I sent this email to comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20@icann.org. Feel free to borrow/edit it:
I oppose Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement. I believe that allowing wholesale prices for .com domains to rise 72% over 12 years, which is far more than the rate of inflation and also far more than Verisign's underlying costs of maintaining the registry could possibly increase by, will dramatically hurt the internet ecosystem. It will especially hurt small website operators, like myself, and will discourage internet users from creating blogs and personal pages, with the end result of reducing democratization of the internet.
Verisign reported a 69.4% operating margin in Q1 2019, so they clearly do not need the extra revenue from this price hike. ICANN has granted a monopoly over .com to Verisign and ICANN has a duty to every internet user on the planet to carefully regulate this monopoly to prevent abuse by Verisign. The only conscionable thing to do right now is to freeze wholesale .com prices and re-evaluate 5-10 years from now. A policy that allows price increases tracking the rate of inflation (but no higher) may make sense in the future, but right now Verisign is already collecting far more from their .com monopoly than any company would be able to in a competitive market [1]. It's simply not right to allow them to raise prices at this time.
- Kerrick
[1] For example, Alphabet, a highly successful player in a very high-margin industry, has an operating margin of around 25%. Verisign's operating margin is over 2.75 times that.
Their structure may be independent from the US government, their office are still there, thus has to respect the US laws and is still accountable to the US government.
This is not going to end. ICANN has revealed their hand -- they are corrupt.
But we don't actually need them. What we do need is a "Let's Encrypt" style initiative to replace the DNS roots in their entirety, run by competent, principled people.
It would be difficult, but the people who are pissed off about this have clout at Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla (the web browser gatekeepers) and might actually be able to pull this off.
There is no legal requirement that ICANN has to run this system. It's just a historical convention. We've successfully taken out arrogant/incompetent (billion dollar) certificate businesses -- I think trying to get ICANN to blink would be a good goal.
To be clear, I don't think it will come to this. But right now, ICANN believes that they can get away with anything, and have started to act on that belief.
We should begin the process of scaring them back on track. Start brainstorming. Start writing IETF proposals that prominently feature removing ICANN from the loop. Come up with ideas for migrating current domain owners to the new system. Build prototypes. Start putting those prototypes into web browsers behind feature flags.
Show them what the internet could look like if it starts to fragment at the DNS level.
I don't think it's a good idea to toss in an ambitious redesign of the internet name system when it's not even clear that we can get everybody to agree to just stare down ICANN.
I think we can accomplish a lot by demonstrating that we're serious about routing around bad behavior. If people start seriously talking about migrating away from today's ICANN, I suspect that one of two things are likely to happen:
1. ICANN might see this as an existential threat, realize that they can't act with impunity, and will start to change their behavior. I am pretty pessimistic about ICANN's current leadership, and think this is less likely to happen.
2. The powers that be will start to see what a disaster this would be, and will find a way to replace the current ICANN leadership. I think this is more likely to happen.
Either way, the result is a better outcome for everyone, at least for a while. But that's how governance works -- leadership tries to get away with whatever they can, and people need to get angry enough to threaten their ability to continue down that path. This process doesn't end.
If Google, Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft decided to split the root using browsers, I think the US government would be happier having them under their control. Why do they need to play ICANN's game if US companies control the new DNS.
Fuck ICANN, why would US government want to continue to support a corrupt international organization trying to avoid US government oversight?
I agree - and good long term solutions that have been tried haven't held up well - you just need to occasionally shake the house and get all the corruption out.
They are trying to kill URL, with AMP and hiding parts of address in Chrome bar. The perfect google customer never types any URL and uses search engine instead.
I agree with this. The power really lies with Browser holders. The browser is the most used app in the world.
If browser folks + name registry folks like namecheap, godaddy, cloudflare etc got together to another .com resolution method and gave ICANN and Verizon a middle finger, this could really work.
Right now, as is, ICANN is a corrupt and profit at any cost motivated org. This will most surely not turn out well for the internet.
