Verisign and ICANN agreement guarantees You Will pay a Lot for your Domain name

ICANN and Verisign recently announced a proposed ettlement of their pending litigation. I believe that the current terms of this settlement will have a direct and negative impact on domain name ownership cost.

ICANN is a private-sector body that operates under contract from America's government and provides coordination of the domain-name system (such as .com and .net), national addresses (such a France's .fr) and routing numbers (which identify traffic on the Internet). Here are its Key Points:
* The proposal allows Verisign to increase the price of .com domain names by 7% each year. Currently, prices are capped.
* The proposal doubles the fees that accredited registrars must pay to ICANN.
* The cancellation terms between ICANN and Verisign would be difficult to implement. Therefore, Verisign will essentially gain perpetual control of the .com registry. This effectively eliminates all incentive for Verisign to improve quality of service or maintain the affordable cost of a domain name (between $15 and $25). Whoever controls the domain names (in VeriSign's case .com and .net) controls the Internet. "Nevertheless, ICANN's stewardship has succeeded because its focus has been not on politics, but on making the network as efficient as possible ."(Economist Oct. 6 2005)

In June of this year President George Bush stated that America will retain its authority over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) but in October of this same year control of the .com and .net domain names is being turned over to Verisign whose purpose is to make more money by building in guaranteed cost hikes of %7 per year until 2012. This is in spite of the fact that other costs on building and maintaining the Internet Infrastructure continues to spiral downwards.

Last year, VeriSign unilaterally sought to commercialize a technical process related to .com that created problems for some users. ICANN ordered VeriSign to stop. In turn, the firm sued ICANN, questioning its authority.

In September of last year Verisign again made an effort to corner the market on acquiring the rights to back ordering domain names, through snapnames, and charging for the service even if the domain name never became available. More detail about VeriSign efforts to ransom domain name rights next week. See http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/verisign/settlement-agreements.htm