4) The registrar fee. If ICANN were to get rid of the annual fee, it would have to raise the proposed $.25/transaction to $.36/transaction in order to make up for the difference.
I would appreciate it if you did not overlook the fact that that is exactly what the new budget is doing. It is increasing the per domain fee of SMALLER Registrars by $0.60 and above while not doing the same to larger Registrars. It is quite easy to make the above statement when Register.com is going to have a less than 1 cent impact on their per domain cost
to be honest that while some small registrars truly operate solely as registrars, others make very large margins by selling connections or other services for which domain names are simply loss leaders, and they will not be impacted by a nominal annual fee.
Until WLS (which incidentally has been approved) comes in. So what is the recourse now - * the backorder money that smaller registrars were making now goes to Verisign Registry * the legitimate money that smaller registrars were making now cant be made because suddenly their cost has shot through the roof So in two consecutive quarters ICANN has decided to cut out the smaller registrars completely by stifling all possible sources of making operational profit bhavin