The problem with alternate roots is they usually abandon traditional domains. A solution to this problem must include some way to bring the existing .COM, .ORG and .NET databases into the new root or else existing domain owners will look at the cost of migrating the brand they've spent years building and instead decide to just pay the ICANN tax.
The issue is that DNS registrations should cost money to dis-incentivize excessive parking. And the money it should cost vastly exceeds operating costs. It's not clear what you should do with that money - someone is bound to be unhappy.
I know very little about the technical and business side of DNS and Domain Registrars. That being said, have things actually gotten more expensive for them to operate?
I'm pretty confident the answer is no and these price increases just reflect the need for a handful of entities to charge more for an essential service with no viable alternative.
From a technical standpoint, what would the risk be if Verisign screwed up? If they could only afford low rate engineers, would the risk go up significantly?
That depends on the failure. Plus what recovery methods, redundancy, and backups they have. However, even at current prices verasign should have no problem paying decent engineers. Especially considering the number of registrations.
However, the distributed nature dns does protect against a lot blunders unless they persist for long enough for caches to invalidate.
The largest concern would be bad backups of registration records. However, last I checked ICANN requires tld operators to keep backups and also submit those backups daily to ICANN. Plus other things so if the company/org goes belly up for some reason ICANN can manage it till they find someone else.
In some ways, it seems like the potential risks warrant Verisign to have a strong financial incentive given the problems we've seen at PG&E (if Verisign can also be considered a utility). Also, it does serve as a north star in regards to properly compensating companies or individuals who provide important protocols, infrastructure layers, and FOSS projects. How much that should be though is an interesting question.
People falsely equate any domain they can't register and doesn't have a website with squatting.
I get at least one angry email from someone a month trying to buy a domain that only has MX (mail) records. Another is a 3 letter .com I use for my internal lab environment, and I explicitly don't want it to resolve on the public Internet.
I support you using any domain for any purpose, as you are the owner. Nobody else should be telling you or punishing you for using a shorter domain for non-web use.f
I'd call, without the slightest of doubt, the latter to be squatting.
Maybe ICANN should specify a shorter internal lab domain (There's already .local for your use, which I would think is plenty short, even adding a prefix), but I would most certainly say that given there's only ~50,000 2 or 3-letter domains, the price for one should be high enough to make an individual flinch.
Come on. Squatting is when you're doing som with the purpose of reselling.
If you just were lucky and registered a 3 letter domain back in the 90s, why is it anyone else business? Let it be.
I have got a 5-letter domain myself that I keep a website of mine that never worked out online mostly for portfolio and because I really like the domain name. I've no plans to sell the domain or free it so others can register, even though it could indeed be more useful for some other stuff. Well, if someday I want to launch a company, I might as well brand it with this name. For the time being, it's no one's business.
You know, I do agree and respect that, but I also see that these are a (artificial) constrained resource - There's value in them. They're a constrained public good, and prices should be charged appropriately - And yeah, I think that the really short domain names should be $XXXX per year to renew, if not more.
Squatting isn't just with the purpose of reselling. It's an overloaded phrase, from "living in someone's building illegally" to "Holding onto a good with the intent of depriving others of it's use, driving the price up (particularly if you control a large portion of the limited resource)", which are, in many ways, exact opposites (The hobo sleeping in an abandoned property and the landlord underutilizing that property so they can benefit from the scarcity of land are both "squatting") I'd say that the mild foresight that 3 letter domains are useful and then holding on to one because, even though you're barely using it, you don't want to give it up - Yeah, that's squatting. It's a minor dick move, though I'd say that dumb stuff like littering newspapers or not tipping your waiter is probably the greater offense.
I'm also fine with how things are now, because I don't have any illusions that ICANN as currently stands would put that additional revenue to good use, but I'd like to see this treated... well, I'd compare it to water rights, but those are broken just as badly.
> And yeah, I think that the really short domain names should be $XXXX per year to renew, if not more.
