Registry increases price for .com and .net once more

On January 15th 2012 Verisign, the registry which is responsible for the management of the .com and .net extension, will increase the price once more. They last increased the price in July 2010.

In 2006 an agreement was made between Verisign (.com and .net registry) and ICANN, the umbrella organisation for all generic extensions. This agreement will end in 2012 and allows Verisign to increase the price for the .com extension 4 times during 6 years with a maximum of 7% per increase. It turns out Verisign eagerly used this agreement. With this last price increase which will happen in January, the price will have been increased 4 times in the last 6 years. Every time the price was increased by 7%.

In 2011 Verisign renewed their agreement with ICANN for the .net domain. This agreement is valid until 2017 and allows Verisign to increase the price of the .net extension by 10% every calendar year. Verisign also seems happy to use the new agreement since the price for the .net domain will increase by 10% on January 15th 2012.

At the end of 2012, the agreement between Verisign and ICANN for .com will also need to be renewed. Question is or this will happen without any problem since some protest voices were heard when the .net agreement was almost automatically renewed earlier this year.

ICANN allows Verisign to increase their prices to cover the costs they make in order to manage and secure to .com and .net domain. If those costs have increased (significantly) is hard to find out. However we do notice that for country extensions prices tend to decrease. For several cheaper country extensions volume prices are almost 50% lower of what Verisign asks for a .com domain name.