

Why Your Domain Registration Costs That Much - zo1
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/61467/if-icann-only-charges-18%C2%A2-per-domain-name-why-am-i-paying-10

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buro9
Mine costs even more, it's a .sm domain and registration still requires things
to be posted, faxed, and a few operations can be emailed.

.sm is the Most Serene Republic of San Marino and even on a map of Italy it is
little more than a dot
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Marino#/media/File:Locatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Marino#/media/File:Location_San_Marino_Europe.png)

The population is 33k, and my registrar (Gandi) has to email someone just to
change a nameserver... it can (and has) taken weeks.

I actually think this is a benefit; in an age where the domain is the key to
securing everything there is a view that too much automation and too low a
price results in too lax security. A race to the bottom in terms of price
means every other corner is cut.

The best registrars for security are those that are expensive, slow, manual,
bureaucratic, officious. Hell, last time I tried a nameserver change it took 6
weeks and several confirmations of identity - interacting with a country
office certainly forces ass-covering of the highest nature.

I'm a fan of slow, stupid and manual but of course... security is different
from the whole Verisign .com .net mess.

That .sm per year? GBP 263.25

[https://www.gandi.net/domain/price/detail/sm/](https://www.gandi.net/domain/price/detail/sm/)

$10 really isn't much.

~~~
xh208
Have you considered 101domains? They seem to be about half the price.

[https://www.domcomp.com](https://www.domcomp.com) type in .sm in the filter
box

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jasode
I don't know why that stackexchange accepted answer with 41 votes was the one
the questioner judged as the best. To me, it does not actually answer his
question: _" What do domain name registrars do for its customers to justify
this extra $9.82?"_

It's best to break apart that question into 2 components:

1) _" What do domain name registrars do?"_

2) _" What justifies this extra $9.82?"_ <\-- accepted answer explains this
via the history of politics and government bumbling

To answer the sub-question, _" what do domain name registrars do?"_ for a
_technical audience_ like webmasters.stackexchange, it would make more sense
to explain the _technical_ landscape because it's somewhat of a mystery
blackbox to many people. Also by understanding this, phrases such as "monopoly
over .com address" make no sense. It's not really a business monopoly but a
natural technical boundary of database administration. Unfortunately, the
technical underpinnings _look like a business monopoly on the surface._

Imagine an absurd (but simple) scenario. You create a new TLD called
.hackergeeks. You'd have to "administer" that tld. That means you literally
hold the _master database_ of records for that tld. To do that, you might grab
one of your old laptops with a 100GB harddrive from the closet and load up
MySQL on it to hold the registration records. You filed paperwork with ICANN
and they recognize you as the _master authority_ for .hackergeeks. ICANN does
not hold the database records for .hackergeeks, you do. In turn, this means
your computers are the ultimate authority for DNS resolution. ICANN also
doesn't care whether you use MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or SQLite for
registration records. You just need to have some type of acceptable hardware
infrastructure to administer the domains. If you're just selling a few
thousand .hackergeek domains, your modest laptop would work. Obviously, this
is oversimplifying things but the idea is to picture some entity (that's not
ICANN) literally spending money on hardware+software+electricity to maintain a
database.

Now, Verisign holds over 117 million .com domains[1]. Obviously, they have a
lot more hardware infrastructure to handle that capacity. Registrar resellers
like godaddy or namecheap sell ".com" addresses but their datacenter computers
don't actually hold the master database records for the ".com" they sell --
it's the Verisign computers that hold it. Verisign also has a larger staff to
handle non hardware stuff like legal processes (2 parties dispute ownership of
a domain, fraud, etc).

Once the underlying technical picture is clear as to what _authoritative
registrars_ (not reseller registrars) _actually do_ , then the pricing
question can be analyzed. We speculate that the overhead to run and maintain
the master .com registration database to be somewhere between 9 cents and
$7.85[2]. That's a different question involving profit margin targets,
competition, politics, etc that the accepted stackexchange answer explains.

To address the "monopoly", how would a de-monopolized ".com" actually work
from a technical standpoint? Again, _somebody_ has to maintain the master
database. Would we de-monopolize by having one Company ABC Inc to hold
database records for A-M.com and another Company XYZ to hold records for
N-Z.com? We would then have DNS servers with an if/then/else statement to
route queries to the correct database? Or what if we do a SHA1 hash and
distribute (shard) the ".com" database records over 10 different companies?
Company A has 17 million records. Company B has 17 million records, and so on
for a total of 117 million records we have today. We'd then have DNS servers
burning up cpu cycles calculating billions of hashes repeatedly to send
queries to one of 10 databases. Therefore saying "Verisign has a monopoly over
.com" actually obscures the picture. It is more important to avoid monopoly at
the entire DNS level (via TLDs) instead of the ".com" level and that's what we
already have today.

With all that said, Verisign profit margins to administer the ".com" database
is too high considering the falling prices of compute power and disk storage.
Maybe a better scenario would be a government non-profit entity. The USA
government already manages 300 million social security numbers, the millions
of Federal Tax IDs for businesses, and passport IDs. Therefore, the government
managing databases of unique IDs is not outside the realm of possibility.
Another option might be decentralized ownership of ".com" via a distributed
block chain similar to bitcoin[3]. I'm not familiar enough with it to know if
it can handle the high registration activities of 117 million addresses.

[1][http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/channel-resources/domain-
re...](http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/channel-resources/domain-registry-
products/zone-file/index.xhtml)

[2][http://www.internetcommerce.org/dotcom_price_freeze/](http://www.internetcommerce.org/dotcom_price_freeze/)

[3][http://namecoin.bitcoin-contact.org/](http://namecoin.bitcoin-
contact.org/)

