Dot Com Domain News

[GhostShip]

While I,m sure that there are legal safeguards on any "backdoor" deals, many folks keep an eye on this important domain and question its continued value in being a monopoly.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6199394.stm

The US government has given its blessing to a controversial deal over the future of the lucrative .com net domain.
The deal gives .com administrator Verisign control over the domain until 2012.
The  Department of Commerce retains some oversight of Verisign and has final approval of any price rises to renew .com net addresses.
Critics said the deal gave Verisign a monopoly hold on the iconic domain.

Details of that deal were handed over to the US Department of Commerce in March 2006. Although the internet is increasingly an international phenomenon, the US retains the right to rubber-stamp Icann decisions on how the infrastructure operates.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the US Department of Commerce, has spent the last nine months scrutinising the proposed agreement and reviewing comments made on it by net bodies and companies.
Verisign has run the .com domain since 1999 and has now won the right to keep on controlling it until 2012. The deal also gives it the right to raise prices to renew .com domains in four of the six years of the contract.

Price rises are limited to 7% in any year and six months notice must be given of any proposed increase.

Lets hope things go as smoothly for all .com users as they have been so far, it would be a shame to see the web split into two because business interests where put ahead of maintaining the global public resource the internet has become.

[KM]

verisign have done a good job of running things, the prices are cheaper than with most other domain names (although that may be to do with the fact that there are so many more domains so they don't need to charge as much), a 7% increase is a few pence, nothing that's going to break the bank

...i have no problems with them continuing to run it

[GhostShip]

I think you missed the details there KM, the US government limited the price not verisign.

[KM]

no, ICANN did, and the US Government just rubber stamped it - and if you think it's new information that the US government technically retais a veto on a handful of things, i believe you yourself posted about it a while back

in reality the US government can't do anything that the ISPs dont want, they currently have a vito over decisions of ICANN, and ICANN has absolutely no power at all... so vito over an organisation with no power, great!

ICANN only gets to make a handful of decisions like who runs a few TLDs, and who runs which IP Address space, and then they can only make the decisions that the ISPs want - if they turned around and said something stupid like no ISP can have more than a class B of IP Addresses then it would not be practical for larger ISPs, who would just turn around and give themselves IP Addresses without ICANN, if ICANN turned around and said they wanted to completely scrap the .com TLD then the ISPs would ignore them and simply add verisign to their DNS servers themselves

ICANN ave no actual power, they just act as if they do, in reality the only power they have is the fact that ISPs do what they say because it makes sense, ultimately the power is with those that implement decisions, not those who make them