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As .gov changes hands, would Verisign run it for free?
The .gov top-level domain is moving for the first time since 1997, and the new owner is promising some pricing changes from next year.
The US General Services Administration has been running .gov, one of the original gTLDs, for almost a quarter-century, but next month it will be taken over by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
No changes have been made at IANA yet, but CISA is talking of the handover as if it is a done deal.
It will be the first time ICANN has been asked to redelegate what is essentially an uncontracted gTLD with some of the characteristics of a ccTLD. To be honest, I’ve no idea what rules even apply here.
The move was mandated by the DOTGOV Act of 2019, which was incorporated in a recently passed US spending bill.
Legislators wanted to improve .gov’s usefulness by increasing its public profile and security.
The bill was quite adamant that .gov domains should be priced at “no cost or a negligible cost”, but there’s a catch — Verisign runs the technical infrastructure for the domain, and currently charges $400 per domain per year.
According to CISA, “The way .gov domains are priced is tied closely with the service contract to operate the TLD, and change in the price of a domain is not expected until next year.”
So we’re looking at either a contract renegotiation or a rebid.
Frankly, given the really rather generous money-printing machine the US government has granted Verisign with its perpetual right to run .com and increase its profit margins in most years, it seems to me the company should be running it for free.
The .gov zone currently has domains measured in the low thousand.
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