There's damage to the internet from "evicting" people from these domains. Broken links, etc. Sure, that doesn't apply in this "intentionally unused" case, but... who's currently incurring what damages? Why try to squeeze more dollars out of folks with these domain names? I'm suspicious of ideas to replicate the physical real-estate model of pushing people out through raising rents that seems to just benefit landlords and the already-wealthy.
Well, I'd argue your model of usefulness and the concept of a public good is broken.
We are living in the Internet and names are cheap. If for some historical reasons (I'd say, maybe even related to artificial scarcity), .com|.org|.net got more popular than they probably would, this is fine. gTLDS (generic top-level domains) are here now, and if they don't suffice, something else will eventually appear.
No? Yeah at one point a lot of us used that one, but it was never official and has long since been eaten by mDNS. And with ICANN happily selling off whatever TLDs anyone wants you can’t count on anything unused and unreserved either. Local only DNS TLD use has been explicitly discouraged if anything, which has long been intensely irritating and argued over. Ones like .test are reserved but aren’t intended and don’t read as being for permanent deployment purposes on intranets. Official req has been to buy a legit TLD and use that.
It does have the benefit that the price affects the reputation of a TLD. I know there are some cheap TLDs that people block because their cheap price makes them attractive for mass-registration by spammers.
I don't like that administrators resort to blocking whole TLDs, and I don't like that there can be so much variation in profit between domains with no correlation to operational costs. Still, I can't say that it's purely a greedy move on their part. People do benefit from paying more.
The current price cap has been in place since 2012, so prices will increase by 70% over the 19 year period from 2012 to 2031.
That works out to roughly 2.9% per year, which is a bit above the current US overall inflation rate of 2.3%, but less than the US housing inflation rate of 3.2% [1]. I don't have an opinion on whether domain prices should increase with inflation, but the increase does seem to be in line with it.
Another way to look at this (and this only works for domains, not things like hosting) is supply and demand. There's a limit to the number of domains out there, and there's a huge increase in people who want them.
It's almost like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies... scarcity is built in to domains. At some point, they'll all be taken.
just because it’s predicted by economic theory doesn’t make it harmless.
Take your idea one step further, and they should start individually assessing each domain name, and charging the maximum possible. Google.com would cost a billion the first year. Then, it suddenly starts redirecting to Bing because MS outbid Google.
This hasn’t happened yet, but, as far as I can tell, there are no rules preventing such behaviour, only the ever-changing power dynamics.
This scenario has been a reason for me to avoid all these new TLDs. Because those are run by smaller organizations less susceptible to bad PR, I expected them to pioneer the shakedown.
Which leads to the question: which registrar would you trust most? Are there any that are contractually or, better yet, bound by law to limit increases to what’s reasonable? Absent such guarantees, maybe something like .eu is the safest? Despite common cynicism about politicians and money, I tend to expect them to shy away from controversial schemes to get rich quick, and to be far more susceptible to public pressure.
Being able to register a .ninja or .space domain does not eliminate the limit of practical .com domain names. Does an apartment building opening in Pierre South Dakota have much of an effect on the scarcity of housing in New York or San Francisco?
If you're a California resident and are affected by the price changes, you can file a complaint with the California Attorney General. If you're a US resident outside of California you can file a complaint with the Department of Commerce as well as the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. And if you really want to get revenge against ICANN you can contact Senator Ted Cruz's office and let them know what you think of ICANN's recent actions since their 2016 IANA takeover. He was the loudest political voice to oppose it when it happened.
Senator Cruz opposed the transfer when it appeared ICANN's governance model was going to be like the U.N., where countries might have veto power over strong transparency, security, privacy, freedom of speech, financial accessibility, etc. Senator Cruz and many in his party are disdainful of the U.N. and similar multilateral international institutions; they oppose them on principal.
But ICANN ended up being run more like a private company in a free market. The fact that it also resulted in poor financial accessibility or any of the other feared consequences is irrelevant to Senator Cruz unless it somehow furthered the vilification of social media outlets and his attempts to repeal Communications Decency Act Section 230 protections. Don't forget, Cruz also opposes net neutrality, believing it to be "the biggest regulatory threat to the Internet".
