Karl, I see your maths in a different way. Your approach is kind of Madoff, inventing pyramidal money. This pyramidal bubble (Madoff-like value 1.3 billion $US per year) was a cost of AGP put on Verisign, which registry had to face all that pollution and increase its servers capabilities. I am happy Verisign could cope with that nonsense, and even happier that AGP policy was changed, thanks to all. Money does not arrive from nowhere, bubble is not sane. I do not know if $7 per domain is expensive or not, but I am quite sure the registry must have resources to cope with pollution like AGP. Kind regards, Elisabeth Porteneuve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Karl Auerbach" <karl@cavebear.com> To: "At-Large Worldwide" <at-large@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Cc: "ALAC Working List" <alac@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2009 10:58 PM Subject: Re: [At-Large] ICANN Announcement on Domain Tasting
On 08/12/2009 01:21 PM, Alan Greenberg wrote:
As the organization that started this entire policy process, At-Large and ALAC can be proud of the results.
I'm not so sure about that.
The main problem with the massive add-grace stuff was not the churn but the fact that it was a transfer of costs from the "domainers", who were getting a free ride, onto the backs of the domain name buying public who were paying for the transaction costs and the lost opportunity costs due to the 5 day name lock-up.
When you or I acquire a .com name for a year we each have to pay a registry fee of about $7 to cover the purported costs that the registry incurs in order to handle our transaction and publish the name into the zone and operate the zone servers. We pay that fee even if we relinquish the name in a week.
That would suggest that in June 2008, where there were 15,738,292 AGP names, that the .com registry was bearing a cost (at that pegged $7 registry fee) of $110,168,044/month - or about $1,322,016,528/year.
There are two conclusions:
Either the .com registry has now saved over 1.3 billion $US that we were previously paying and which it is now retaining as profit.
Or the registry fee is pegged by ICANN at a hyper inflated level.
Either way, we the community of internet users are a Boston fish - we are scrod.
The point of this little exercise is to show that ICANN's fiat registry fees, based on thing more than hot air emitted by the registries and accompanied by no audit of actual registry costs, is costing domain name users a very large pile of money every year.
It is long past time that ICANN be required to perform a believable, public, and deep audit of registry costs and to adjust the registry fee component of domain name prices to be in conformance with those costs.
--karl--
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