These comments are either irrational or full of domain squatters and registrars.
This price increase costs a person who own a single domain $3.22 per year. That's conservatively adjusted for inflation, in 2020 dollars, and after 10 years not while it's still increasing. At minimum wage, this price increase is costing you an extra 3.4 to 6.1 seconds per work day, depending on the state.
In other words, if you own a single domain, this increase does not affect you.
It does affect you, though, if you own thousands of domains that you aren't using. The word for that is "domain squatter".
It also affects you if you're a registrar and you're aware that most domains are held by squatters, therefore that most of your revenue comes from squatters.
This price increase doesn't affect me or other legitimate domain holders, has already made my trigger-happy friends tell me they're going to review their domains and let go of the ones they probably won't use, and may even make some types of domain squatting unprofitable. This price increase is good for the internet.
I feel that if Verisign wanted to actually do some good, they would have negotiated a retail minimum price rather than just raising their wholesale price. The registrar space is already a race to the bottom, so if Verisign made that bottom more profitable for the registrars rather than themselves, that would make this action seem to be a little bit more charitable.
That said, I do agree that domain squatting is a problem which should be addressed. I don't think this is the way to do it though.
Yeah, it's not much in raw dollars, but the percentage increase is significantly above inflation. Imagine if everything you pay for increased in price by 7% every year while you're getting a measly 1% or 2% raise like most people.
Yeah, that's my point exactly. It's not much if you only pay it a few times, but just imagine if domains were a significant portion of everything you pay for.
Just imagine if everything you buy increased in price by 7% per year for no good reason.
Domain squatting wouldn't be an issue if domains were $5 / year with a thousand gTLDs. Instead, there are premium pricing games on every gTLD and Google, etc. are doing their best to de-emphasize domain names and URLs.
well put, I would even go as far as estimating domain value and matching the squatters prices. Or put differently, lets make real-estate on domain-street as expensive as it should be. Something like: 2 letter domains 100 000, 3 letter ones 50 000 per year. 500 euro per year is nothing if you are serious about your business. Such high prices will force a market in domain names to replace this idiocy where any dumb name is owned by whoever got there first and buying it starts at 20 k and every good name is either a shit or a spam page. Think of the children! (haha)
I aquire that insight from some EVE online economist who argued fees should be high enough to make exploiting the [ingame] property a requirement. (and that this logics should apply to other non-gaming things like land tax) If a game doesn't work like that it just gets boring with few players owning everything while not doing jack shit with it. You get "ghost" towns like London.
A discount for purchasing multiple domains with the same name under different TLD's also seems reasonable. A German should be able to get .de and .com as a package and .fr should be cheap.
With the new found fortune squatters could get a refund for everything they let go of.
I know someone who has a small business that registered a 3 letter ccTLD 20 years ago and they wouldn't be able to justify a one time fee of $50k let alone $50k / year for their domain.
Domains are basically property, so why not start charging people fair market value for the physical property they own that's appreciated significantly over the last several decades?
And if you're talking about only doing it for new domains, all that does is massively increase the value of good grandfathered domains, so it's even better for the squatters.
It is property and it is for commercial purposes. 50 k is just a wild guess. It also doesn't have to jump there in a day.
In my cities shopping street an increasingly large number of stores became investment vehicles for people who just live there. Shopping there just becomes... well... bullshit.
The 3 letter COM domain street should be entirely populated by serious business imho
Your buddy can sell it or he can get a 20 year refund. Depending on the character combination he might be sitting on 150 k or it might be worth millions.
Pumping up the fee by that much would probably hurt the value a lot which is a good thing.
People need to start businesses that need names that customers can remember. We shouldn't limit the real economy for people who feel entitled to something for nothing.
Lol. The person I know has been using it for their owner operated small business for 20 years. $50k USD per year is an extra employee. Small businesses are serious business for the people who put their lives into them. The idea that only huge corporations are real business is crazy.
You’re talking about seizing people’s property and selling it off to the highest bidder. Who gets that money? And, like I said, it’s a ccTLD (.ca). A 3 letter .ca is worth about $5k USD.
And based on your other comments it sounds like you think people in developing countries should use the ccTLD for their country and leave the popular TLDs for the big businesses. No thanks. Your suggestion is way worse than dealing with domain squatters.
> Domains are basically property, so why not start charging people fair market value for the physical property they own that's appreciated significantly over the last several decades?
We do that with property taxes. That's the biggest slice of personally owned, likely to appreciate, physical property. When a property is sold, we also tax the proceeds from that, similar to domains.
Oh I think you misinterpreted, I was talking about a 7% price increase every 1.5 years, not a 12,500% increase today. It goes without saying, but such wildly different ideas would also have wildly different effects.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that a 7% increase every 1.5 years wouldn't change much at all about the domain market. The only thing it would break is using value estimation algorithms so rough that you need to squat on 10,000 domains just to find one that somebody actually pays for. But, of course, that would mean displacing hundreds of people that have legitimate uses for those domains yet can't justify the asking price, and I'm sure not many people have such a disregard for others that they're willing to displace hundreds of people just to make one sale.
This price increase costs a person who own a single domain $3.22 per year. That's conservatively adjusted for inflation, in 2020 dollars, and after 10 years not while it's still increasing. At minimum wage, this price increase is costing you an extra 3.4 to 6.1 seconds per work day, depending on the state.
In other words, if you own a single domain, this increase does not affect you.
It does affect you, though, if you own thousands of domains that you aren't using. The word for that is "domain squatter".
It also affects you if you're a registrar and you're aware that most domains are held by squatters, therefore that most of your revenue comes from squatters.
This price increase doesn't affect me or other legitimate domain holders, has already made my trigger-happy friends tell me they're going to review their domains and let go of the ones they probably won't use, and may even make some types of domain squatting unprofitable. This price increase is good for the internet.