Auerbach: Domain Admin Isn't A Moon Landing
Months after it sealed a deal to continue running Internet addresses that end in .com, VeriSign said it plans to raise registration fees for the popular top-level domain [see story in Technology Daily's PM edition]. The news angered critics like Karl Auerbach, a former member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers board.
The price increase is not justified by the costs of providing the service, although no one outside of VeriSign really knows how much it costs to run .com, he told us in an e-mail. Auerbach's own estimate is 3 cents per domain name -- a far cry from the $6.42 fee that will take effect in October.
"ICANN has not once bothered to wonder, much less to actually inquire, what the actual costs are. Instead ICANN, once again, has let VeriSign have what VeriSign wants, Auerbach said. Meanwhile, VeriSign cites increased Web traffic and security threats as the main reasons for the fee increase. Auerbach said bandwidth capacity is "far less expensive to create than it sounds."
He lauded VeriSign for doing a "first class" job of administering the domain over the life of its contract. "But we should not go agog and fawn over them as if they had just done another moon project or invented anti-gravity and time travel," he said.
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