Vast majority of people in the world. Everyone who is below middle class income in the USA (which is a lot more than you probably realize).
The Internet is not just for rich people and it should certainly not just be for making money.
I assume you are American, but when did exactly .com became the USA's TLD? .us is your country's TLD
ICANN doesn't solve domain disputes at all. That is handled through UDRP providers (WIPO, NAF, etc).
ICANN doesn't manage any of the registries themselves, they give the contracts in some meaningless manner (different problem, shitty organization ICANN is).
You eat some of the biggest taco bell meals I have ever heard of. As others stated, you have a very rich mindset. Even 7$ is expensive for some people, I've met startups in third world countries that have trouble paying $20/month for hosting (that can be 20% of a monthly salary or more!)
ICANN manages the fees so they can make them whatever they want...no?
If $7 is expensive for someone...they can just get a non .com name. Your blog that gets 5 visitors a day, will work just as fine on a .net. Same for businesses. If you can't afford $240/yr then you are probably not serious enough about your venture. So your third world startups can just stick on their country's domain name...or get a .net or do the whole start.ups type name.
Yes I overdid it with the TB...but that's because I usually get it for 2 people.
ICANN doesn't do anything themselves, it's all done by registrties, udrp providers, etc. ICANN is also supposed to be a non-profit, raising the fees for an arbitrary purpose serves who?
> Yes I overdid it with the TB...but that's because I usually get it for 2 people.
Where do you live and who do you eat with? I can feed like 8 people for $20 at Taco Bell here in Columbus, OH
as far as food: 4 supreme beef chalupas, 2 chicken quesadillas, 2 drinks = ~20
If all you have is actual people you know reading your blog (and that's most people) there's no reason hosting should cost more than $5/month. For those people, 2/3rds to 4/5ths of the cost would be something that basically costs nothing, and is only priced because there needs to be a mechanism for assigning ownership.
I mean, where would all this money go exactly?
as far as where money goes, infrastructure improvement.
For example: .com could cost 15$ instead of 7$, but .net could go from 7$ to 3$ or even less.
Yes, you would end up with Internet ghettos, and "high-street" areas, but given it's only the extension, and a .com address is not really surrounded by other .com addresses, then it's not such a bad thing.
The small time owners will have no problem paying that. Who doesn't have $20 a month for their blog? Eat one less taco bell meal and you are good to go.
And it won't do much for the small time consumers who get 5-6 domains. It's bad...but not by much. The only people such a price would hurt are the guys with 2,000 domains who'll go from paying $20,000 a year while making $180K of selling domains, to paying $480,000 a year, while still making the same $180K a year(prices will increase, but not by much...can't very well ask $500,000 for strawberries.com)
This will free up a ton of short term domains from the guys who get exact match domains hoping someone will buy one(whiteweddingdresses.com, ipadsoftware.com, askhackernews.com, goodbookstoread.com). At $10/yr it doesn't matter if someone buys...at $240 a year you can only afford to keep the really good domains.
And this can actually happen. The registars don't control domains...ICANN does. All they need to do is bump up the ICANN fee from 30 cents to 18 bucks for the .com and bam instant market correction.
And with all the money ICANN will get, they can create a free domain extension...i.e. something like .web. And the rest can be spent on improving internet infrastructure world wide...laying fiber, so anywhere in the world you can get 1gb/s.
ICANN is a non-profit...it should be doing more than just solving domain disputes.