ICANN and Verisign recently announced a proposed settlement of their pending litigation (Verisign had sued ICANN a few years ago and that lawsuit is pending). This settlement is no doubt unfair, unjust & inappropriate... as it allows Verisign to increase the price of .COM Domian Names by 7% per year. And increases ICANN fees from .25 cents to .50 cents per Domain.

Main Highlights of the settlement are:

• The settlement agreement allows Verisign to increase the price of .com domain names to every Registrar by 7% every year. Currently Verisign charges all Registrars $6 for every domain name. The new settlement agreement however allows them to increase prices to all of us without any cost justification. They can simply increase the price by 7% EACH year.

• This means they could double the price in 10 years. Naturally any increase in price would mean all Registrars would have to increase their prices too.
  

• In this settlement proposal ICANN is giving Verisign the chance to make more than 2 Billion Dollars extra over the next 10 years. This may by far be the most expensive settlement proposal the world has witnessed.

• This 2 Billion Dollars is coming out of customer's pockets.

• The new settlement agreement also doubles the ICANN fees charged to Registrars. Currently Registrars pay 25 cents per domain name to ICANN. The new agreement will make that 50 cents. This again means all Registrars will further increase what they charge for dotCom Domain Names.

• The new settlement agreement has a perpetual presumptive renewal clause. This means that Verisign will permanently hold on to the dotCom Registry. There will never be any competitive bid for it, except in a very remote circumstance. Verisign now gets the right to a perpetual monopoly. This means that they are free to do whatever they want with dotCom, without fear of competition. Prices therefore will never reduce.