> Selling DNS names is not a profitable business... There's no need to pick apart Phillip's message in detail. Let's just pick that one phrase apart, and leave the rest behind. It happens to be something I know something about.
I guess everybody wants to "lose money" selling DNS names, since when ICANN offered people the chance to sell names in their own TLD, only 1,930 applications arrived, at a non-refundable $185K apiece, bringing in only $357 million, completely on speculation, long before ICANN would promise them ANYTHING. Even before the gTLD goldrush, ICANN certainly seemed to raise and spend a pile of money selling DNS names. The Internet Society certainly has a *lot* more money since they won the ICANN "lottery" to run the .ORG domain. (I used to be on their board, back when fundraising was a significant issue for them.) I personally started a domain name business (Moniker) and was closely involved in starting up the CORE registry and working out all the details among the CORE registrars, most of whom went on to become ICANN registrars. The costs involved in *providing* domain name service are fixed and trivial compared to most businesses. People are basically buying small numbers of bits on a disk drive from you. The prices are more than a dozen times the total costs. And the costs are spread over a huge volume of registrations, which has been created by domain-name speculators (which of course the registrars/registries have taken pains to encourage). In .COM with 100,000,000 domains, it should cost a few cents a year to handle a domain registration; in other domains, perhaps a dime. And the cost of servers and storage is going... down. See for example: http://www.solorwell.com/ex-icann-board-member-verisigns-cost-per-domain-is-014/ http://web.archive.org/web/20070409034330/http://dev.blog.domaintools.com/2007/04/ex-icann-board-member-says-com-costs-014/ Now it's possible for incompetent or corrupt businesses to waste even a 1200% profit margin -- not to name any names or anything. But if there was actual competition in domain names, they would retail for something like 30c/year rather than $10-20 per year. The incentives of everyone inside the domain business are to keep prices high, not to lower them. Normally, competition would restrict that behavior, but look at what they're selling: monopolies on virtual real estate. The ultimate rulemaker is a corrupt nonprofit monopolist that is accountable to exactly nobody (I know the lawyer who set up its structure; that was their main goal, and they largely succeeded), that sets its own prices. ICANN sets a base price per domain by charging registries 25c per domain, which is already 2x to 20x the actual costs at the registry. 100 million .com's bring ICANN 25 million dollars - every year - for the "service" of having your input ignored by the ICANN insiders. At each level below ICANN, those obscene prices only get multiplied more (e.g. $6+ at VeriSign) -- and oh, they hate it all the way to the bank. John _______________________________________________ dane mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dane
