Domain Name Fees Soar? — Will .Com
Hidden bomb in fresh gTLD agreement could introduce tiered pricing to .com domains.
Upset regarding VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN) increasing your .com registration fees 7% a year? Imagine if they could raise them by whatever they want.
There’s a little time bomb in the fresh draft gTLD registry agreement, part of the fresh top level domain rollout process, that could make this happen.
Essentially, the fresh registry agreement wouldn’t place any pricing restrictions on registries as they introduce fresh domains, such as .cars. They can price them still they want, counting variable pricing as is done for the .tv country code. This can apply to fresh registrations or renewals. (For example, for .tv you’ll right now pay a higher registration and renewal fee for money.tv than somelamekeyword.tv.) The only requirement is that these prices be made transparent.
ICANN considered removing pricing caps for domains such as .biz and .info back in 2006, but the community helped persuade it otherwise.
“Big deal,” you say. You don’t plan to register any of these fresh domains.
That’s where the hidden bomb comes in. There’s an “equal treatment” clause in registry agreements that states essentially one registry won’t get something that another registry doesn’t get. In other words, if the draft fresh gTLD and registry agreement aren’t changed, then VeriSign could argue that it shouldn’t have price restrictions anymore. You could end up getting hit with a $10,000 renewal fee for your prized domains.
Corporations ought to care regarding this, too, since they rely on their domain names for commerce and e-mail. Imagine if VeriSign suddenly wanted to charge AT&T $1 billion a year to renew att.com.
I don’t have a problem with pricing for fresh domain registrations going up. But renewals ought to be grandfathered or capped.
In order to stop this from happening, it’s notable that you comment on the drafts. You can comment on this particular section of the draft by sending an e-mail to gtld-transition [at] icann.org. You can read current comments here.
