[At-Large] ICANN Announcement on Domain Tasting

[John R. Levine]

> 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.

I don't believe that Verisign has ever offered a cost justification for 
their registry fees.  Considering that .COM and .NET use the exact same 
infrastructure, it'd take some pretty creative cost accounting to justify 
$6.86 for .COM and $4.98 for .NET.

At the time the board approved the settlement that gave Verisign eternal 
renewals and price increases, board members told me they wanted stability, 
and showed no interest in whether the price was related to costs.

Considering that roughly the same board seems to have no problem with the 
CFO speculating in the stock market with the corporation's reserve funds, 
with a well documented loss of over $4M, it doesn't seem realistic to 
expect them to exert meaningful financial oversight over anything. 
That's why they were doing you a favor when they didn't let you see those 
tedious and confusing financial statements.

R's,
John

See http://weblog.johnlevine.com/ICANN/vrsncom.html