.org 10% price increase coming on July 1st 2013 but the registry contract expires June 30, 2013

PIR, the .org domain name registry, have announced a price increase in .org effective July 1st 2013. Registrar price for .org will increase from $7.45 to $8.19. If you add the $0.25 ICANN fee the .org wholesale price will be at $8.44 in July.

The problem I see is that the increase is set to kick in after the .org registry contract expires on June 30th, 2013. In 2006, PIR renewed its .org Registry Agreement with ICANN until June 30, 2013. I guess PIR hopes that they will renew the contract by then or that a short term extension will kick in.

Public Interest Registry, the .org registry, a per the ICANN registry contract can increase the price of .org up to 10% every year. The previous increase was done last year on July 1, 2012 (from $7.21 to $7.70 including ICANN fee). That was about 7%.

This latest increase comes shortly after Verisign announced that the .net registry fee will be increased from $5.11 to $5.62 effective July 1, 2013 as well.

On November 30th Verisign, Inc., the registry operator for .com, got it’s contact renewed for another 6 years but although Verisign got the contract renewal, it lost the right to raise the wholesale price of .com for the next 6 years.