The Freename Forum

The US registry VeriSign Inc. is going on the media offensive in the discussion about the level of .com fees: a clarification in the company blog is intended to refute popular myths.

On 2 August 2024, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that it will renew its contractual relationship with VeriSign to manage .com. At the same time, however, it announced its intention to hold talks with VeriSign about pricing in the .com market. The aim is to discuss possible solutions that benefit end users, both businesses and consumers, and serve the public interest. The background to this is that VeriSign has always fully utilised its contractual right to increase fees, but without offering a better product or service, according to critics. VeriSign CEO Jim Bidzos immediately announced that the company was prepared to review structures, among other things to make .com fees more predictable. However, anyone who believes that VeriSign is freezing or even lowering the fees for .com is probably mistaken. In an article in the company blog entitled ‘Setting the Record Straight - Myths vs. Facts about .com’, Pat Kane, Senior Vice President Naming and Registry Services, clarified things from VeriSign's point of view. According to him, much of the current discussion is distorted by factual inaccuracies, a misunderstanding of basic technical concepts and misinterpretations regarding pricing, competition and market dynamics in the domain industry.

In his article, Kane describes seven ‘myths’ that the registry believes are being spread about .com - and are false. The first myth: ‘The technology that powers the .com TLD is not sophisticated.’ refers to technical expertise. Kane tries to counter this with facts. It is true that VeriSign's infrastructure processes an average of 329 billion DNS transactions per day and has reached a peak of more than six million transactions per second this year. For more than 27 years, VeriSign has ensured 100 per cent DNS availability for .com without interruption, he said, by operating a large, globally distributed registry operation consisting of hundreds of technical sites spread across more than 60 countries on six continents. Kane then addresses fees in myth two (‘The annual wholesale price for .com domain names - $10.26 as of Sept. 1 - is much higher than market value and is harming consumers.’). The annual wholesale price for the renewal of a .com domain is lower than for 87 per cent of the 448 gTLDs for which such data is available from registrars. Based on this data, the renewal prices would be US$ 9.93 (.org), US$ 15.00 (.biz) or US$ 17.50 (.info), for example; .xyz would rise to US$ 11.00 by the end of September 2024, .online to US$ 25.00 and .store to US$ 40.00. This makes it clear that the prices for .com are at or below market value. Owners of .com domains are more affected by two factors over which VeriSign has no influence: the rising prices of domain registrars and the unregulated secondary market, which accumulates large stocks of domains and demands price premiums that are in some cases thousands of times higher than the regulated wholesale price. Kane also opposes regular tendering of .com contracts and emphasises the importance of the ‘security, stability, and resilience’ of the DNS.

Even if each of the seven myths gives rise to discussion, there is currently no concrete indication that a public tender for .com will actually take place. The number of serious contenders would probably be manageable anyway: the second largest gTLD registry Radix only manages around nine million domains, a fraction of the current 157 million .com domains, and is also based in Dubai, i.e. outside the USA. Even the GoDaddy subsidiary Registry Services LLC only manages 2.3 million domains. What Adenauer already knew applies to .com: ‘No experiments’.

You can find the VeriSign blog article at:
https://blog.verisign.com/domain-names/ ... t-dot-com/