Bear with me for a moment: I firmly believe that in order for good .com domains to be available for a smaller price the registry fee should be far higher.
The reason for that is speculation: even though a .com registration is dirty cheap, getting a decent .com domain is very expensive because for many companies it is worth it to keep the domains parked, and when someone wants to buy one of them it gets very expensive - quite often it costs thousands of dollars.
However, if registration prices went 10x overnight these domain hosting companies would be forced to get rid of many "second class" domains, which would be soon available for regular users without intermediaries. Off course "premium" domains would still be expensive, but it's an advancement anyway.
Honestly (disclosure: I own some of those second class domains), I highly doubt it.
This is a case where efficient markets mostly apply I would assume. Sure, I'd reconsider if I'm really going to ship this dream side project in my lifetime and I may drop some of those domains, but if they're good, professional domain resellers will snap at them before you get a chance.
And if you think that $10/year is too cheap, what makes you think $100/year is closer to an optimum? Why not $1000? I don't want to get into politics but this is a universal problem.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if this makes things worse. Raising prices evicts small domain speculators from the game and concentrates the supply into fewer hands.
This is a money grab. No one in charge intends for this increase to make things fairer. I don't think anyone looking for a domain name should rejoice that taxes (going straight to for-profits) got higher.
If we really want higher prices, how about we at least get more features for it. Such as built-in privacy protection.
Or how about we restructure the whole relationship so that wildly excessive amounts of money don't end up in either Verisign or ICANN regardless of what the price is.
Why do we still consider the "perfect domain" valuable? Most users will search on Google for the company rather than typing the address (even for companies that probably do have a .com, like their bank) so why is it something we still care about?
Thank you for saying this. I think a lot of people probably haven't felt the pain of actually acquiring a trademark and branded domain these days. My personal opinion is that .com domains should be a minimum $100 per year. At this price point the number of available domains would skyrocket effectively overnight as it became untenable for squatters to hold on to them. If you can't afford $100/year for a domain to be used for something actually useful, you probably don't need that domain in the first place.
Of course at that price point, HTTPS should be the default and the extra profits should go somewhere other than ICANN.
Youre thinking about yourself. Students etc who have .com domains cant afford $100 a year for their domain? Should they be forced to give up their domains because people like you couldnt get their chosen domains from squatters/
Also ignoring poorer countries in the world. Not everyone makes high western developer salaries. Why should .com domain names suddenly be gate kept and all the profits going into a monopoly and a corrupt oversight organization?
Right, they can use free .tk, .xx.yy domains that highjack their content to serve ads. It's fine. /s
We've been there people and it sucked, hard. Neither anybody here, nor ICANN, should get to decide what people can or cannot use domains for. Stipulating such restrictions or unreasonably raising prices to exclude any group that is neither rich or a company would essentially break the TLD. In that case you
can just get rid of .com and tie it into the US trademark system if you like. Maybe that's where the internet is going these days but it's neither natural nor a good direction in my book.
This could cause more centralization of the web. It's likely that other TLDs will follow since .com is one of the cheaper ones and the most commonly sought.
There are well-funded projects working on creating a better alternative to ICANN, namely https://handshake.org which is creating a distributed alternative root zone. The main benefit is security (the root of trust is a distributed ledger instead of Certificate Authorities which are a huge security hole), but there are additional benefits in that anyone can register their own TLD privately without risk of that TLD being seized or censored.
> Handshake leverages a blockchain based on unspent transaction output (UTXO) and proof-of-work (PoW) similar to Bitcoin for naming capabilities. The naming system features an on-chain smart contract-like functionality called covenants which restrict the future use of outputs of a transaction. Because covenants are built in at the blockchain layer via the consensus protocol, the handshake system enables different types of smart contracts which is used to develop an auction system for individuals to bid on domain naming rights.
> What does the Handshake names auction process look like?
