[At-Large] The Case for Regulatory Capture at ICANN | Review Signal Blog

[Karl Auerbach]

I find it interesting that the notion of 'removing the price cap" is 
being read to suggest an increase in registry fee amounts.

But why?  Any back-of-the-envelope calculation for TLDs such as .com or 
.org strongly suggests that the existing registry fee levels are 
dramatically too high - and cumulate well past a $billion a year in 
monopoly rents far in excess of actual costs.

Running a registry is largely a back room operation - some database 
transaction servers and a cloud of actual DNS name servers.

Since ICANN was formed the cost of those things has fallen and fallen 
and fallen.  And the cost of much of the infrastructure - such as 
Verisign's fortress data center(s) have been amortized years ago.

As far as I know there has never been an audit, much less a serious 
audit that distinguishes between real operational costs and Potemkin 
Village corporate image fluff costs, of actual costs of providing legacy 
TLD registry services.

One would think that an audit - published to the public - would be 
warranted before any consideration of unleashing unbounded upwards 
prices onto captive legacy TLD users?

	--karl--