ICANN fees should be ten to one hundred times greater than they are in order to reduce the ridiculous hoarding that has occurred.
We used to say that fees should be low so that the average person could have their own domain. After all, there is no inherent cost in the sale, so why should ICANN profit? Instead, organizational fees are $0.18/yr for dot com domains, even though the registrars charge at least $8.00. This captures 97% of retail registration proceeds in private hands. Yet at the same time, no domains are available. Who could afford to own so many unused domains at $8/yr? No one, because they establish private registrars and own then at $0.18/yr, covering these meager costs by selling marginally valuable domains for $100 and short dot coms for tens of millions on secondary markets.
If there are thousands of votes that ICANN should not be allowed to raise rates, they are certainly from people who are profiting off their sale, and not people using them for the intended purpose of identifying servers on the Internet. If we are concerned about profits, we should push for them to be assigned to a charity benefiting something deserving.
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." - Anatole France (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France)
> ICANN fees should be ten to one hundred times greater than they are in order to reduce the ridiculous hoarding that has occurred.
No. Hobbiests and regular people won't be able to afford domains just because some squatters decided to profit off this.
You are probably salty just because a squatter grabbed a domain you liked, and yeah thats irritating but that doesn't mean that millions of people should be denied the right of having their internet presence by making prices so high that they can't afford them.
1$ / month per domain would have zero impact on affordability for the average American on .com. With .counrty codes they could have higher or lower fees at their discretion.
Instead DNS is basically useless for the average person who uses search engines and bookmarks to find things.
PS: The Phone number system oddly enough is far more user friendly in practice.
> 1$ / month per domain would have zero impact on affordability for the average American on .com
Sure, but if there are no price caps, what makes you think .org domains will be available for that price?
> DNS is basically useless for the average person who uses search engines and bookmarks to find things.
Um, you do realize that when you click on that search engine link, you're using DNS to find the actual site, right? Search engines point at URLs, not IP addresses.
DNS is incredibly important infrastructure, but the protocol is more than just a name. Getting a geographically local IP from a universal name is independent of what the name is. Replace Microsoft.com with MVKVS or other short string and that still works.
Indeed. Which means it's not "basically useless for the average person", since the average person needs it in order to find the websites they want to visit.
That's ridiculous. In the worst case a domain name would cost $10 or $20 instead of $8 per year, which is less than actually hosting a page on that domain. In the best case, an uncommon and unused domain that's for sale for thousands of dollars will become available for the cost of registration. I don't care if speculators take all the good domains, or even a lot of mediocre ones. The current state of affairs is that speculators have a very large number of all reasonable domains, just because it's cheap.
We used to say that fees should be low so that the average person could have their own domain. After all, there is no inherent cost in the sale, so why should ICANN profit? Instead, organizational fees are $0.18/yr for dot com domains, even though the registrars charge at least $8.00. This captures 97% of retail registration proceeds in private hands. Yet at the same time, no domains are available. Who could afford to own so many unused domains at $8/yr? No one, because they establish private registrars and own then at $0.18/yr, covering these meager costs by selling marginally valuable domains for $100 and short dot coms for tens of millions on secondary markets.
If there are thousands of votes that ICANN should not be allowed to raise rates, they are certainly from people who are profiting off their sale, and not people using them for the intended purpose of identifying servers on the Internet. If we are concerned about profits, we should push for them to be assigned to a charity benefiting something deserving.