There are far more than roughly two hundred million domain names
registered.
To how many different unique registrants?
Do we have a situation in which the top 10% registrants possess more than half of the extant domains?
How many domains are rented for purely defensive reasons?
How many are part of speculative portfolios?
How many are purchased by bots, thousands at a time, with malicious intent?
Such statistics should be easily collected. Are they?
Many of those are registered to individual or to small businesses
(that are essentially the commercial extension of an individual or
small group of individuals.)
How many? Evidence, please.
I assert that the impact is far less that is claimed. ICANN has had 30 years to collect the demographics of its tenants and certainly has the means to do so. Has it bothered? Or would the reality of how few people it actually impacts be too embarrassing?
I know people in the US who find $25 to be the difference between
eating and not eating at the end of the month.
And those people have no reason to buy domains. Nor does the vast majority of the population, anywhere.
How much more
significant might that $25 cost be to the 95% of the world's
population who do not live in the US?
That 95% of the population has no need for domains. Indeed, far more than 99%.
When I first got involved in ICANN I was confronted by the widespread belief that every person on earth was a potential registrant who simply hadn't been properly sold yet. I immediately drew the comparison, based on its internal self-image, between ICANN as the Once-ler and domains as Thneeds, This belief and the conceit it creates still underlies a lot of ICANN thinking, apparently.
Anyone who has travelled the world -- as those who attend ICANN meetings have, at least a little -- should be looking around them to see how local populations access the Internet. One might see the popularity in some locations of the Meta Free Basics scheme, which provides free or subsidized service to more than 100 million people who access the Internet without using visible domains at all. And of course there are the ccTLDs, completely outside the remit of ICANN, who choose their own pricing and business models to suit local needs should the ICANN model be too onerous.
And to think that business do not pass costs onto consumers -
such as individual internet users - would be a flight of fancy.
I prefer evidence. Got any?
For companies, whether large or small, the impact of domain name
costs may be small, but those costs are there in the financial
calculations. And like those drops of rain and flakes of snow
they accumulate and eventually business will raise their product
prices - raises that will land, often only indirectly, onto
individual users of the internet.
This is laughable. Especially the assertion that prices of domains owned by speculators, not used for any purpose, have any impact on the costs to end-users. And I would just love to see any evidence that the targets of phishing and malware and other scams have had to pay extra ransom as a result of the millions of domains rented specifically to produce the scams having had their rates increased.
Penny by penny, dollar by dollar, Euro by Euro, ICANN's allowance
of unaudited and unquestioned registration fees adds up to well
beyond a $Billion each year. And much of that comes, directly and
indirectly, year after year, from the pockets of individual
internet users.
You keep saying that, without a whole lot of proof. This line of thought is starting to sound faith-based.
One might say "the only ones affected are those individuals who
acquire domain names". Not really. An individual who had to pay
$25 for a domain name for which the underlying cost is a few cents
is paying at least $24 too much.
I tend to agree with Barry that domains are vastly underpriced. If the ultimate intent is to serve the interests of non-registrant end-users, high domain prices would deter speculative and abusive domain rentals, and would promote greater use of third-level domains and other innovations to keep the costs down for legitimate domain uses. The excess of revenue over cost could be then used to fund more-aggressive abuse mitigation regimes. But that won't happen because ICANN needs the money and the domain churn.
But the impact at the source end - where the the monetary numbers
are small (but the numbers of people paying is large) also
deserves attention
"Large" is not a useful metric. Some statistics on what proportion of domains are rented by individuals might make this point credible.
One can argue that ICANN and its bodies formed of individuals
ought not to worry about what are probably the better part of a
$Billion being yanked out of the pockets of individuals.
The one thing upon which we can apparently agree is that the rent-seeking model of ICANN domains extracts value from the Internet rather than adding value. But the world's answer to that appears to be the abandonment of the use of "memorable" domains in favour of other ways of accessing the Internet. And yet the gTLD space is expanding; more and more domains are being used by fewer and fewer people.
Unlike so many of the other assertions being made in this thread, the trend away from typing domains has some research statistics to back it up. I await any research from the opposite direction.