There are some people that asked a similar question but I don’t want who gets raw revenue, but who gets the probably obscene margins (profits thus) from paying $10-20/year for linking a piece of string and an IP address?

    • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.com
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      1 year ago

      OpenNIC is free, but pretty much almost no one use them. But I think lemmings would love them because of their open and democratic nature.

      • equidistantWhitfield@lemmy.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        $10/year is super expensive for the cost of linking few thousands of requests to an IP address. The point of my question was: who has obscene margins ?

        • Johan@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          For .org, the non-profit organization that has “obscene” margins is called PIR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Interest_Registry However, they hand over most of their profits after expenses to their parent organization ISOC (Internet Society) which among other things operate IETF, an important internet standards organization.

          Of all the top level domains you can complain about, .org is one of the few without a profit motive.

    • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      $20 is dirt cheap lol. They go up to the hundreds or even thousands. But those domains I do wonder why they cost so much, like a .xxx domain

      • birdcat@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        It’s really not dirt cheap, it’s pure madness.

        I pay ~$100 for the hosting of 100gb, where I can place 20 websites and use 25 email addresses (which have unlimited space I believe). I can also use licensed stuff like divi theme or install Nextcloud and some other apps. That hosting is secure, fast and reliable. Customer support responds within a week at most. All that requires real infrastructure and real work. Every single day.

        So pray tell why should the registrar, sponsor and the ICANN get 10, 20 or more % of what I pay for all of that? For one single domain? Every single year. It honestly drives me crazy.

        And don’t even get me started on those new TLDs, pure cancer. Not even talking about the obviously shady stuff, but also nice-sounding things like .art 🤮

        The Internet is infrastructure. We deserve an at-cost, straightforward process to put our stuff there; no need for leeching gatekeepers and shady middlemen.

        Free domains for everyone!

        • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I assume you weren’t being literal about the free domains part, but I agree lol. No reason why one domain should cost $1000 when the other cost $20. It’s the exact same technical setup. Prices should vary if they’re already bought, but that’s about it. That’s why I like my .dev TLD because all of those are a flat $15/yr. Yet something cool for the hip techy youngsters would be like a .io domain, but those are $100+. Like why?

          • equidistantWhitfield@lemmy.mlOP
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            1 year ago

            A guy told me that the one ripping us off is the TLD owner so I guess the TLD owner is ripping even more people renting .io domains

        • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          If domains don’t cost anything, what’s going to stop spammers from registering literally all of the domain names? Spam domains are already a huge problem, and I can only imagine that problem getting much worse if the gate is not kept.

          • equidistantWhitfield@lemmy.mlOP
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            1 year ago

            Handshake DNS has a cost but no one is ripped off since it is with a crypto that gets burned so everyone earns since burning -> deflation

    • smstnitc@lemmy2.addictmud.org
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      1 year ago

      before it opened for companies to be allowed to do registrations I paid $70 for my first .org domain. Back then you were also required to do 2 years up front then you could lay $35 a year after that. This was back in the late 90’s, so $70 was a lot more back then.

      $20 is nothing now.

      • equidistantWhitfield@lemmy.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        If everyone had a personal domain name, at the pic of world population, the total cost of DNS would be $200’000’000’000, it is higher than the GDP of Hungary ! According to https://www.namebase.io/ the industry already weights half of that whilst the web is super centralized, what the freak