[At-Large] ICANN Announcement on Domain Tasting

[Karl Auerbach]

On 08/12/2009 01:21 PM, Alan Greenberg wrote:

> As the organization that started this entire policy process, At-Large
> and ALAC can be proud of the results.

I'm not so sure about that.

The main problem with the massive add-grace stuff was not the churn but 
the fact that it was a transfer of costs from the "domainers", who were 
getting a free ride, onto the backs of the domain name buying public who 
were paying for the transaction costs and the lost opportunity costs due 
to the 5 day name lock-up.

When you or I acquire a .com name for a year we each have to pay a 
registry fee of about $7 to cover the purported costs that the registry 
incurs in order to handle our transaction and publish the name into the 
zone and operate the zone servers.  We pay that fee even if we 
relinquish the name in a week.

That would suggest that in June 2008, where there were 15,738,292 AGP 
names, that the .com registry was bearing a cost (at that pegged $7 
registry fee) of $110,168,044/month - or about $1,322,016,528/year.

There are two conclusions:

Either the .com registry has now saved over 1.3 billion $US that we were 
previously paying and which it is now retaining as profit.

Or the registry fee is pegged by ICANN at a hyper inflated level.

Either way, we the community of internet users are a Boston fish - we 
are scrod.

The point of this little exercise is to show that ICANN's fiat registry 
fees, based on thing more than hot air emitted by the registries and 
accompanied by no audit of actual registry costs, is costing domain name 
users a very large pile of money every year.

It is long past time that ICANN be required to perform a believable, 
public, and deep audit of registry costs and to adjust the registry fee 
component of domain name prices to be in conformance with those costs.

		--karl--