
Ask HN: ICANN charges only 18¢ per domain name, why am I paying $10? - allpratik
Purchasing a new domain name is second nature of a techie. But in this ear of disruption it&#x27;s little odd that we didn&#x27;t saw any major procedural changes in this field. Especially .com registry, which is owned and monopolized by Verisign.<p>Which things&#x2F;laws are preventing us from solving this problem? In btw, kudos to Let&#x27;s Encrypt for offering free SSL.
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arcdigital
Domains do not cost $0.18 to a registrar. ICANN charges registrars a $0.18
ICANN fee and then the company that owns the TLD (the registry) charges
whatever they want per domain. Then your registrar adds their markup to the
ICANN + Registry fees. Currently, a .com costs $7.85 + $0.18 + Registrar
Markup. (I run a domain registrar)

~~~
allpratik
You're right. But here I'm more concerned about the job of the registry (TLD
owner). Is there any way to justify $7.85 registry fee? I wanted to know that
where they need this money?

~~~
gist
It actually takes a bit to keep this running with rock solid reliability. For
example when a registrar calls Verisign they get replies almost in an instant
as there are people sitting by 24x7 to handle and clear up any issues that
come up. And the uptime, with the exception of planned maintenance (which can
run from 45 minutes to several hours) is near 100%. This isn't like calling
godaddy or fighting with Google or Facebook if you have a problem.

Does Verisign make money? Yes. Do they have a right to make a profit? Yes. How
much? Not up to the public to decide this it's up to their customers. Their
customers are registrars, not the public. Their contract, fairly negotiated is
with ICANN (and their registrars).

What's interesting is that you don't hear much about the price from large
portfolio owners but from people who seem to think that nobody has a right to
make a profit and all costs need to be driven out of any existing system which
most certainly needs to be disrupted.

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superuser2
The .COM namespace is the property of the United States Department of
Commerce, which has a responsibility to the American public to provide the
best service at the lowest cost. Contracting to Verisign and allowing it to
extract rents may well be the best way of doing so. But a _right_ to make a
profit off a public resource? Why? Why Verisign and not, say, me?

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allpratik
Verisign's some recent financial report's highlights:

1) Verisign ended the third quarter with cash, cash equivalents and marketable
securities of $1.9 billion, an increase of $466 million as compared with year-
end 2014.

2) Verisign Registry Services added 1.68 million net new names during the
third quarter, ending with 135.2 million .com and .net domain names in the
domain name base, which represents a 3.4 percent increase over the base at the
end of the third quarter in 2014, as calculated including domain names on hold
for both periods.

3) In the third quarter, Verisign processed 9.2 million new domain name
registrations for .com and .net, as compared to 8.7 million for the same
quarter in 2014.

Full Report available at:
[https://investor.verisign.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=93...](https://investor.verisign.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=938048)

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Uffizi
It's interesting that Verisign, a private company, controls the authoritative
directory of all .com, .net, .tv, .cc, .name top-level domains and that their
patents allow them to hold absolute control over the process.

[https://www.verisign.com/en_US/patent/index.xhtml](https://www.verisign.com/en_US/patent/index.xhtml)

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allpratik
Apparently there are 3 guys in picture over here.

1) ICANN - $0.18 2) Registrars - ~$1 to $2 3) Verisign - $7.85

Verisign is making huge margins here, thanks to zero competition.

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throwaway000002
Perhaps Verisign collects funds for the operation of the root nameservers.
According to [1], they operate at 107 out of 514 sites. The rest of which are
operated by others including 144 by ICANN itself.

Bizarre, this setup is.

[1] [http://www.root-servers.org/](http://www.root-servers.org/)

~~~
iancarroll
Each TLD has its own operator. You pay that operator an amount they usually
define to have them serve your nameserver records. It's used to pay for the
immense volume of DNS requests resolving your domain to your NS and to build a
(profitable) company.

Root servers only point to TLDs; they do not collect money or register
domains.

~~~
throwaway000002
Yes, and in turn the TLD operator requires the rootserver operators, am I
missing something? It is only appropriate that part the funds they collect be
distributed to those that operate the rootservers.

By calling it bizarre, I was only reflecting on how arbitrary the parties
involved in rootserver operation seemed to be.

We could imagine internet company X paying ISP y just to have X.tld resolve to
the appropriate server, and other stranger scenarios.

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gesman
Government needs to drive this change. Someone is in VRSN pocket.

The action is to find someone important who is not and start driving change
from there.

~~~
gist
I am curious is this a big problem for you personally, the charge for domains?
How many domains do you own?

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_is this a big problem for you personally_

Perhaps he's just abhorred by typical rent-seeking[1] behavior for such an
important part of the global Internet?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking)

~~~
gist
From that I see this:

"The classic example of rent-seeking, according to Robert Shiller, is that of
a feudal lord who installs a chain across a river that flows through his land
and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee (or rent of the
section of the river for a few minutes) to lower the chain. There is nothing
productive about the chain or the collector. The lord has made no improvements
to the river and is helping nobody in any way, directly or indirectly, except
himself. All he is doing is finding a way to make money from something that
used to be free."

I am not seeing in any way the comparison between a company that maintains
infrastructure and employs people and machinery to accomplish issuing and
enabling domains and keeping them functioning on the Internet and "a feudal
lord who installs a chain across a river....there is nothing productive about
the chain or the collector".

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_From that I see this:_

Wow. It's like we are reading two different articles. If Verisign isn't doing
typical rent-seeking, then we might as well delete the Wiki entry, because the
concept doesn't exist.

Just from paragraph 1:

    
    
       seeking to increase one's share of existing
       wealth without creating new wealth.
    

Exactly what Verisign is doing. They are supplying _infrastructure_ to the
Internet. They're not _creating_ anything, they're simply charging everyone an
excessive fee for using the existing Internet. They're inserting themselves
into every single .com and .net domain purchase or renewal.

From paragraph 2:

    
    
       capture of regulatory agencies to gain a coercive
       monopoly can result in advantages for the rent
       seeker in the market
    

Regulatory capture. This is _exactly_ what happened when ICANN awarded no-bid
contracts to Verisign, under the pretense that no other firm would have the
capacity to do it.[1]

[1] [http://timothyblee.com/2010/01/22/verisign-angling-for-no-
bi...](http://timothyblee.com/2010/01/22/verisign-angling-for-no-bid-contract-
renewal/)

~~~
jklein11
Verisign isn't hitching the proverbial chain across the river, because they
are a necessary part of the domain registration of domain names. They are
providing a necessary service and raising the barrier to entry with their
patents. If their role were unnecessary, then it would be rent seeking
behavior.

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propogandist
$8.99 @ NameSilo.com - free privacy too

No coupon(s) needed.

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HeyLaughingBoy
What problem?