> Users can buy or register domains through a Vickrey auction using HNS coins. All possible names are released weekly over the first year after launch. Users may submit blinded bids on the Handshake blockchain anytime after a name is released for auction. Bidding is open to everyone for ~5 days after the reveal period, and have ~10 days to reveal their bid price. A winner is assigned the name and, as it is a Vickrey auction, pays the second highest bid at the end of the reveal period. The winning bid amount of HNS coins is burned and permanently removed from circulation. Losing bids are returned and not burned.
... and you've lost me, as well as 99.9% of the rest of domain name owners.
It seems anything that involves blockchains at all is built by people living in a bubble and completely oblivious to how the real world works.
Why people are so mad about .ORG, it was supposed to be that special place, focused not on profiteering and corruption. Thanks Internet Society for fucking that up.
"Verisign will be allowed to increase the wholesale price to registrars for .COM domains by 7% each year in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. After a two year “freeze”, Verisign can increase prices by 7% annually during 2026-2029, then another two year “freeze”. This cycle will continue, meaning that within 10 years, .COM domains could cost approximately 70% more than the current wholesale price of $7.85 — and the sky is the limit."
Well, even if .com lost its credibility tomorrow, it couldn't come at a better time with other tlds gaining credibility over the years. Only downside is that a 7% increase is too slow to kill .com. Would be nice if it died fast enough for the zeitgeist to actually consider another DNS system which I don't think will ever happen without a distinct exodus event. Until then, this kind of news doesn't really penetrate beyond HN.
Let's just say that, for example, the ACLU decided to bail out of aclu.org to aclu.io. Whomever ends up with that domain now gets all incoming *@aclu.org emails, which would include a massive amount of sensitive, privileged information.
Has there ever been an instance of an online company with a serious presence that changed domains? Even del.icio.us didn't let icio.us out of their hands. (in fact, delicious.com wound up being the domain they eventually parted with)
and regarding alternative TLDs "gaining credibility," well first, THANK GOODNESS we all lived long enough to be able to use other TLDs finally finally finally; but who's to say this won't just happen to any other TLD?
I have a friend in the domain regulation industry. His take on the .org sale, was that everyone's worries about what a private equity firm might do to a TLD has already happened under ICANN.
Possible positive side effect is reducing profitability of Domain Squatters, leading to more names available. If you've ever tried to get a domain you know what a hassle it is to find a decent .com
I'm thinking, is that really any different from real estate property tax? Imagine there was some poor non-profit owning like 15 acres on Manhattan, would it be better to tax them the same a in the middle of Nevada?
Yeah, no. Selling a single domain covers my renewals for the year. Even raising prices to the point where normal users are priced out, I might have to sell two.
I thought most squatters 'kite' the domains so they don't have to pay for them? Eg they buy the domain and get a refund just before the month is up, then buy it again, ad nauseum.
That only happened for a year or so. The rules were changed so you can't claim refunds for more than a single digit percentage of your registrations per month. (Which is needed because lots of domains are registered on stolen credit cards)
I haven't looked for a .com in a long time, but when people are looking for .com's, do they really find that their choices are mostly taken by squatters and not by other people with legitimate uses for the domains? I would think that .com's are just saturated because it's the standard TLD and also because it was only recently that new TLDs appeared.
All squatters. This price change won't affect anything in terms of squatters though, they'll keep buying even if the prices almost double over 10 years. This just means more money for ICANN / Verisign.
Most squatters I know of today are holding domains simply so competitors can't have them. They don't do anything with them. They just sit there and point back to the registrar. I have many clients who own a ton of domains for just this purpose. Some think they may actually use the domain someday, some actually think if they point their domains to their website they'll get more business (nope), but still, they own a lot of domains that other people could probably use.
IPFS is more of a storage layer. Pairing it with a decentralized naming layer like https://handshake.org (just launched a week ago) would make for a powerful combination.
