Domain Registration Related News
Unnoticed fee could raise Net domain costs
December 2004
Internet users may soon be required to pay an
additional annual fee for each domain name they
own, thanks to a virtually unnoticed requirement
that will begin to take effect next year.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN), the international organization
that oversees domain names, is moving forward with
a 75-cent annual fee for .net domains starting
next year and is expected to expand the levy to
other generic suffixes such as .com and .biz in
the future.
A small but growing number of critics, however,
charge the proposal amounts to a surreptitious tax
that will allow ICANN to expand its budget with
minimal oversight and divert the money to projects
of dubious merit. When the fee takes effect with
.net, domain name owners will pay an additional $4
million a year, a figure that would leap to more
than $34 million if the fee is extended to .com
and other popular top-level domains. That's far
more than ICANN's annual budget.
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