OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
ICANN is now proposing lifting price cap provisions for .biz domains too. This came shortly after the proposals to lift price caps for .org and .info domains.
Of course Neustar, the biz registry, would sure like to get what Afilias and PIR want and ICANN is willing to give them. All these companies want to compensate their failing registration numbers with price increases instead of actually doing something to save their extensions.
As I have said this is the most serious issue that registrants have come up against ever.
If these agreements are accepted by ICANN then VERISIGN will come running asking ICANN to lift price cap provisions in .com and .net. So all domains can go overnight from $10 per year to $100 or $200 per year.
And .biz, .org and .info get to raise the prices 10% every year as it is. That is well above inflation.
The .info and .org registry agreements are open for public comments until April 29 2019. The .biz registry agreement is open for public comments until May 14 2019.
Anyone can comment and I suggest people start commenting NOW!
The 3 extensions will also get URS with these proposals.
Here is what the new ICANN .biz agreement proposes about .biz prices:
“Pricing for Domain Name Registrations and Registry Services (Section 2.10 of the .biz renewal agreement): In alignment with the base registry agreement, the price cap provisions in the current .biz agreement, which limited the price of registrations and allowable price increases for registrations, are removed from the .biz renewal agreement. Protections for existing registrants will remain in place in line with the base registry agreement. This change will not only allow the .biz renewal agreement to better conform with the base registry agreement, but also takes into consideration the maturation of the domain name market and the goal of treating the registry operator equitably with operators of new gTLDs and other legacy gTLDs utilizing the base registry agreement.”
If I am not mistaken there are NO other other legacy gTLDs utilizing the base registry agreement.
Will lifting the price caps allow the registries to introduce premium renewals for good .org, .biz and .info domains as well?
It will be difficult for all domainers if the price gets increase from $10 to $100 but I’m wondering what will happen to HugeDomains who have over 5M in their portfolio 😀
I’d drop a lot of domains if this happened.
Not in .biz since I only own one .biz domain. All the other extensions, lots of drops.
Guess this is what registries want?
Once people have registered names in any tld it becomes a bit of a monopoly because of the friction involved in switching extensions. It will make sense for registries to do large price increases to milk existing registrants and that is why caps are needed.
Remember this acronym:
RAPE
(Reprehensible And Pure Evil)