On 08/04/2026 23:27, mike palage.com via CPWG wrote:
On the issue of vertical integration, the ICANN Board acted unilaterally in approving the change and has never undertaken a proper economic or legal analysis of its decision. The listing/marketing fees that Registrars are imposing on Registry Operators are a silent tax on prospective TLD applicants that most do not fully appreciate.
Afternoon all, I missed the last two calls due to a power failure making my main Windows PC unbootable. There may be a serious problem with ICANN's lack of data on registries and registrars that could affect any economic analysis. This is due to the state of registry reporting and also the sheer volume of data involved. A few years ago at one of the meetings/webinars, I asked an ICANN VP if it had historical data on registry reports and whether it had extracted, transformed and loaded the data. He replied that it had not. During a Covid lockdown, I took a look at the problem and integrated all the ICANN registry report data (CSV format, text format, PDF format, partial data with no ianai-ids etc). ICANN then tried to implement its Open Data project with a piece of software that was simply not able to integrate the existing data which ICANN had and there was an assumption made (not a good one) that all of the registry reports were in the same comma separated variable (CSV) format and had no errors. The project seems to have been consigned to that graveyard of ICANN projects that seemed good ideas at the time. However, I still update databases here with all that ICANN registry/registrar report data on a per gTLD and per registrar basis each month. The registry report dataset covers July 2001 to December 2025 (current). The data is also used to compute the HHI figure for each gTLD in each month to show the market concentration in each gTLD along with calculating the blended renewal rates from that data. The First Renewal Rates ( on a per domain name basis and not in the ICANN registry reports) for each gTLD is calculated for these monthly HosterStats reports and it is not unusual to see 80% of domain names in some gTLDs not being renewed. That is where the impact of bulk registrations appears because most domain names registered for nefarious purposes are one year registrations. Not only is the ICANN registry/registrars data in a database here, the domain names and their nameservers/hoster are also stored in the databases. And they go back to 2000. Both datasets would be usable for ecnomic studies and analysis. One of the monthly reports tracks the renewal rates across the registrars and brands. There are definitely some registrars that focus on discounts to drive registration volume.The Registrars and Resellers report has categorised brands covering 95% of the gTLD market. There is a significant percentage of resellers in the gTLD market. The data on the hidden resellers that use their registrar's DNS and their own web hosting is also generated monthly. Godaddy, for example, has over 12,000 of these hidden resellers. The sizes of these hidden resellers can vary with the smallest having a single gTLD website. If Vertical Integration means that a registry operator can operate both gTLDs and registrars, then the results have been mixed. One of the main examples was the Uniregistry gTLDs. In the irrational exuberence of the 2012 round, the registry operator registered thousands of potentially "good" domain names via its associated registrar. This effectively killed the landrush period in those gTLDs. Despite some purists disliking domain name speculation, it is an essential part of the launch of a TLD because it drives interest and awareness. Without interest and awareness, there are few registrations. The reaction what was effectively the plundering of gTLDs by the registry operator from the Domainer community was: why should we make you rich? The landrush period in the launch of a new TLD is a very important period when a new TLD gets most of its initial registrations. There is a level of speculation and domain names are heavily traded during this period. For most of these gTLDs, that didn't happen. The registry operator then increased the renewal prices leading to its gTLDs being removed from Godaddy. For a gTLD targeting the US market, having shelf space on Godaddy is essential. Vertical Integration might have seemed like a good idea at the time. It was another far more insidious idea that has caused problems for the 2012 round and that's the lack of price certainty. It seems that nobody was worried about how the registrants would cope with this.This might have been an At-Large issue rather than a CPH one. With .COM/NET, there is a certainty about registration and renewal fees. The new gTLD registries have much more control over their pricing. As a result, there is a number of different business models used by the registries and registrars. None of the new gTLDs became .COM killers. The heavy discounting model where there is massive discounts for the first year with the renewal rate shooting up to about $30 in the second means that 90% or more of heavily discounted registrations will not renew for a second year. Bulk registrations are a part of that. There is also a level of sweating the assets with some of the legacy gTLDs where renewal fees keep increasting year on year to target brand protection registrations. The most damange caused to the gTLDs is not from DNS Abuse. It was the abject failure of ICANN's board to deal with Domain Tasting in the 2005-2008 period. That led to the rise of the ccTLDs and outside the US, it is largely a ccTLD world now with even the .COM falling back to just over replacement level in many countries.Against all that, there is still the problem of DNS Abuse. The position of the CPH on who deals with DNS Abuse and what can be done is understandable. They have to operate in their own jurisdictions. For many registries, the domain names are not highly profitable and they make more from value added services like web hosting. They are also highly limited about what actions they can take against DNS Abuse. And even then there are different categories. Abusive registrations are different from compromised websites. Lurking in the background is the issue of Bulk Registrations. That is a problem that some registries and registrars may not want to address because their very existence depends on being able to offer discounted registrations. Some registrars even appear to have the characteristics of discount chasers with sawtooth registration and deletions patterns over gTLDs and years. For registry operators, being able to offer discounts is essential. On the Economics side of things, has ICANN hired a new economist yet?
Anyone up for an economic fact-finding excursion? I know where the bodies are buried. I just need some help digging them up and documenting them.
Every month, I publish reports on registrations activities, renewal activities, the web hosting market. The data on ICANN registrars has the year change, the five year change, the ten year change, the fifteen year change and the twenty year change for each registrar's DUMs. It is difficult not to be completely cynical about ICANN management's approach to understanding the gTLD market. They can order bespoke economic studies to justify their decisions. The problem is that many of these economists simply do not understand the dynamics and politics of the domain name business. Thus when these reports mention the academically sound theory of product substitution by new gTLDs, people in the business knew that it was just not going to happen. An economic analysis would be a good thing, but the business changes rapidly. This year's domain name market is different from last year's and those of previous years. The problem with a good economic analysis is that ICANN might not like what it sees and especially when it comes to the gTLD registration and hosting patters across developing markets. Regards...jmcc -- ********************************************************** John McCormac * e-mail: jmcc@hosterstats.com MC2 * web: http://www.hosterstats.com/ 22 Viewmount * Domain Registrations Statistics Waterford * Domnomics - the business of domain names Ireland * https://amzn.to/2OPtEIO IE * Skype: hosterstats.com ********************************************************** -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com