The price of a .com is about to rise care of the ICANN monopoly
posted Sunday Feb 16, 2020 by Scott Ertz
If you are a .com domain owner, expect the price of your annual domain renewal to almost double over the next decade. This is thanks to the poor structure of the domain name registration process. To understand how domain names work, especially for .com, you'll need to know about a small collection of organizations that are involved. First is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit which is responsible for deciding which top-level domains exist, and who will administer each. Then we have the company Verisign, which is best known for security certificates but also administers all .com domain names. In addition, there is the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is part of the US Department of Commerce, which oversees the rules that govern .com.
To register your .com, however, you don't directly interact with any of these groups. Instead, you'll go to a company like GoDaddy, who buys the domain wholesale from Verisign. The price they pay for it is governed by the NTIA, who has given ICANN more freedom in setting price increases.
What does all of this mean? Verisign has permission from ICANN to increase the price of a .com registration 7 percent per year for the next decade. As the wholesale price increases, of course, the retail price, which you and I pay, will increase as well. If they take advantage of this ability, Verisign will see a profit increase of $500 million above the expected 2 percent inflation, in 2030.
If you're living entirely in the traditional old-school internet, there is no way around this monopoly. It shows one of the inherent issues with a centralized internet and lends credence to the concept of a decentralized internet. This concept already works and exists in a couple of implementations, including TOR. But, while TOR is known for a lot of illegal activity, other implementations are more straightforward. As ICANN continues to make the internet more expensive to operate, and companies produce easier access to decentralized networks, we may see a rise in its use.
