Who profits from domain names fees

equidistantWhitfield@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 95 points –

There are some people that asked a similar question but I don't want who gets raw revenue, but who gets the probably obscene margins (profits thus) from paying $10-20/year for linking a piece of string and an IP address?

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Three groups:

  1. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit in charge of domain names.
  2. Domain sponsors, the organization that agrees to provide the infrastructure for a particular top level domain. For example, .com is sponsored by Verisign.
  3. The registrar you deal with has a license from the sponsor to sell registrations for a top level domain.

You pay the registrar, the registrar pays the sponsor, and the sponsor pays ICANN.

Don't forget countries. A few, I don't have a list, but including .ai, .pn, are in full control of their domains and do it all on their own infra.

Country-code TLDs are sponsored by the nation-state, but they still fall under the aegis of ICANN.

*Sorta. ICANN has a special relationship with ccTLDs. Registries of gtlds can't put an A record at the root tld.

Yes. Apparently the YouTuber/Web Dev Theo from theo.gg very recently had his domain just...disappear? Due to the country delisting him or something along those lines...he was obviously, and understandably upset in a recent video he released on this subject.

EDIT: Looks like he got it resolved.

But why is it so expensive? Like 20$ for a .org Domain. Fuck that.

Cloudflare does no markup pricing, an .org with them is about $10 a year. https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/

$10/year is super expensive for the cost of linking few thousands of requests to an IP address. The point of my question was: who has obscene margins ?

For .org, the non-profit organization that has "obscene" margins is called PIR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Interest_Registry However, they hand over most of their profits after expenses to their parent organization ISOC (Internet Society) which among other things operate IETF, an important internet standards organization.

Of all the top level domains you can complain about, .org is one of the few without a profit motive.

$20 is dirt cheap lol. They go up to the hundreds or even thousands. But those domains I do wonder why they cost so much, like a .xxx domain

Because someone is willing to pay for them. The internet isn't a nonprofit project anymore like in the 90s when it was run by universities. For better and for worse.

It's really not dirt cheap, it's pure madness.

I pay ~$100 for the hosting of 100gb, where I can place 20 websites and use 25 email addresses (which have unlimited space I believe). I can also use licensed stuff like divi theme or install Nextcloud and some other apps. That hosting is secure, fast and reliable. Customer support responds within a week at most. All that requires real infrastructure and real work. Every single day.

So pray tell why should the registrar, sponsor and the ICANN get 10, 20 or more % of what I pay for all of that? For one single domain? Every single year. It honestly drives me crazy.

And don't even get me started on those new TLDs, pure cancer. Not even talking about the obviously shady stuff, but also nice-sounding things like .art 🤮

The Internet is infrastructure. We deserve an at-cost, straightforward process to put our stuff there; no need for leeching gatekeepers and shady middlemen.

Free domains for everyone!

I assume you weren't being literal about the free domains part, but I agree lol. No reason why one domain should cost $1000 when the other cost $20. It's the exact same technical setup. Prices should vary if they're already bought, but that's about it. That's why I like my .dev TLD because all of those are a flat $15/yr. Yet something cool for the hip techy youngsters would be like a .io domain, but those are $100+. Like why?

A guy told me that the one ripping us off is the TLD owner so I guess the TLD owner is ripping even more people renting .io domains

If domains don't cost anything, what's going to stop spammers from registering literally all of the domain names? Spam domains are already a huge problem, and I can only imagine that problem getting much worse if the gate is not kept.

Handshake DNS has a cost but no one is ripped off since it is with a crypto that gets burned so everyone earns since burning -> deflation

OpenNIC is free, but pretty much almost no one use them. But I think lemmings would love them because of their open and democratic nature.

before it opened for companies to be allowed to do registrations I paid $70 for my first .org domain. Back then you were also required to do 2 years up front then you could lay $35 a year after that. This was back in the late 90's, so $70 was a lot more back then.

$20 is nothing now.

If everyone had a personal domain name, at the pic of world population, the total cost of DNS would be $200'000'000'000, it is higher than the GDP of Hungary ! According to https://www.namebase.io/ the industry already weights half of that whilst the web is super centralized, what the freak