Comments on: Domain name price hikes come under fire

A proposal would let VeriSign charge billions more for .com domains, but some are skeptical about its continued monopoly.

[Akyan]

Disgusting

It is disgusting how verisign is allowed to continually increase the charges for .com addresses, I have addresses for web sites with .com's and .co.uk's and I get charged about half the price as it stands for .co.uk addresses. Why do verisign need to increase the prices and what advatange as a customer will I get because of it? It appears none...

What a con!

[dhayes501]

is it that bad?

i'm just as cheap as everyone else, but if domain names only cost an additional $1.86 6 years from now, i'll consider us to be pretty lucky. it seems prices on everything are going up much more quickly than that. on the other hand, if a $1.86 rate increase from Verisign gets multiplied by "x" by the middleman to drastically increase the end-users cost of domain names, then i'll have a problem.

[andrew999999999]

Yes, it is that bad.

If you're just buying one domain it's not a big deal. But if your business needs to buy 1,000, 10,000, or more domains, it is a significant hit.

It also bothers me that, in a competitive bidding process, VeriSign lowered the wholesale cost of .net domains. It makes it hard to justify price increases on .com domains. I believe there are economies of scale to running a registry. With the number of .com registrations growing ever day, the cost should be decreasing.

More here:
http://domainnamewire.com/2006/06/08/verisign-icann-settlement-gets-political/

[tbuccelli]

But costs are going down....

The issue I have is that they want to increase prices, but for what? Prices of most PC/network related items (with the exception of MS Software) are falling. They are just providing a database of used names for the '.com' domain - why do they need to charge more per address?

Also, $1.86 may not seem like much, but they get that for each '.com' domain for doing basically nothing. All they do is reply that a name is already in use (do they privide 'whois' also?) if someone requests it.

[R Me]

treat verisign

like a public utility.

The public deserves some regulated stability in the pricing structure of domain names. Its time Verisign acts like the utility they are and its time the G'ment regulated them like one. For a price hike to go into effect they should have to prove a need and if it looks like we are being overcharged for names, as I believe we are, there needs to be a class refund.

Verisign MUST be accountable to someone. As it is now they are only accountable to a lawsuit, which we all know is not a workable solution for those on the paying end of the deal.

[Seaspray0]

Verisign and ICANN not trustworthy

Registering a domain name simply reserves that in a database. That database does nothing on it's own. To put that database into action, you must have DNS servers. The root servers for .com, .net, .org, etc. are what makes it all work. They do the majority of the dirty work of resolving those domain names to IP addresses. .com is the leading root domain that gets resolved. If anything, we should be funding the root servers and not the "holder of the database". Does anyone know who pays the bills for the root DNS servers? The US government has jurisdiction on those DNS servers (it invented the internet, it has the right) and it should be overseeing the registration of domains, not ICANN and Verisign.

As far as registrations go, there is alot of improvement that needs to be done to improve the process. Too often, domains are registered with false information by spammers, and Verisign is responsible for that. So far, all they've proven to me is that they can be sloppy at their job and want a pay increase.

A few years ago, verisign actually changed how DNS resolution was done for domains that didn't exist. They redirected the non-existent domains to their own IP so web pages would pull up at verisign where they advertised their services. In the process, the messed up how mail servers were verifying domains to validate incomming emails as comming from a "real" domain (now all fake domains showed up as real... verisign's). Under pressure, that scheme was dropped, but I and many others have not forgotten that cheap tactic.

I do not trust ICANN, not after the attempt to transfer control of the root DNS servers to themselves. After seeing how the United Nations cowtows to special interests and 3rd world countries, I have little faith in international organizations doing whats right.