[rovr138]

I’m not opposed to it if needed. This part is the one that convinced me it shouldn’t happen right now,

> $7.85 of your registration or renewal payment goes to Verisign. The actual cost to Verisign to provide the expensive infrastructure and the management of the registry has been estimated at between $2.50 to $2.90 per domain name per year. Other registries have said they can offer the same services for cheaper.

I’m wondering why the ICANN wouldn’t simply go to another company that would provide them the same service at that same rate. Is Verisign innovating somehow?

[geofft]

"Has been estimated" by others?

I'm not a fan of government-style lowest-bidder procurement for something as critical as .com. Among other things, I assume this involves operating the .com DNS servers, and it seems like the current operators are probably uniquely positioned to understand what makes that different from operating e.g. .party or .racing, what weird load patterns it sees, maybe even how much to pay the folks who know the hard parts to keep doing this, etc. Obviously it would be better for the world if Verisign were transparent about their operations and it could be moved, but for potentially $5/domain name/year, forcing the change doesn't seem valuable. (If it were $50, sure, it'd be worth thinking about.)

[fgonzag]

Critical infrastructure operated by a single company. That can't ever go wrong, provider redundancy is overrated.

[geofft]

Not that I disagree, but wouldn't that require increasing the price even more so you could pay both companies?

I don't think the argument for "We're paying Verisign too much to be a single point of failure, so let's pay someone else who's never done it less to be a different single point of failure" really holds up.

[lucb1e]

> I’m wondering why the ICANN wouldn’t simply go to another company

Do also consider the cost of change. I don't know if it's worth it, and it might be worth it just for keeping the 'market' competitive, but this is another factor.