As we all knew Verisign went ahead and confirmed that they are planning to increase the registration cost for COM/NET domains by the maximum permitted amount of 7%. The new prices (which are paid by the registrars) go in effect on October 15th, 2007. The annual price for .COM registrations increase from $6.00 to $6.42 and .NET registrations will increase from $3.50 to $3.85. We can be sure that the majority of the registrars will pass them on to us.

As a little remedy (yeah right), ICANN has retroactively (from July 1st, 2006 onwards) lowered their ICANN fee to registrars (some registrars, such as GoDaddy, charge this fee separately for endusers) their fee from $0.25 to $0.22.

Meanwhile Jay from DomainTools lets us know that former ICANN Board Member Karl Auerbach told him that Verisign spends $0.14 on maintaining a domain name for a year. I guess their expenses are going to increase a lot, since infrastructure, bandwidth, hardware and storage are getter cheaper more expensive all the time. Oh the irony. But they are going to build us a much safer DNS infrastructure over the next 3 years, and they are going to need all of our money to do so. And then there was this item about increasing their own company value, so their shareholders are happy.

And yes, Jay is right. Verisign has yet to complain about the Domain Tasting and the load it puts on their servers. My guess is they make too much money from the kept names to care about it. And how come the .ORG registry PIR complained about it and was able to push through a resolution that allows them to charge for “excessive” deletions? My take would be that the “keep-rate” of tasted domains in the .ORG namespace is quite a bit lower than the rate for COM/NET domains.

In order to keep things safe, the US Department of Homeland security would also like to participate somehow. How about giving them the private key to the Root servers (thanks Tia), that make our domain names work. After all, how could we implement the new DNSSec without their help. And let’s not forget, that the US government still reserves the right to oversee ICANN/IANA.

Meanwhile ICANN is considering to seek immunity from US laws (thanks Tia). Maybe this is about tax laws? Lawsuits about Registerfly and the like? And what exactly is ICANN doing again, and who are they representing? Who is financing them again?

I’d go along with Frank Schilling here and say: Advance Renew your domains. The good ones, at least. You can save 7% erm, make that 6.5% now (with the ICANN fee being 3 cents lower).