Study Price Caps on Domain Registrations — ICANN to
As part of fresh TLD process, ICANN commissions study on pricing restrictions for registries.
Following receiving a number of comments regarding lack of pricing limits in fresh TLD registry agreements, Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has commissioned a study to determine if price caps ought to be implemented.
A number of domain owners were concerned that the first draft registry agreement for fresh top level domains did not have price caps, and that existing registry agreements could adopt these same terms through “equal treatment” clauses. In other words, VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN) could increase prices on .com domains to $100 a year or charge variable pricing, such as $100,000 for Google to renew Google.com and more money for domainers to renew good domains.
In addition to commissioning a study to evaluate price caps, the second version of ICANN’s fresh gTLD guidebook includes two provisions related to price increases. First, registries must give six months notice of changes. Second, registries must allow registrants to renew domain names for up to 10 years at a time. The combination of these would protect domain owners to a degree; if a registry decided to drastically increase prices then domain owners could renew for 10 years at current prices. Still, 10 years is not eternity and drastic price increases would be harmful to the future of the internet.
Hopefully these two provisions will survive along with additional rules regarding rates of increases and competitive price bidding for renewal of registry agreements.
My general take is that registries ought to have light pricing constraints to set fresh registration prices but ought to have caps on increasing renewal fees.