~~~
ComputerGuru
You say that like only 117 million records of very fixed-format, fixed-fields,
heavily-defined data with archaic length and content constraints is a lot...
Any modern RDBMS can handle that in a single instance on a decent not-too-
beefy machine. Heck, a modern file system could probably do it with flat files
and a directory-sharding technique without batting an eye.

Now try doing it on tech from when the internet was first invented.... Maybe
that's why?

~~~
quesera
> Now try doing it on tech from when the internet was first invented.... Maybe
> that's why?

You could _store_ the entirety of .com (and all other TLDs) on a midrange
server. There might well be such a server that serves as the Source of Truth
for the database.

The much harder part is _serving_ those records authoritatively for billions
of requests, which is why we have Root Nameservers. There are 13 of them (by
DNS name) distributed around the world, all synchronized from the same SoT.
The total number is actually much higher (500?), because they are redundant
locally and Anycasted globally.

Also, FWIW: Domain name registration was free from inception in 1983 until
1995, at which point .com registrations were $50/yr, minimum 2 years for first
registration, with only one vendor (Network Solutions).

1995 was the year of Netscape and the Internet on the cover of Time magazine.
NetSol was the monopoly vendor, and 30% of that registration fee went to the
U.S. Government (National Science Foundation), which was the majority funder
of the post-ARPANET internet. This fee was to establish an "Internet
Intellectual Infrastructure Fund". After a lawsuit, the fee was scrapped
(illegal tax) and instead the entire remaining $70 fee went to the granted-
monopoly private corp NetSol.

Prior to NetSol, domain registration was handled by one guy working at USC,
Jon Postel. Over email. Even then, there were almost a dozen (early 90s tech)
Root Nameservers to handle the query load.

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aestetix
It's interesting how the StackExchange responses claim that ICANN has expanded
the TLD namespace to make the marketplace more competitive, but then proceeded
to charge $100k+ to consider proposals for new TLDs.

------
rascul
OpenNIC Project may be interesting.

[http://www.opennicproject.org](http://www.opennicproject.org)

