling features for the right kind of customer, but I don't think it makes sense for a non-profit to provide them.

[1] https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/org/o...

[2] We moved to one of those after the current flavor of Network Solutions was phished and an unauthorized person used a customer service account to change our domain's glue records as well as some others; with registry lock, no changes can be made by the registrar unless the registry unlocks the domain after doing a song and dance routine with the end customer --- not very convenient, especially when the authorized person ignores the call to dance, but better than when a registry employee can get phished and change our domain without our consent

> As I understand it, PIR, the operator of the .org registry charges registrars $9.05 / domain year [1]

How can it possibly cost PIR $9.05 per domain to run a registry? Or are they a for profit entity?

That's a good, but separate question. My point is an at cost registrar probably saves people 10% on a .org, which doesn't meaningfully increase access... If you can't afford $10/year, $9/year isn't really affordable either.

To your question though, I think PIR actually contracts out the operation of the registry to Affilias. I don't know what the current rate is, but before they renegotiated, they were paying about $3/domain to Affilias [1] based on a reported payment of $33M on just under 11 million domains.

I don't really know where the rest of the money goes. There were a lot of questions when PIR tried to sell .ORG to private equity in 2020, but I don't know if there was much follow up after the deal got quashed.

[1] https://domainnamewire.com/2016/11/14/org-sticks-afilias-bac...

It doesn't. It could hypothetically cost PIR $0. 501(c) organizations are not prohibited from collecting and spending profits, they are prohibited from unreasonably distributing such earnings to private shareholders and individuals (see https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicc90.pdf).

PIR is owned by the Internet Society, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit which does a bunch of other stuff, like running the IETF. Most of the Internet Society's revenue comes from selling .org domains.

Exactly. I run a registrar price comparison service, and a lot of domain extensions are basically sold ‘at cost’. The catch is that a) a registrar will sell some tlds with a tiny/no margin, but charge a healthy extra for other tlds (like a ‘loss leader) and/or b) get you on the renewals (or c) keep increasing fees once their number of customers is high enough and hope most of them won’t notice for some time, double or triple of regular fees is not uncommon!).

So even though margins are low, as a customer it still makes sense to shop around.

Ps https://dot.bs is the service I run to compare tld registration and renewal prices

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