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 $10-20/year for linking a piece of string and an IP address?
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Chiefly the domain name registrar.
So if it is the guys who owns the TLDs who rip everyone off, if a company bought a TLD and started to rent it at production price, it would finally enable domain names at like one cent or one dollar? (most websites have like 10 requests and they have a single IP, I don’t get why one cent would be impossible)
Three groups:
- The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the non-profit in charge of domain names.
- Domain sponsors, the organization that agrees to provide the infrastructure for a particular top level domain. For example,
.comis sponsored by Verisign. - The registrar you deal with has a license from the sponsor to sell registrations for a top level domain.
You pay the registrar, the registrar pays the sponsor, and the sponsor pays ICANN.
But why is it so expensive? Like 20$ for a .org Domain. Fuck that.
Cloudflare does no markup pricing, an .org with them is about $10 a year. https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/
$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 ?
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.