I have mixed feelings about this, the increase by ICANN is outrageous, but at the same time NameCheap are positioning themselves as heros here, and I've been burnt multiple times by the byzantine way their renewal system tries to fool you into paying for the wrong thing (put 'registration period as 10 years? suuure, we won't tell you you're paying for 10 years of privacy guard over 1 year of domain registration though')
Separate the issues and it'll make your conscience clearer. I too have issues w/ how NameCheap presents things (sale prices for other TLDs don't clearly state renewal rates for example), but that is orthogonal to their position here.
That says retail not renewal. Often during sales of products companies will put full price so you know your savings, not often is it really the full price you'll pay later. One might think "sale for x/yr" would be different than "sale for x/1yr".
> NameCheap are positioning themselves as heros here
They have a history of jumping on various issues for marketing purposes. They got a lot of there core users by going against the founder of GD and spamming reddit with anti GD comments.
If you want a good registrar with free whois privacy (that is easier to manage than NameCheaps) and better prices, go with NameSilo
I don't think it's simply marketing purposes. They actually try to make a different and impact. On .ORG they filed an official complaint with ICANN because they could as a registrar. Their CEO has been in the domain industry I think over two decades now and actually cares about it. What's good for consumers buying domains is good for NameCheap I'm sure.
After that DNSSEC outage the other day with no notification or anything from them before or afterwards, I've been slowly moving my domains away from them.
If they really wanted to fight back they could do a lot more than just post on their blog. Why don't they fund ICANN like Verisign is and maybe ICANN will start to listen?
It's about time for the US Government to intervene and dissolve ICANN and transfer the domain business to Mozilla! She should not piecemeal the problem - we should solve it once and for all. We should start a Whitehouse petition and ask the government to end this legalized scam!
Everything regarding domains is designed to scam the regular folk and pour money into registrars and domainers!
Imagine you forgot to pay your phone bill, and then all your competitors start bidding, and they get your number in 30 days. This cannot happen in the real world, because it's wrong, but it happens with much more valuable ones (yet cheap in terms of annual cost) - the domains.
All this is designed to steal money from all of us and pour it into the greedy bellies of some of the sketchiest folks in the digital space - the domainers. I'd say that even the SEO scammers are much more sophisticated and nice than the domainers! Yet, ICANN allows them to exist, and guarantees their profits!
I'm really considering abandoning my firstlast.com domain (used for email and personal blog) and transitioning to firstlast.ccTLD so that I can stop giving Verisign money.
Just make sure you pick a ccTLD that has not already been bought/taken from the country in question. If you don't, it could be operated by Verisign anyhow (see .cc, .tv, etc)
We've moved from a market where people would be able to just pick a name for something, to one where most names are taken.
Essentially, good .com names are now like prime real estate. Search engines and browsers have done a bad job at making other TLDs as accessible, so there's a natural bias towards them.
If domains are like land, I wonder why the market hasn't moved from a parking system where domains are resold at a premium, to a leasing system?
I oppose Amendment 3 to the .COM Registry Agreement. I believe that allowing wholesale prices for .com domains to rise 72% over 12 years, which is far more than the rate of inflation and also far more than Verisign's underlying costs of maintaining the registry could possibly increase by, will dramatically hurt the internet ecosystem. It will especially hurt small website operators, like myself, and will discourage internet users from creating blogs and personal pages, with the end result of reducing democratization of the internet.
Verisign reported a 69.4% operating margin in Q1 2019, so they clearly do not need the extra revenue from this price hike. ICANN has granted a monopoly over .com to Verisign and ICANN has a duty to every internet user on the planet to carefully regulate this monopoly to prevent abuse by Verisign. The only conscionable thing to do right now is to freeze wholesale .com prices and re-evaluate 5-10 years from now. A policy that allows price increases tracking the rate of inflation (but no higher) may make sense in the future, but right now Verisign is already collecting far more from their .com monopoly than any company would be able to in a competitive market [1]. It's simply not right to allow them to raise prices at this time.
- Kerrick
[1] For example, Alphabet, a highly successful player in a very high-margin industry, has an operating margin of around 25%. Verisign's operating margin is over 2.75 times that.