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ICANN removed the .org price threshold - why the IT community is against, and what will happen next

Also “under the distribution” got .info and .biz.


/ photo by David Goehring CC BY

ICANN changes the rules of the game


ICANN changed the terms of the agreement with the Public Interest Registry (PIR) domain name registrar responsible for .org. Previously, he was forbidden to charge a base price for a domain above $ 8.25 ( clause 7.3 ). Once a year, this rate could be increased, but not more than 10%. Such restrictions apply to all large domain zones, including .com, for which Verisign is responsible. Such an approach and competition between registrars help restrain price increases.

Earlier this year, ICANN decided to provide PIR with the ability to set their prices for .org domains. At the end of June, this decision came into force. Moreover, the changes affected two other top-level domains - .info and .biz. They are controlled by the operators Afilias and Neustar.
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Why removed the ban


Today, you can find a domain name in the zone. Com or. Org within 10-13 dollars. But in recent years, many other domain zones for commercial organizations have emerged on the market, the rules for setting prices for which are not regulated at all.

The editors of ArsTechnica say that changing the terms of the contract with the PIR (as well as Afilias and Neustar) is an attempt by ICANN to standardize contracts with domain registrars to give them more freedom. In theory, such a decision should help make the market more “consistent”.

Probably, there are financial reasons behind the decision. At the end of 2018, ICANN representatives said that the organization may face a shortage of funds over the next five years. It is expected that ICANN's income from the sale of domains will decrease (or remain at the same level), but the costs of maintaining the performance of existing systems will increase.

The ICANN budget is built primarily on revenue from mandatory registrar fees. For example, Verisign pays $ 18 million per year. Rising domain prices will allow ICANN to increase the flow of funds. This can help the organization stay afloat in the long run.

IT community against


Initially, ICANN and PIR worked through new terms of the transaction behind closed doors, before submitting the question for public comment. But the decision to remove price restrictions was taken despite the almost unanimous objections of the IT community.
The author of the blog Review Signal has analyzed all the comments received by the Domain Name Management Corporation. It turned out that as many as 3252 respondents were in favor of maintaining the status quo. In support of the new rules were only six people. One of them was a former Verisign manager, and the other was a member of a company lobbying for the registrar's interests. Thus, more than 98% of respondents considered that the abolition of basic tariffs was a bad idea.

Representatives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF) and the Domain Name Rights Coalition (DNRC), who defend the constitutional rights of Internet users, spoke against the ICANN decision.

According to them, such initiatives of ICANN should be coordinated with the IT community. The top level domain .org is used by a large number of public organizations. An increase in price may adversely affect their operations, since they will not be able to predict the budget in the new market conditions.


/ photo Kai Pilger Unsplash

This point of view is shared by the non-profit organization National Public Radio (NPR), which distributes news from 800 American radio stations, the National Geographic Society of the United States, and the C-SPAN television network. They even prepared an open letter to ICANN asking them to reconsider the decision.

Some domain registrars also opposed the ICANN decision. According to Namecap in his corporate blog, such a move will lead to an uncontrolled increase in prices.

Maybe someone will have to pay ten times more for the renewal of their domain. Although representatives of the PIR Registry have already made a statement that the company will not raise prices. But what happens when management changes in an organization — this question remains open.

In the near future, reform is not likely to have a noticeable effect. The author of the resource Domain Name Wire Andrew Ellimann (Andrew Allemann) is sure that the recorders will not inflate prices hundreds or thousands of times. But the situation itself creates a dangerous precedent. There is an opinion that in 2024, when the contract between ICANN and Verisign ends, we can expect a repetition of the history with the domain zone .com.


Additional reading from the First Corporate IaaS Blog:


And the blog on Habré:

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/458684/

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