If ICANN only charges 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? (2014)

An idea I&#x27;ve been tossing around: What if domains cost $100 if more than one person wants it? The idea here is to squeeze the squatters with 000s of domains.<p>Whenever I want a domain, most of the ones I want are taken. Not by people who are making use of it, but by people who are squatting in hopes of extorting anyone who would actually use the domain to produce value.<p>I&#x27;d actually be happy if Verisign or any other private company or any government extracted such an unfair price for useful domains because it would free up so many more useful domains for use.<p>Edit: I&#x27;d love to hear good arguments against this, I&#x27;m partly throwing this out there to see others thoughts.

Laurent Chemla, the founder of gandi.net, a French registrar wrote a book [1] on this topic, describing himself as a «thief» for selling stuff that have no cost in the first place (domain names).<p>[1] confession d&#x27;un voleur (confession of a thief) : <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.confessions-voleur.net&#x2F;confessions&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.confessions-voleur.net&#x2F;confessions&#x2F;</a> (in French)

I don&#x27;t claim to know what the fair price for the .com registry. I will say this though the hosting isn&#x27;t free. There are millions of requests per second across all networks from all across the world. They must respond with low latency. The major registries are nearly always under DDoS attack. There is a reason verisign has some of the best DDoS protection.<p>All the data centers across the world, the network connectivity, the DDoS hardware, servers, custom software and staff to run it all must be expensive.

Ignoring the fact that the revenue goes to a private company there&#x27;s one good reason why 18¢ would be a bad idea - already too many domains are hoarded by a small group just for resell; I imagine it would be even worse then.

This page is stuck in a redirect loop for me. This one works: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webmasters.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;61467&#x2F;if-icann-only-charges-18%C2%A2-per-domain-name-why-am-i-paying-10" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webmasters.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;61467&#x2F;if-icann...</a>

Previous thread where I explain that the stackexchange accepted answer (now with 78+ votes instead of 41) outlines more of the history rather than answer the question in a technical way for a technical audience:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9358902" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9358902</a><p>(small correction: my previous answer had a typo of &quot;17 million&quot; instead of &quot;11.7 million&quot;)

this is a classic example of how monopoly position is monetised. nowdays monopolies are established and maintained by the government. there is a lot of money to be made, being a monopoly, but government cannot show this on its books (joe the plumber may not like that). so they create a commercial proxy entity, that accumulates most of the profits. the part left in the shadow is how moneys make it back to individuals in the government who arranged this deal, but judging by how vigorously government protects the proxy, there is little doubt that this is happening. for starters i would run a cross check between names of verisign subcontractors and names of family and friends of top icaan officials.

There are a few different places where the money goes in a domain registration transaction.<p>ICANN gets $0.18 per gTLD registration.<p>The registry (Verisign, Neustar, Donuts, Radix, etc.) sets a wholesale price that the registrar pays the registry for each domain year. That can be anything from a few bucks to hundreds or thousands of dollars (see .cars, for example).<p>The registrar adds a markup to what they charge the registrant on top of that wholesale fee.<p>In general, ICANN gets very little, the registry gets the most and the registrar somewhere in between. The registrar supplements this small yearly amount with add-on services like WHOIS privacy, or by selling email or hosting alongside the domain.<p>The registrar also pays a yearly fee to be accredited by each registrar which also adds to the cost to consumers.

After Verisign&#x27;s SiteFinder stunt, I was shocked to hear their contract was renewed. This is the first I&#x27;ve read about Verisign suing ICANN over the matter and getting a settlement giving them the contract renewal.

Sadly, if Verisign is not earning $7.85 per domain, I guess every possible combinations of meaningful dot com domains were already exhausted.

I operate a registrar, I&#x27;ll outline a couple pieces of the puzzle here and the justification for the price. ( I couldn&#x27;t read the stack exchange article - redirect issue)<p>First its recognized these are digital goods where the incremental price is very nearly approaching 0. Technical aspects of domain registration have very little to do with the price.<p>That said ICANN has various requirements for registrars and registries that do require more than just keeping an entry in a database. For registries, you have to not only have a hot failover data center location for your registry but you are contractually obligated to test it (I believe every 6 mos. but its not my part of the industry). For registrars you have to escrow your entire domain settings both incrementally and fully (daily and weekly) for all domains, this way if you disappeared as a business tomorrow they could recover everything. This is audited regularly and swift action is taken for those who are delinquent.<p>Those are the technical issues, the rest of the cost is highly related to the administrative burden of domain management.<p>Some of these are:<p><pre><code> DMCA takedown requests Generic legal requests UDRP Claims Governmental abuse claims NGO abuse claims (i.e. other hosting firms etc) WHOIS verification claims </code></pre> We get these kinds of requests on a very regular basis (ie hourly&#x2F;daily), it takes a team of people to manage them and its a never ending torrent. Some of them can be disposed of quickly others take a lot of time.<p>There is also a huge amount of what I&#x27;d term &quot;misguided requests&quot;. For example:<p>A company who makes a ICANN complaint because after the UDRP ruling saying they won a domain and access to the domain was provided, they failed to renew it, let it expire and another company got the domain. This happened and turned out as you would think. This still took 1 person a week of investigation and back and forth to dispose of.<p>Complaint that a domain registrant did not receive expiration notices when in fact there is no history that they&#x27;d ever been a registrant of the domain.<p>People who file false WHOIS complaints with ICANN because they don&#x27;t like the domains owner, whois complaints MUST be verified or the domain is taken offline. These complaints create a huge burden.<p>All of these requests have rules about procedure, deadlines that must be complied to and a form of investigation that must be adhered to.<p>While many domains are nice and quiet and don&#x27;t need much attention. The legal, abuse and governmental drivers that run the modern internet create a ton of overhead for registrars. That overhead is manifested in your fees.<p>This is only about normal fees. Premium domains are strictly market driven and the &quot;scarcity&quot; of a domain&#x2F;tld is highly subjective. Costs are less about overhead and more about what the market bears.<p>Hope this has been insightful for anyone who read this far!

Distributed DNS like service would solve most of the problems. Something similar to DHT for DNS.

The retail price of goods and services is determined by supply and demand, not cost plus markup. Registrars will sell you both 99¢ domains that nobody wants and premium domains at thousands of dollars. Supply just increased thanks to new TLDs, yet demand seems to be moving slow to these new options. When more of the new TLDs are registered and adopted by the market, overall prices will go down. Eventually, if a blockchain-driven domain registry takes hold, ICANN domains may become free or even disappear.

I think if Google and Firefox join forces and create a Dns override in their browsers that resolves domains without querying the root servers it could be a real game changer. I remember this used to be an option in very old versions of IE where some company it using some plugin. This can be an end to all such monopolistic tactics and domain squatting.

It still blows my mind they Verisign to retain .com despite all the obvious corruption.

Why do we even need domain names? I mean unless it&#x27;s a brand, we rarely type in a domain name, it&#x27;s usually bookmarked or linked.

Domains used to cost $100 a year. I don&#x27;t see any reason to complain (although before they cost $100 they were free).

In short the domain name system is a racket.

Why do registrars charge more per year if I try to register a domain for more than one year?