Comment by AnthonyMouse
20 hours ago
> How are you going to pay for the (substantial) cost of running a TLD without registration fee revenue?
Is it actually a substantial expense? The TLD itself only has to publish the nameserver records, which generally have a TTL of about a day. A DNS response is a few hundred bytes. Big DNS providers like Google and Cloudflare would make requests for every actively used domain every day, but then cache them. Smaller providers wouldn't cache as well but also wouldn't each request every domain every day. For e.g. a million personal domains, ballpark estimate is somewhere in the few TB a month of traffic. Maybe a little over personal hobby project money but definitely not outrageous for a small non-profit organization.
> How do you plan to tell the difference between a parked/squatted domain and one in legitimate use but offering no public-facing services?
This is the easy one. Squatters buy domains because they want to sell them. To sell them they have to make it publicly known to prospective buyers that the domain is available for sale. So then if anyone lists the domain for sale anywhere, you make them prove that they own it (which any actual buyer would also have to do in order to not get scammed) and when they do the domain is forfeit.
It's kind of sad that we don't do that for all domains. Domain squatters can go to hell.
Much of the cost here comes from compliance with the ICANN gTLD program structure, not from running the underlying technical infrastructure (which is not limited to DNS - you also need EPP/RDAP/etc). See https://www.icann.org/en/registry-agreements for (hundred+ page) documents outlining registry responsibilities. Registries can outsource some of this to an ICANN-accredited "registry service provider", but should expect to pay upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly for the privilege.
You can't do it in the general case.
Most TLDs need to allow domain transfers because projects do genuinely change ownership sometimes. If you allow transfers, you allow reselling by definition (because you can't physically determine whether cash changes hands).
This isn't like tickets, where "return to pool and let an interested party buy it" is a viable strategy. Tickets are fungible, domains are non-fungible.
If the focus of this is truly on one-per-person personal domains then you don't need to allow transfers and reselling. (Although you'll probably get a grey market of people just repointing DNS to someone else anyway, because if there's money to be had someone will take it)
> Most TLDs need to allow domain transfers because projects do genuinely change ownership sometimes.
That's fine. It's not the transferring that you punish, it's the offering for sale. Good luck squatting when publishing any solicitation to sell the domain is the thing that causes you to lose it. How many domains are you going to squat on and pay renewal fees for when you have no way to let the public know you're willing to sell them that won't cause you to lose them?
> This isn't like tickets, where "return to pool and let an interested party buy it" is a viable strategy. Tickets are fungible, domains are non-fungible.
What does fungibility have to do with whether you can return something to the pool? The lack of fungibility makes it work even better, because if you want a specific domain and you find someone squatting on it, you can report them advertising it for sale. When the registry verifies that the report is true then the person filing the original report can be given first crack at the domain when it goes back into the pool.
It costs ~$200,000 to apply for a TLD, and there's an ongoing renewal cost in the tens of thousands of USD.
For this application round, ICANN is running an Applicant Support Program, or ASP. The applicants seeking to apply for a TLD this round who qualify for the ASP will have a substantially reduced application fee, among other benefits. Our organization is one such org who has qualified for the ASP so we will not have to pay the full $227,000 application fee.
How much is the reduced fee then? As I understand it's somewhere between 75-85% less, which is still a lot of money.
Also, who is paying for the reduced fee, administrative and infra costs? And have you actually submitted gTLD application, or are you trying to crowdfund? Unclear to me.
3 replies →
That's definitely not a cartel then.