
Let ICANN know if you support .com price hikes - dsgriffin
https://www.internetcommerce.org/comment-com/
======
StavrosK
I kind of want the price to increase, to combat domain squatting. That said,
I'd much prefer it if the money went to some charity instead of the ICANN.

~~~
foo101
Squatting can be easily prevented by reclaiming domain names without refund
when the domain names have not been used or used illegitimately for more than
a fixed threshold period of time.

Parking pages or any other use that intends to work around the restriction can
be deemed illegitimate use.

~~~
skrause
> _Parking pages or any other use that intends to work around the restriction
> can be deemed illegitimate use._

My personal domain doesn't even have an A record in the DNS, only an MX record
because use it for all my email. By your definition that would be an
"illegitimate use" and I should lose my domain...

~~~
kerkeslager
Would it be an undue burden to require people like you to put up a page
saying, "This is my personal domain which I use primarily for email."?

Can we just agree that nobody is posting the full proposed set of rules on HN,
and nobody is trying to take away your domain?

Every time this solution to domain squatting is proposed, someone counters
with your objection as if it's a huge problem with the idea, but it just
isn't. Surely you can imagine a set of rules that shuts down a large number of
domain squatters but allows your use case.

~~~
jefftk
How do you write rules that allow "this is my personal domain that I use for
email" and not squatting? Can't the squatters just say something along those
lines?

~~~
franga2000
If the squatters have to do that, then their squatting has no value to them.
The point of squatters is to eventually sell the domain and if all the domains
look "in use" (so no parking allowed), the amount of people sending offers
will fall.

~~~
anonsivalley652
The "domain squatting" meme is intellectually dishonest and based on envy.
People who buy zillions of domains must be allowed if people are allowed to
buy as many stamps, boxes of paper, cars, jet skis or houses as they wish.
It's called freedom, property rights and being consistent. If you want one of
their domains that they registered and paid for before you so badly, inquire
if they will sell it; if they choose to or not is their choice, and you are
not entitled to it simply because you want it.

~~~
toyg
Domains are real estate. Periodic land reform / redistribution is a staple of
human history, when things become patently unbalanced for society as a whole.

~~~
ryanlol
Is domain distribution patently unbalanced for society as a whole? What does
that even mean? Should everyone be able to get a short dictionary word .com
domain?

~~~
toyg
_> Is domain distribution patently unbalanced for society as a whole?_

Not entirely yet, or it would have already entered the political debate.
However, in many ways the proliferation (and success) of alternative TLDs
indicates that there is an issue. You shouldn't have to use an Indian Ocean
domain because .com is squatted to the wazoo.

We have lived through the land-grab era, sooner or later the redistribution
era will come.

 _> Should everyone be able to get a short dictionary word .com domain?_

Considering there are less than a million 4-ascii-letter combinations,
obviously not. But there _could_ be more stringent criteria for assignment and
revocation, like limits per-company and per-individual, escalating costs in a
way that hoarding becomes uneconomical, banning parking (which is absolutely
doable, you just need an actual human judge), and so on.

~~~
ryanlol
The redistribution is happening every day, every day people are buying land-
grab era domains they can extract value from.

------
Olipro
At this point, I believe that even if the population of 90% of the planet were
to legitimately oppose this, ICANN would ignore it anyway.

Not that it isn't worth a shot, but I have become highly cynical of the entire
organisation.

------
buboard
Isn't it odd that prices are going UP instead of down ,even though they
flooded the market with tlds? The issue is obviously their monopoly, and it
needs to be broken down. Petitions are petty

Actually what would be even better is if browsers started supporting ENS or
some similar competing name system

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
Agreed.

Handshake[1] is another such similar competing name system that specifically
is aimed at taking down ICANN's monopoly - which they've abused time and time
again.

[1] [https://www.handshake.org](https://www.handshake.org)

------
Hamuko
No one likes a price increase, but 30% increase to ~$10/year over four years
is not making my blood boil.

~~~
rovr138
I’m not opposed to it if needed. This part is the one that convinced me it
shouldn’t happen right now,

> $7.85 of your registration or renewal payment goes to Verisign. The actual
> cost to Verisign to provide the expensive infrastructure and the management
> of the registry has been estimated at between $2.50 to $2.90 per domain name
> per year. Other registries have said they can offer the same services for
> cheaper.

I’m wondering why the ICANN wouldn’t simply go to another company that would
provide them the same service at that same rate. Is Verisign innovating
somehow?

~~~
geofft
"Has been estimated" by others?

I'm not a fan of government-style lowest-bidder procurement for something as
critical as .com. Among other things, I assume this involves operating the
.com DNS servers, and it seems like the current operators are probably
uniquely positioned to understand what makes that different from operating
e.g. .party or .racing, what weird load patterns it sees, maybe even how much
to pay the folks who know the hard parts to keep doing this, etc. Obviously it
would be better for the world if Verisign were transparent about their
operations and it could be moved, but for potentially $5/domain name/year,
forcing the change doesn't seem valuable. (If it were $50, sure, it'd be worth
thinking about.)

~~~
fgonzag
Critical infrastructure operated by a single company. That can't ever go
wrong, provider redundancy is overrated.

~~~
geofft
Not that I disagree, but wouldn't that require increasing the price even
_more_ so you could pay both companies?

I don't think the argument for "We're paying Verisign too much to be a single
point of failure, so let's pay someone else who's never done it less to be a
different single point of failure" really holds up.

------
rambojazz
They ignored completely any message that we sent their way regarding the sale
of .org. Filling out this form feels like a huge waste of time.

------
davinic
Since domain names are finite, like real estate, why not charge based on
demand? In this scenario, in-demand domain names (mostly based on length)
would have higher renewal fees than undesirable ones. Perhaps add an order of
magnitude in pricing for each character under 7?

    
    
      >=7 - $10
      6 - $100
      5 - $1000
      4 - $10,000
      <=3 - $100,000

~~~
ryanlol
The second hand market already solved this, why does Verisign need to be the
one doing this?

------
tehabe
Domains are the virtual realestate on the web and we are all just tennants and
not owners. So there need to regulation for this "market" against domain
hoarding and price hikes. Sadly the US government doesn't care.

------
rasengan
Switching away from ICANN will have a larger effect than a petition.

If you don’t support centralized authority over the DNS root, you can vote
with your computer for a new DNS root controlled by the commons [1].

[1] [https://www.handshake.org](https://www.handshake.org)

~~~
anonsivalley652
There has to be a common namespace, even if it's controlled by a different
entity that's transparent, fair and non-profit. Fragmentation of the namespace
breaks the internet. Starting a parallel namespace doesn't address the core
problem: the privitization/commercialization of names, registrars and the
meta-registrar were all extremely bad ideas because publicly-traded companies
are selfish, omnicidal and suicidal. All non-country TLDs should be run at
actual cost by one entity that is a nonprofit. No more commercial registrars
or meta-registrars; per-country registrars can do whatever they want. If
people want to auction-off, buy or sell domains in a marketplace, that's their
business. Let's not not solve the problem by avoiding it with phony solutions
that cause more problems. Petitions won't work either.

~~~
rasengan
Handshake isn’t parallel, but instead, it’s a drop in replacement for ICANN
that is controlled by the people. All existing TLDs continue to function as
they did prior.

~~~
zchrykng
If it is an exact mirror with no differences, there is no reason to use it.
Either it will start to diverge, or it is pointless for it to exist.

~~~
rasengan
It will absolutely diverge, although it’s probable that ICANN will likely
continue to mirror the Handshake Naming System on their end.

