On Uniregistry pricing change — GoDaddy comments

Registrar is happy regarding grandfathering, but still has issues with Uniregistry price hikes.

This morning, Uniregistry disclosed some changes to its planned price hikes that take effect in September.

Most notably, existing registrations in nine of the domain names it is increasing prices on the most will be grandfathered. A current registrant of a .juegos domain, for example, will continue to pay a price of $9.33 plus their registrar’s markup instead of the fresh $300 price.

GoDaddy dropped Uniregistry’s domains from its offerings when Uniregistry disclosed the price hike. I reached out to the firm today to see what its reaction is to Uniregistry’s latest actions on prices. Mike McLaughlin, EVP, GM of Domains, responded:

Registries have an enormous responsibility to provide a stable namespace for end users. Individuals and businesses work to build their identity online, most of all around a specific domain name. Sizable price changes damage end user trust and are not only bad for end users, but also the domain name industry as a whole.

We appreciate Uniregistry grandfathering registered names for the most affected TLDs, though the price hikes for some of the other TLDs are still outside of historical industry norms and are still impactful. Ultimately, Uniregistry’s actions are being absorbed by end users, impacting both their wallet and their trust in the use of domain names on the Internet.

We’re in the process of reviewing the implications of the fresh pricing scheme to determine how it impacts our clients, both today and in the future.

Registries such as .com, .net and .biz have typically raised prices by no more than 10% per year. Despite Uniregistry’s fresh legacy pricing, domains such as .help and .pics will still experience 50% wholesale price hikes.

Legacy TLDs such as .com, .net and .biz have prices that are regulated. Fresh top level domain names do not.