Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Who gets registrar money?

I sometimes wonder who gets the billions of dollars which are paid in to buy domains. Does anybody know? It must be the closest thing to a licence to print money.

And of course then they just "create more land", as in the new .xxx scheme. Basically anybody with any important domain has to pay the (obviously!) exorbitant fees (over a hundred bucks per year per domain, plus a one time reg fee of $130, otherwise you would soon see avatar.xxx, disney.xxx, lindsaylohan.xxx, etc etc. I get dizzy just trying to imagine how much low-hanging lucre has been whipped up and plucked from thin air in this caper.

I guess it was even worse back in the nineties, when for years Network Solutions had an artificial monopoly on selling domains. After it was democratized, at least the general prices dropped dramatically.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It directly finances Al Qaida.

Anna said...

Good question!