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?
Three groups:
- The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit in charge of domain names.
- Domain sponsors, the organization that agrees to provide the infrastructure for a particular top level domain. For example,
.comis sponsored by Verisign. - 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.
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.
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 ?
$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
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!
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
