>Verisign ... will increase the wholesale price it charges registrars for .com registrations and renewals from $7.85 to $8.39.

It's 54 cents, in case anyone else was wondering.

Source: https://domainnamewire.com/2021/02/11/breaking-verisign-anno...

tjbiddle

Lol - So, a 7% raise. Totally reasonable even given standard inflation.

ohashi

Cost to operate a registry, estimates are under $1/domain - costs have been decreasing. Why should VeriSign get an indefinite monopoly with a no bid contract that renews and allows price increases? There's no benefit to the internet as a whole, where .ORG at least is plausibly going to a non profit (as hard as they tried to sell off to private equity).

silisili

As someone with industry knowledge, it's way, way under $1 per domain. It's little more than an xml parser, simple business logic and cron jobs, a database, and support. I imagine a single motivated person could do it themselves, minus support. Honestly, sending a single email is more tech intensive than registering a domain.

jart

There were a lot of people who thought like you and thought they could just whip up some perl scripts to do it. Then they all got hacked, and since when you hack a domain registry, you hack every domain it manages too, they'd usually snag a google.whatever domain and say haha we hacked google. Eventually Google got so angry about this happening that they sent a crack team of security experts to build a top-level domain registry the right way, and made it open source. https://github.com/google/nomulus It wasn't easy.