CircleID

As Captain Renault in "Casablanca" might now say, "I am shocked, shocked to find prices going up." I mean, I know VeriSign said it wouldn't and ICANN endorsed the deception, but is there a rational person on the planet that did not see this coming?

See VeriSign's press release where they mention that they receive 30 billion queries per day, making it sound like a large number.

One need only look at:

http://system.opendns.com/

(1 billion queries/day lately, operated free) to know that 1 billion isn't what it used to be. I'd be curous to know how many DNS queries are handled daily by GoDaddy, NSI, Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Akamai, etc., and whether their technology costs are rising 7% per year....

Also, if you look at what webhosting went for in 2000, compared to what it costs today, the amount of space and transfer limits for a typical account have grown far higher than 30-fold, and at the same time prices have gone down.

CNNIC recently reduced the price of .cn domains to 13 cents/yr.

ICANN should have been looking at a price index of technology costs like webhosting, not the price index comprised of Beluga caviar, Cristal champagne, 5 star hotels, Jimmy Choo shoes and Gucci bags, when they were pretending to engage in hard negotiations with VeriSign. If the registry contract had been open for tender, .com prices would be on the order of $1.50/yr or less, instead of going up.