I Guess VeriSign just sent all of us an early Christmas present.
My registrar just informed me that they received a notice today from VeriSign today that they were raising their fees by 7% on July 1, 2010.
VeriSign fees for .com registrations and renewals will be increasing to $7.34 from its current $6.86 and .Net fees for registrations and renewals will be increased to $4.65 per year.
Don’t forget ICANN’s fee of $.20 (currently) , is in addition to VeriSign’s fees and of course each registrar is free to set their own price.
Nicely played VeriSign, raise your prices right in the middle of a recession.
Of course we would all love the hear the logic of why it “costs” VeriSign more to administer a .com registration or renewal, than a .net registration, to justifies a 50% fee differential.
Certainly if VeriSign can make money administering the .net registry for $4.65 per domain, they could do the same for .com registrations.
Of course it would also be nice if other parties would have been allowed to bid for this contract rather than giving it to VeriSign on a no bid basis with a guaranteed right to rise rates without even a showing of increased cost.
This announcement does not effect any extension other than .com and .net and does not effect any ccTLD’s.
For those who want to read the whole notice here you go:
“””VeriSign, Inc. (“VNDS”) is hereby notifying all registrars of a fee change for .com and.net domain names effective July 1, 2010. In accordance with our
contract, ICANN has already been notified. Details as follows:
1. VNDS’ fee for each annual increment of a new and renewal .com domain name registration and for each transfer of a .com domain name registration from
one ICANN-accredited registrar to another will be US $7.34, exclusive of any ICANN Variable Registry-Level Fee (as defined in the .com Registry
Agreement) or any other ICANN fee; and
2. VNDS’ fee for each annual increment of a new and renewal .net domain name registration and for each transfer of a .net domain name registration from
one ICANN-accredited registrar to another will be US $4.65, exclusive of any ICANN Variable Registry-Level Fee (as defined in the .net Registry
Agreement) or any other ICANN fee.
Except for the above-described fee changes, all other terms of the relevant agreements (.com and .net Registry Agreements and Registry-Registrar
Agreements) remain unchanged.”””
Lets not forget that under the new gTLD proposals, the registries want the price caps completely removed so they can charge you want ever they want to renew your domain names.
Have you joined the ICA yet?
There is also the tax called Obama Domain Tax which is 10%.
Bull
I have no idea of what you are talking about
I’m curious why domain prices go up when everything relating to the Internet goes down in cost. Bandwidth is cheaper. Servers are less expensive. Hosting is less expensive. Databases are more robust and flexible. A lot of enterprise software is now free. Dark fiber can be bought by the bundles. Even in a down ecomony – employees are cheaper. Yet prices of domains go up. Perplexing.
Good point on asking for the justification of .com compared to .net!
Do you think they would have announced this price increase in Sept. when Congress had Icann on the carpet?
They are going to milk the .com contract to the max.
And, then in 2012 they will negotiate a better contract by creating a panic over .com cyber threats. And, only they can solve it. But, it is going to cost them a billion dollars so they need to drastically raise the cost .com.
Icann will say “Sure. No problem.”
It’s not perplexing at all, Andrew, when one realizes that VeriSign is an abusive monopolist. This price increase should provide some ammo to the CFIT case, so to that extent it might be a “good” thing (i.e. pay 7% higher fees now, and then hope that we get it all back and more one day if/when the courts find the contract to be a violation of anti-trust laws).
This could be a blessing in disguise for many ccTLDs. The main attraction of .com and .net (after their global nature) is their price. If this price increases, then it may affect sales of .com and .net. It is exactly the wrong action in a fragile economy. There is still a lot of two and three year domain tasting stuff working itself out of the system but it is no longer the problem it once was. What the domain tasters were doing was akin to fishing for plankton. It was resulting in paid registrations but with domain tasting no longer having the same scale, these paid tasting registrations no longer happen to the same extent. One of my theories about domain tasting is that a tasted and registered domain has a finite lifespan (where the domain is not a strong generic domain). The lifespan of one of these domains is strongly related to the rate of decay of its back links. As these links disappear, the traffic decreases accordingly until it is relying almost entirely on type-in traffic. The numbers of these tasted/regged domains being renewed will fall. So having lost one revenue stream, Verisign is relying on extracting more money from an almost captive audience. It should be interesting to see if this has any impact on .us ccTLD.
