[Comments-com-amendment-3-03jan20] Domain fees should decrease or vanish, not increase

[Brad Templeton]

I am shocked at the proposal to increase annual charges for maintenance
of existing .com domains (or any other domains for that matter.)

There is not clear reason, in fact, that there are any significant costs
in maintaining a domain after its registration which justify annual
renewal fees of any significant amount.   One can argue why the first
registration might have a cost, but the cost is much lower in subsequent
years, so much lower that it can be argued that a basic fee should cover
many years or even a lifetime.

Of course, it costs money to remain the core servers for a TLD to
respond to requests for where the server is for any subdomain, and to
respond to much rarer whois requests.   A bulk of the cost of continuing
a domain is the cost of billing for the additional year, or so we would
see it if we calculated.

Domains vary.  While the domain "google.com" is fetched extremely
frequently, it is also cached almost everywhere, but even so, small
domains that are rarely referenced incur extremely low costs to maintain
and serve.    It might be reasonable to assess an annual charge, even an
increasing annual charge, for a high use domain, but for low-use
domains, there should be no annual cost at all.  Instead, cost should
come only when wishing to change data, and even then only if the change
is unusual and not automated.   The cost for the computers is trivial
and dropping with time on Moore's Law curves.  It is only the cost of
programming and sysadmin which increase with time.

For the latter, if more revenue is needed, make it for new registrations
in a domain, not the maintenance of old ones.

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