Comment by DoctorOW
2 years ago
Only $0.18 goes to ICANN, the non-profit. The rest goes to the Verisign which is a publicly traded for-profit company which ultimately gets that $9.59. I bring this up because it of course _doesn't_ cost that much. Incidentally, Verisign posted $1.56 billion in revenue last year and spent about $1.21 billion on stock buybacks in the same time.
As I understand it, Verisign doesn't own the .com TLD, they are just a contracted service provider to ICANN.
Which begs the question, why doesn't ICANN just replace Verisign them with a different authoritative register that charges much less?
Because that doesn’t solve the problem. The demand doesn’t go away if you charge less – if you charge $1/yr for .COMs, they will all be permanently squatted. (Well, like now, but worse!)
We could use anti-scalping techniques, but that’s non-trivial to implement. Perhaps some name squatting policy? No idea how to enforce it though, especially without money.
Fair enough, but even we use a floor price to disincentivise squatting, I'm not sure why we should gift those excess margins to a private company?
Shouldn't ICANN collect that margin and use it for charitable purposes instead?
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That’s a “$1.56 billion” question…