On January 3, 2020, ICANN announced significant changes to the contract it has with Verisign, Inc. to operate the top-level domains .com.

ICAAN and Verisign inc recently had a secret meeting and decided to hike the price gradually for .com domains. This ignorant decision of ICAAN and Verisign is surely going to affect all the internet users as the registration price and renewal prices and likely to be raised, resulting in having your own domain a much more costly process. Cloudlaya stands strongly against the price hike as it is going to highly affect the internet user.

.com domains

Why the .com domains may get hiked?

The price hike of .com domain is likely to have a much bigger effect than the previous price hike of .org, .biz, .info domain due to the dominance of .com domains among all the TLDs. 144 million of the .com domain among the available 359.8 million domains, results in 40% of all the domains available on the internet. With this contract between ICAAN and Verisign Inc, VeriSign will be allowed to act as a register and ICAAN will receive a bonus of 20 million dollars.

Verisign will be allowed to increase the price of .COM domain by 7% each year in 2020,2021,2022, and 2023. Then there will be a freeze of two years and then again price hike by 7% annually by 2026-2029, then another 2 years of “Freeze”. This cycle will continue, meaning over the course of 10 years the price of .COM domain will increase by 70% of the current price.

We are quite not sure as to what will happen next but let’s hope that price increase will not affect the normal users and the access to the internet and knowledge will not be hindered by this unilateral decision made by ICANN staff.

If you want to get your .com domain for personal or enterprise needs, we at Cloudlaya are on standby for your service. Ring us anytime or visit our contact page.