Domain price hike!!

Yes, that .COM domain that you’ve been so sordidly holding by paying a mere $8-$9 per year might start costing you more than that, given the new deal between the keeper of the keys VeriSign and the lord of the assigned names ICANN goes through without any fireworks!!

Though as per this deal VeriSign won’t be able to charge those 50 cents per domain its been charging as a surcharge which goes to ICANN, nevertheless, VeriSign would be given an almost free reign to increase the amount of $$ that it charges from the domain registrars, which is currently $6 per domain per year!! What this means is that in the case of VeriSign increasing its fees, the increment would of course be passed on by registrars to the customers, with an obvious increase in the registrar fees as well. Now this liberty of VeriSign is somewhat limited by the fact that in two of the next six years, VeriSign can increase its fees up to 7 percent a year in case of any security threats or as per an ICANN mandate, it has free reign over the remaining four years in which it can increase the charges at the rate of 7 percent per annum without being answerable to anyone for those price hikes!! This hike can generate a lot of extra cash for VeriSign, as with more than 40 million .COM domains around, a 7 percent increase means about $17 million in the first year which can go on to more than $20 million given the current number of .COM domains, not counting the new registrations over that period of four years!!

One of the outcomes of this settlement will be that both VeriSign and ICANN will drop lawsuits against each other, which apparently were also caused by VeriSign’s implementation of its controversial search tool called Site Finder, which redirected visitors to a domain registration page if they typed in a domain that was available for registration. But VeriSign dropped any intentions to use that technology following complaints from many that it was breaking spam filters, besides giving VeriSign an unfair advantage in search!! ICANN however isn’t likely to approve that currently under the wraps technology, may it lay there in its coffin bound & sealed!! :tup:

However, what these price hikes mean that the people will be paying more for their domains than they currently do. No more $2 domains from Yahoo! I guess. It can be fairly assumed that we can look forward to pay anywhere between $13-$17 per .COM domain if we pay $10 for it now. It can be more than that or even less, but that’s the range I’d guess for now. For long have I wondered as to why registrars aren’t holding out & demanding more money for the domains since only VeriSign is bound to charge $6 per domain, the registrars can charge whatever they want, and after all, domain names are the most important properties on internet, the backbone some might say, because without domain names, you just can’t imagine internet, unless you are willing to remember 64.233.187.99 instead of Google.com!! :shh:

Source of story: Yahoo! News