Americans are deserting .com (1.Viewing)

Forget China, Verisign is now seeing most of its domain sales weakness coming from the US.

The company revealed in its quarterly earnings call last week that .com and .net were down by a combined 1.1 million names in the third quarter, and 850,000 of those losses were from American registrars.

CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts that the weakness was a result of US registrars concentrating more on making existing customers more profitable and less on acquiring new customers.

Registrars are raising prices and pushing more secondary market sales, he said. That’s great for the registrars’ bottom lines, but it doesn’t help Verisign shift product.

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Read more: Americans are deserting .com - Domain Incite

Either that or domainers are running out of money for renewals

And the consistent 10% per year price increases didn't have any effect at all.

Once the US gave ICANN over to foreign interests, the whole organization became one big cash-grab full of kickbacks and sweetheart deals.

DomainRecap said:

And the consistent 10% per year price increases didn't have any effect at all.

Once the US gave ICANN over to foreign interests, the whole organization became one big cash-grab full of kickbacks and sweetheart deals.

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At least they shouldn't be able to increase prices for the next two years.

I don't see the connection to foreign interests, though; VeriSign's right to increase prices stems from a settlement in a lawsuit about Sitefinder. VeriSign was resolving even unregistered domains, and ICANN told them to stop doing that. Verisign sued ICANN, and they settled out of court. The result: Basically keeping the contract assigned to them and allowing price increases.

I see that the Trump administration may favour VeriSign's side over ICANN's and consumers, so they might get the right to further price increases.

FM said:

I don't see the connection to foreign interests, though; VeriSign's right to increase prices stems from a settlement in a lawsuit about Sitefinder. VeriSign was resolving even unregistered domains, and ICANN told them to stop doing that. Verisign sued ICANN, and they settled out of court. The result: Basically keeping the contract assigned to them and allowing price increases.

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My entire point revolves around how Verisign got the contract in the first place, and why it hasn't been revoked.

There are still a few good people at ICANN but their numbers are dwindling quickly.