"Under no circumstances should VeriSign be allowed to raise .COM prices without cost-based justification," Parsons said. "If VeriSign does request an increase, it needs to result in competitive bidding for the registry contract. This would certainly create lower prices, not higher, just as it did for the
.NET registry."
Ya!
7% indefinitely seems a bit much, and the automatic (did I read that right) after 2012 seems weird, but I think GoDaddy is wrong if they think that prices should go down or don't deserve some kind of increase.
The other problem here is that unless their is a profit motive, this will have to be handed off to a government.
Do you really want that? And do you really want it handed off to the lowest bidder?
Maybe if IBM put in a bid, I think it would be OK, but even then I'd rather a smaller player like Verisign to have it.
There might be less domain squatting if the .com domain name was more expensive.
Squatting means when someone buys a domain which tries to gain from another entity's trademark. This was the case with bmw.com. Someone bought the bmw.com domain and wanted to sell it to bmw for millions; instead of paying up like other companies had up to that point, bmw took the squatter to court and got their domain.
I hope that I have my history right. :)
In short, there is already a law for squatting; what it might cut down on is parking domains for years without using it for anything.
And that is another legitimate concern...if all the supporting information is unavailable how can we know an increase is needed or not? Are you just going to take their word for it? That's not good business.
Just my opinion of course. ;)
