“Variable Domain Pricing” Gets Media Attention — Push Against

Network World picks up variable domain pricing story.

Domain owners have been commenting on ICANN’s proposed fresh gTLD structure counting the potential for “variable pricing”, and the technology media is starting to pick it up.

Today Network World published a story titled “Fresh top-level domain plan dangerous, too costly, critics tell ICANN” that summarizes criticism of the plan. Although most of it discusses trademark concerns, the story also mentions a number of criticisms of the lack of pricing controls:

Many commentators also questioned ICANN’s variable pricing scheme, which would allow the registrars of the fresh domains to charge different prices depending on the popularity of a particular domain name instead of the uniform, regulated prices available today in .com or .net.

Critics say variable pricing for fresh domains is unfair, and they worry that VeriSign would be able to get a similar pricing scheme for .com if it were approved for the fresh domains. Variable pricing, they say, would create inequities where VeriSign could charge $1 million a year for one domain name such as Google.com and only $6 a year for another name like joetheplumber.com.

This is exactly the type of attention we need on this issue. Big firms need to understand the danger and take action.