[IP] more on ICANN lifts price caps on .NET registry fees
Begin forwarded message:
From: Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 4, 2005 7:07:51 PM EDT
To: Bret Fausett <fausett@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] ICANN lifts price caps on .NET registry fees
Reply-To: Karl Auerbach <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Mon, 4 Jul 2005, David Farber wrote:
As you probably recall, back in 1999 when ICANN finally brought
Network Solutions under its authority, ICANN imposed a $6/registration
cap ...
It wasn't a price cap, it was a price floor. It was a fee that
Verisign received per name per year from registrars. There was no
mechanism in the contract to reduce that fee no matter what the
actual costs of providing the registry service might be nor where
there incentives to induce Verisign to drive down those costs.
The absence of any reality about this fee was one of the reasons why
I voted against the ICANN-Verisign contract in the first place.
That $6 amount because a fixed cost component for every domain name
in .com/.net for every year - and with the number of names
in .com/.net the amount of that cost component amounted to several
hundred million dollars per year drawn out of the pockets of consumers.
There is no reason to believe that this new "cap" will be any
different. The only thing that seems to have changed is the total
number (reduced), the size of the ICANN portion (increased), and an
the removal of the prohibition against changing the rate.
The new price "cap" includes a $0.75 per name per year ICANN fee.
That is a pretty substantial tax, especially when considered as a
percentage of the registry fee of $3.50 - roughly 20% . Why should
consumers be paying such an exhorbinate tax on things that harm
consumer interests (e.g. the privacy-busting "whois" and ICANN's pro-
trademark UDRP), particularly given the exclusiong of the consumer of
domain names from those parts of ICANN that actually make decisions?
Given that ICANN still arbitrarily precludes the creation of long
term contracts in which name buyers can lock-in terms, there still
remains the confiscatory potential to which you (Bret) allude.
This continues ICANN's tradition of price fixing - it was nothing
less than that. And this price fixing is only one part of ICANN's
non-technical doings. When compared with the virtually nothing of a
technical nature that ICANN has done, this "change" merely reduces
the percentage of ICANN's non-technical to technical jobs from 100% :
0% to 100% : 0%.
--karl--
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