It highly concerns me when domain registries controlling a certain Top-Level Domain (TLD) raise the wholesale prices they charge to registrars (domain retailers) without consultation to domain registrants (domain buyers).

When this happens, all the registrars will need to pay more to the registry for every domain which they register or renew for a customer. They will in turn raise their prices to cover the additional cost to them. Transferring the domains to a different registrar will not help, as all the registrars for that TLD will be forced to raise prices as they all have to pay more to the registry.

Don’t think it hasn’t happened before? A very good example of this happening is when the registry of .SC (Seychelles’ country code TLD) raised the registration and renewal cost to registrars for a .SC domain from about $25/yr all the way to $75/yr (http://www.afilias-grs.info/public/policies/sc). Registrants who previously paid about $35/yr at their registrars (Dotster, I believe) for their .SC domain were then forced to pay upwards of $100/yr to renew it. Many registrants were forced to let their .SC domains expire and it dissuaded other people from registering .SC domains because they feared that the price would double, triple, again the next year.

Many ccTLDs, including .SC, have allowed anyone around the world to register domains in their extension, marketing it with secondary meanings like a TLD for “South Carolina” or “Source” in the case of .SC. There are other extensions like .TV (TLD for Tuvalu but marketed for Television), .WS (TLD for Samoa but marketed for WebSite), or .CC (TLD for Cocos Islands) that do this and attract many people around the world to register domains in those extensions.

So, it is not just people in the country of the ccTLD which are affected when registries raise their prices unreasonably but also people around the world who have registered domains in those ccTLDs for their websites.

I feel that unreasonable price increases at the registry level are very unjust to people who own any domains in that TLD. They will have no choice but to pay the renewal fee demanded by the registry or else, lose their domain. When they originally registered their domain in that TLD, they would have had no idea that they would have to pay a substantially increased cost the following year to keep their domain, their website. Many of these people would have had spent a lot of time and money creating and marketing a website on that domain name, completely in the expectation that they would only have to pay the nominal fee that they had paid to originally register the domain to keep it. If they cannot afford to pay the new renewal fee, they would lose not only the domain itself but any repeat visitors to their website, any brand recognition, and lose any backlinks and search engine rankings that they had worked so hard to build. Individuals, small businesses, organizations are hardest hit by these money grabs.

Worse, registrants are not consulted when the renewal fees for their ccTLD domain names are set to go up. The contracts with the registries for the management of these ccTLDs, which may include terms on registration/renewal pricing are more often than not negotiated behind closed doors.

My question to ICANN is if there are measures (i.e. policies) in place to protect ccTLD registrants from unreasonable increases at the registry level to their domain renewal fees. I feel that these unreasonable increases violate the spirit of the terms under which ICANN delegates the management of these ccTLDs to these registries.

Something needs to be done!

I have also posted about this issue on the ICANN “public participation” website. http://public.icann.org/en/node/1399 and sent ICANN the same message through their Contact Us form, but did not receive a meaningful response.