Exercising its contractual right to raise prices, VeriSign is once again increasing the base registration fees for .com and .net domain names. It’s the second increase in as many years since the company extended its control of those two TLDs in 2006.
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Currently, registrars pay VeriSign $6.42 per .com domain and $3.85 for .net domains. Come October, those prices will increase to $6.86 and $4.23, respectively. Those price hikes are the maximum 7 percent allowable (to the penny) under VeriSign’s contract (which runs through 2012) with ICANN. Chances are, registrars will pass the price increase on to customers.
In a press release justifying the higher prices, VeriSign cited increases in the amount of traffic and cyber attacks on the global TLD infrastructure it is responsible for. The company says it is boosting infrastructure capacity ten-fold by 2010 via its Project Titan, as well as increasing DNS capacity from 400 billion daily queries to over four trillion, even though it currently only processes a peak of 33 billion queries per day under current conditions. (link)
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