As much as I hated seeing the US Department of Commerce having stewardship of ICANN this recent development this is really a body blow to all .org stakeholders.
I guess we all should have seen this coming when it was spun off to a "Multi stakeholder board".
First an increase in allowed fee's then the private turnover. A well scripted subversion.
For a registry, their main costs are nameserver costs and ICANN licensing fees (~$25K for gTLDs, not sure for classic TLDs). It's totally unfair on PIR side to jack the prices up just because they can.
Are profane TLDs allowed? I'd love to register a particular four letter gTLD. I'm sure it'd make its money back.
The profit motive is helpful in some areas, but it can just wreck service-related fields.
So we have things like Tor, which makes a PKI based .onion TLD. What's stopping Us (the people) from making our own TLDs?
It really just is a massive amount of groupthink, inertia, and acceptance of who dns is... right?
And with IP6 seems like it'd be a wild west on all sorts of TLDs.. But we have these monolithic orgs holding us all back. Hell, I know it's orthogonal to TLDs, but we even had the ANPR ip space sold partially to Amazon ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20475855 ). Bluntly stated, these orgs that manage underlying infra aren't trustworthy. And that goes without stating ICANN and all those woes.
The choice to support DNS roots like .oz, .ku, .te, .ti, and .uu is not standards-compliant. Say suddenly a new nation comes into the world and ISO assigns them one of these abbreviations, or one of these “emerging countries” they have TLDs for gets assigned a different cctld, what does opennic do? They made the choice to pre-register a bunch of domains under these reserved 2-letter country codes, so now they either have to
A. stop being able to say “we directly support all ICANN-assigned tlds” and keep resolving the existing domains
or
B. say to the existing domain owners of [their artificial] tld “sorry to be you” as their domain names they thought they owned now become registered to other entities.
I hate to say it, but maybe domain names should be managed on a blockchain, so there's no central authority.
Rent.
As far as I know, you can't "pay off" a domain. And most of us are at some usually negligible risk of losing a domain by mistake or because someone bigger wanted it.
In many (most?) cases, there are multiple registrars, which is who the end customers use to “purchase” their domain from. The registrars (plural) register the domain with the registry (singular).
Most likely they will have to play nice with ICANN to go mainstream
Pros? The conditions are equal to all users. Cons? It is a wild west style registry with no governance besides the little the automated algorithm offers.
They're goal, if I understood correctly, is having .eth TLD managed by this decentralized registry. It can be an interesting experience.
[Full disclosure: I'm part of the Almonit project which uses ENS]
Let's say a .com costs $1,000 per year. For a legitimate business / organization, that is a trivial cost. For a domain hoarder, that makes keeping domains by and large unprofitable.
Killing this parasitic activity is a good thing.
The .org domain is a tenth the size (about 14 million domains) so it's possible that a massive price hike could go through with no one able to stop it--as we're discussing here--but in doing so, you've thrown the baby out with the bath water and made a whole lot of historical domains with no commercial purpose (remember that .org has usually been where "non-business" groups and individuals register) prohibitively expensive in order to tackle a speculative problem.
Speaking of parasitic activity ...
I know you meant this as an example, but $1000 is a lot of money for many students, hobbyists, bloggers and startups.
For that matter, even $100 will put many at a huge disadvantage in low income countries. I'd rather have squatting than make domains unaffordable for the developing world.
Every few months, I get e-mails asking if I'll sell one or the other for a small sum or donate the domain to the group that's asking. I used to reply and politely decline but the vitriol about my "pointlessly" keeping a domain that I'm "obviously not using" that inevitably comes back now has me shift-Delete e-mails like that. The times, they have changed.
0 - And getting a .net meant showing you were an actual Network Operator. Anybody else remember FTPing the template down from internic.net and sending it to hostmaster and waiting two months for the zone delegation?
And people register alternative domains rather than one an investor owns because they don't want to pay that amount.
So I don't agree with your thinking.
And in some countries $1,000 is a lifetime's earnings.
Perhaps there is a more sophisticated approach to this problem than simply raising prices across the board.
I would have to seriously reconsider my domain if it cost a lot of money.
Perhaps domain registrars could do a lot to stop a lot of hoarding if they charged progressively by the number of domains with the same payment details?
Of course, perhaps registrars don’t want to stop hoarding?