MHB…don’t worry that you don’t understand what I am talking about but be prepared to pay more for domains when Obama gets my message to tax on domain registerations.
The govt will always find ways to get revenue w/o lifting the fingers.
If you sign the new RAA your ICANN fee is lowered to $0.18 btw 🙂 .NET was $4.23 before, IIRC.
Verisign: Intel of the Internet.
Michael you make the greatest point, Why the difference between the .com and .net ? There is no way it can be 50 % greater in any logical way. I guess Verisign will say why did we raise prices ? Why does a dog lick his balls ? Because he can.
I love when people talk about how much there names are worth and how they are like real estate, but complain about a $7 to $10 per year maintenance charge. Does anyone pay $7 to $10 a year in property tax for a piece of real estate?
I hope prices double or triple to flush out some domains from the big portfolios.
One person’s problem just might be another person’s opportunity.
Anybody know what the present status of the CFIT case is? Has anything been set now that it is back in Federal District Court after Verisign lost CFIT’s appeal?
Tommy
That is not the issue.
The issue is that there were other companies that wanted to perform this service for less cost for the consumer and they never got a chance to bid.
They are basically a regulated utility and need to be governed as such
Quote-
“I hope prices double or triple to flush out some domains from the big portfolios.”
I hope they triple the taxes on waterfront property so I can own it.
I assume you are also in favor of “eminent domain” so they can take the house away from a little old lady and build a condo or casino on the property.
Do you think the employees of Verisign get annul pay increases? Maybe, say 5% or do you think their annual operating costs might increase? I can go on….. If they are making so much undeserved profits then buy their stock (you can hedge anything today).
Domain Investor –
Who owns 200,000 pieces of waterfront property?
“Eminent domain”, good one….you might control where your domains point but you surely don’t own the names. How much does your registrar and DNS servers cost you?
There will be county tax,local tax, city tax,state tax, and federal tax , transaction tax, etc etc and all adds up to be $50 per domain.
Tommy,
I don’t know where you are but the employment climate in the U.S. is tough.
A friend of mine took a 20% cut in salary this year so everyone else could continue to work. (everyone took the cut.)
He figures he would rather get 80% instead of an unemployment check and a slim chance of finding a job immediately. Plus, he didn’t want to move his whole family if he finds a job somewhere else.
Maybe, the Verisign employees in Wash.,DC and Calif. should be happy with just having a job?
The registrars are not making much on yearly renewals but it is cumulative.
They are making ALL of MONEY on selling your domains.
When Netsol, Enom, Tucows, Fab, Moniker, Directi, Namescout, Godaddy sells your domain, ROI is off the chart. Basically, their only cost is 1 yr. renewal (at their cost), cost of running the auction and credit card fees.
Also, if you think when the big boys drop their good domains you will end up with them, you are wishful thinking.
Folks should remember that the tariff for toll-free numbers (see SMS800.com, Documents, Tariff, page 80 of the PDF) is 10.49 CENTS per month, and has been going DOWN, not UP (it used to be 13.13 cents/month). And DNS/internet technology should be far cheaper than telephony, not 500%+ more expensive. Domain registrants/consumers worldwide are being gouged, by literally hundreds of millions of dollar per year.
The fact that people individually might appear to be able to “afford” to be gouged doesn’t matter. LCD makers and others have been found guilty and fined routinely for anti-competitive behaviour. Consumers still bought the TVs or notebooks that incorporated those LCDs, or other products — however they overpaid for them relative to a competitive market.
As other posters have rightly suggested, higher costs are simply a tax, and that transfer of wealth benefits only VeriSign shareholders.