ICANN publishes .com price hike note
Staff justification note echoes its previous comments, as well as Verisign’s.
ICANN has published a review of comments submitted regarding its proposed contract amendment with Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) for .com. The most controversial aspect of the amendment is allowing Verisign to increase the price of .com domains by 7% per year in the last four of every six years of contract extension.
The staff note (pdf) reads more like a justification, even defending itself against some of the comments made. In its analysis of comments regarding the price hike, staff comments that one of the objectives of the amendment is to align it with Verisign’s Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Government. That agreement now gives ICANN the option to allow Verisign to raise prices. It also repeats its mantra that it’s not a price regulator even though it has controlled prices on some domains for years, and still does with .net.
Oddly, the staff note adopts some of the language that Verisign introduced in its own submission (pdf). Verisign stated that the groundswell of comments regarding the amendment came from “domain name speculators” and groups that align with them. The staff note states:
One of the reasons for the high volume of comments is that a number of organizations involved in the speculation sector of domain name industry mobilized their members and clients to
submit comments to ICANN.
The staff note also notes that many industry blogs, counting Reglike, anticipated these price increases due to the Cooperative Agreement amendment. This also mirrors Verisign’s letter.
A few days back, Verisign disclosed that it would not raise prices this calendar year. Kevin Murphy of DomainIncite noted that the fourth year of Verisign’s current agreement doesn’t start until October 21, 2020. So this might just be a two-month reprieve. Verisign will need to give a six-month notice of its first price hike. I suspect it will “read the room” around the current status of the COVID-19 outbreak ahead of announcing its first price hike but it will definitely happen ahead of the fourth year is up in October 2021.
