kenmccarthy.blogs.com — Today is the last day for public comment on a new ICANN proposal that would allow domain name registrars to charge "market value" for your domain upon renewal. Got a valuable web business or domain? You might be facing a $1,000 or $10,000 - or an unlimited number - boost to your domain name renewal fee. Here's what you can do about it.
Aug 28, 2006 View in Crawl 4
geekkakeAug 28, 2006
The article is incorrect in this regard. ICANN regulations apply to all - or almost all - domain name extensions (TLDs). ICANN currently charges domains registrars an additional $0.25 fee for all .COM and .NET domains. Obviously, they couldn't levy this fee if they didn't control the TLD.While I don't support market intervention and coercion (i.e. price caps on domains), I don't see this as a huge deal. I think the immediate cries of "HOMG I WILL PAY THOUSANDS" are even remotely feasible. What we're looking at, here, is $1-2 dollars per domain in all likelihood. The "what the market will bear" comment appears more along the lines of registries slightly increasing the price of their TLD across the board, rather than singling out any particular domains for exorbitant increases.Consider: VeriSign makes around, from what I understand, $4-5 for a .COM or .NET domain name, from the registrar, who, in turn, sells that domain to the consumer for whatever it is they sell for. Increasing the price of a .COM domain name registration or renewal by one dollar will increase future registration and renewal revenue by a significant amount, which costing the end consumer minimally.This is, of course, ignoring all forms of the fallacious "slippery slope", "HOMG WHERE WILL IT END?!" type of arguments.
brasscheckAug 29, 2006
Domain kiters, spammers and other scammers won't be effected by this at all. Their domains have no measurable value intially and they throw away them soon after they're done with them anyway. Kiters probably keep a lot less than 1%. Again, this is not about raising registration fees, it's about SELECTIVELY raising fees on domains that have become - emphasis on the word "become" - valuable because of the multi-year investment someone made in making them Internet destinations. In all fairness, I think unless you have gone through the real labor of making a domain valuable, it might be hard to undestand what's at stake. To bring this down to earth, should digg.com get a $5,000 renewal bill because digg.com gets a lot of traffic and has a lot of links? That is what the language in this proposal pontentially makes possible. Of course, they're not spelling all this out and of course they're burying the essence of the changes in a mountain of convoluted legal language. That's how guys in suits steal.
higginsAug 29, 2006
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darkhackAug 29, 2006
I wonder if the Internet could be like "Ghost In The Shell" in the near future?
ldrhcpAug 29, 2006
I posted this comment to the blog yesterday, but it was deleted:ICANN does not "control" .org, .info, and .biz in the way that Verisign controls .com and .net. ICANN is the governing body for the whole domain name system, including Verisign's domains--.org and .info are managed by Afilias, and .biz by Neulevel.I looked over the page you linked and nowhere does it mention $1,000 - $10,000 domain name prices. The documents mention variable fees to be paid to ICANN *by registry operators*, not consumers. These fees will be up to 25 cents, i.e. 0.0025% of what you claimed.ICANN has its problems, but before posting information that is untrue and damaging to reputations, and that will clog ICANN's mailboxes with bogus petitions, please do a little bit of research, and at least read the documents that you link to.
darshAug 30, 2006
so is it time to go ahead and buy 10 extra years on our imporatnt domains?
smegoAug 31, 2006
I hate this proposal too, it would make the domain name unaffordable. Howerver, mightbe there is a bright side to it. The domain squatters would have to give up some stored names to market, and make them reused...This will bring a pile of other questions, in my guess.
eaceacSep 2, 2006
I hope the Big Boys of the Internet like eBay or Amazon send a letter to these guys. It will hurt them to for sure. Just think of the "market value" of their dot coms.
eaceacSep 2, 2006
Great thought,..What if this is just a PR stunt to make all domain owners purchase 10 of their products so to speak at one time. They will certainly boost their company value.
selldomainsSep 18, 2008
Yes, most of the registrars as well as domain resellers have increased their domain registration prices and continuously increase as ICANN increased its charges. How ever domain registrations are not yet reduced. So many domains are received for sale at my domain brokerage site <a class="user" href="http://www.collisiondomains.com">http://www.collisiondomains.com</a> for sale.
domainsiteFeb 27, 2009
Because of this type of jeopardy, we always request our clients to register their domain name for 5-7 years<a class="user" href="http://www.annexworld.com/domain-name-registration.html">http://www.annexworld.com/domain-name-registration ...</a>
findhostcouponsMar 21, 2009
increase in domain name prices is never appreciated!