“I think calling them a monopoly at this point is an unfair comparison. Verisign is no more a monopoly than your Ford dealer is a monopoly,” Redl said. “It’s not the original days of the internet where that was the only top-level domain.”
It is bothers me that the monopoly is excused this way.
If you already have a .com domain that all your customers are familiar with, its not like you can just switch to a different domain. _Maybe_ I could excuse this if it was only for new registrations, but left the price for renewals the same, at least for existing domain owners.
If you run a successful restaurant paying for "protection" to mobsters is a negligible cost to keep your business running (and your kneecaps not broken), but that doesn't make the racketeering acceptable...
I can’t imagine a world where Google would move their primary domain from .com to .io. Over the past 20 years, I’ve witnessed numerous successful restaurants move locations due to rent hikes that are still in business in their new locations indicating continued success. I’m having trouble thinking of any major companies that have changed their domains after already being established and successful. Migrating domains feels a smidge different.
The reason it's different is that domains are so cheap and the price increases are so small. Why would a major company (or even a tiny company) change their domain over an increase of a dollar or two per year? It doesn't make sense.
If those restaurants' landlords had hiked their rent by a few dollars per year, they wouldn't have moved either. But it's not uncommon to see increases of thousands of dollars per month, even for a small restaurant, when the lease comes up for renewal.
The problem here is how justifiable is the change in prices, not the amount. If you raise prices because you really have to and I can't keep up, that's OK, that means that my business is not viable anymore, I need to charge more also or cut on expenses (or go out of business, which is also OK). But if you keep milking me for more money just because you can, as I have no other options, it's not OK at all.
There are some differences in the regulation of DNS assignments and real estate that makes this comparison not as direct as it may have been intended. Namely who can own the assets and if they are transferable. In real estate both of these lean much more on the open side, creating market forces which allows capitalism to work. Even if you yourself don't own property in e.g. NYC there is more than one investment company looking to buy and sell in NYC. In DNS these assignments enforce a system of renting and registry lock in. There is little room for capitalism to do its thing when avenues for competition are removed in this way.
Even seeming outs such as "invest in a gTLD" don't provide the opportunity. Aside from being the virtual equivalent of "why don't you just go build your hair salon 50 miles out of town where nobody owns anything yet for 1,000x the cost of a building in town?" gTLDs require being a well established organization, among other eligibility requirements, which creates a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
Both do have a 3rd component of "group good overhead" but the IANA fees of ~18 cents don't seem to be the problem so there's no sense in comparing/contrasting these differences.
Well, you usually can simply move just for a few streets/blocks, it's very unlikely you'll have to move out of the town...But let's imagine if many little shops would be forced to move out of the town because of high rents - wouldn't the town come up with some regulations to prevent that?
Capitalism is fine when it benefits the overall economy, but when it starts self-imploding because of interests of a few, then government jumps in usually - that's why we have anti-monopoly laws, because monopoly hurts the progress...
You tell people to use the new email. I don't understand this, if you make a thing the root of your identity then you have get everyone to migrate when it changes. There is no solution to this problem that doesn't involve implementing USPS mail forwarding for email.
Easier said than done. For most people that probably means updating literally hundreds of sites (and better hope all of those have a way to change your email). Not to mention telling your contacts to use the new email, and hope they don't forget and send an important email to the wrong domain.
Yep, there is no magic bullet to "thing I rent from someone else who has nigh complete discretion on price decides to price me out." You either regulate (which is what happened here that limits the price hikes to 7% yoy) or figure something out. If you can't leave or retaliate then you're basically proving explicitly why they're able to increase prices to the point of ruining you.
At a certain price you just pony up the $200k to ICANN become your own registrar and then actually own your domains.
If your business is at a desirable address that customers are familiar with, and have visited for years... should you be entitled to 4 different landlords available to negotiate your next lease? Might be a nice thought but it's not a reality. You've got one landlord, make peace with that, or move.
When I live somewhere and the owner of the water company decides they need to increase prices 9% despite having lower costs, they are definitely exercising their monopoly, even when there are several other utilities coming to my home and so many other kinds of beverage I might acquire.
How do you know they have lower costs? My local water municipality recently increased prices citing increased pricing across the entire spectrum of equipment, materials, chemicals and labor. This in addition to state-mandated improvements to waste water management that must be completed within a certain timeframe.
If you're in Britain most likely your water company has been saddled with debt [so it could pay more to its shareholders] and is in serious economical difficulties.
TLDs may sort of be fungible, but not really. No one looks at widgets.com and widgets.tube as identical, whereas no one really cares about one car versus another beyond feelings of personal worth.
When you have a monopoly, you spend all of your time explaining why you don't have a monopoly. When you don't have a monopoly, you spend all your time building toward a monopoly.
It is a monopoly. - .com domains have the brand-recognition and trust behind them. Other TLDs still feel 'knock-off' especially for lesser technically aware people.
Also are Ford dealers not doing very similar anticompetitive things? Demanding high markups over msrp for electric vehicles, or refusing to offer them altogether, for example.
Well, if you don't like Verisign's service, you can always move one county over, and deal with a different TLD domain registrar for .com, just like with your Ford dealer.
(As an aside, I'd pay for a better-curated DNS infrastructure. For instance, google's font domains of whatever could just resolve to something federated, and that has TLS certs that are trusted by the alternative infrastructure. Google's chain of trust could be on a certificate revocation list.)
I hope that someone sooner or later will be able to propose an alternative model to the current DNS infrastructure.
Exceeding the current limits and the abuses that derive from it is certainly something extremely difficult to achieve, but I think there's a market in trying to fix the status quo.
It is bothers me that the monopoly is excused this way.