If ICANN only charges $0.18 per domain name, why am I paying $10?

Re:If ICANN only charges $0.18 per domain name, why am I pay... by _delirium on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @09:06AM (#7709891)

I've been doing a little bit with .dk lately, and I kind of like their model: DK Hostmaster handles almost everything. Due to lobbying from various hosting companies, there is an arbitrary restriction that you can't register a domain initially with them, but instead have to go through a registrar (same as in .com). I think this is mostly because it gives various hosting companies a chance to upsell you on email/Wordpress/whatever, since you have to go through one of them to get the domain. But then once you have the domain, you never have to deal with them again, because you subsequently do your yearly renewal directly through DK Hostmaster. You just log in, pay your $8.50 fee, and that's that. And unlike GoDaddy et al, they aren't trying to sell you a dozen services every time you try to renew.

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Re:If ICANN only charges $0.18 per domain name, why am I pay... by lsc on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @12:57PM (#7711286)

>You just log in, pay your $8.50 fee, and that's that. And unlike GoDaddy et al, they aren't trying to sell you a dozen services every time you try to renew.

The registrars are pretty efficient, if you ask me. I think that part of the system isn't broken. Yeah, if you want to save every penny, godaddy does that, at the cost of the shitty service and upsells.

If you are willing to pay just a few bucks more, there are a lot of good registrars who don't up-sell you. Joker.com is my favorite. I think it comes to another four dollars a year; less than half a dollar a month.

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Re:If ICANN only charges $0.18 per domain name, why am I pay... by pbhjpbhj on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @09:17AM (#7709941)

$8.50 still seems quite high given you're paying them to let you use their interface to increment the expiry date on the domain. With the volume they have and once the system is set-up there's got to be almost no action to take beyond the maintenance of a few servers?

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Re:If ICANN only charges $0.18 per domain name, why am I pay... by cpach on Thursday May 08, 2014 @06:05AM (#7714583)

A registry is not just a MySQL database with some random domain names in it.

Have you considered what kind of resources and expertise that are required to handle issues such as domain name disputes? For example, suppose Alice and Bob run an informal business together, they have a clash and both of them make claims of the business' domain name. Or if Mallory registers someone elses company name and use it for nefarious purposes? [+]

[+] See http://swartz.typepad.com/texplorer/2006/04/wellknown_rock_.... for a particularly domain name anecdote involving Metallica and a Swedish VC firm.

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Re:If ICANN only charges $0.18 per domain name, why am I pay... by _delirium on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @09:24AM (#7709979)

Yeah, I'm not too sure what the expenses and finances are like. They mention that they manage ~1m domains, so that's ~$8-9m/yr revenue. Maybe a bit less if a substantial percentage of domains are doing 3-year or 5-year renewals (which are discounted 10-20%). Not a trivial amount, but it's not hard to spend a few million $ on salaries, office space, a server room, etc. It's possible the service is also sending a surplus to its owner, the nonprofit Danish Internet Forum, but I'm not sure if that's the case.

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