ICANN to charge new fees to domain name owners…
From the CNET.com:
Unnoticed fee could raise Net domain costs
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international organization that oversees domain names, is moving forward with a 75-cent annual fee for .net domains starting next year and is expected to expand the levy to other generic suffixes such as .com and .biz in the future.
A small but growing number of critics, however, charge the proposal amounts to a surreptitious tax that will allow ICANN to expand its budget with minimal oversight and divert the money to projects of dubious merit. When the fee takes effect with .net, domain name owners will pay an additional $4 million a year, a figure that would leap to more than $34 million if the fee is extended to .com and other popular top-level domains. That’s far more than ICANN’s annual budget.
The forthcoming requirement from ICANN is striking because the organization had proposed a $1 annual tax on domain names five years ago and was soundly rebuked by politicians and conservative activists. In addition, President Bush and Congress signaled their distaste for online taxation by enacting a moratorium earlier this month curbing taxes on Internet access.
The 75-cent annual charge would not be the first that’s payable to ICANN; the group recently imposed a 25-cent annual charge on .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and .name domains. With the forthcoming .net charge, ICANN’s cut of those domain name registrations would increase to $1 a year. (About 46 million domain names are registered that end in the six most popular suffixes, according to Domain Intelligence.)
ICANN defends the new levy as a way to expand and stabilize its annual budget, which was thrown into turmoil when scores of domain name registrars banded together this year to protest a near-doubling of the organization’s spending. Targeting domain name owners may result in less organized opposition, ICANN seems to have concluded.
- I have a very uneasy feeling about ICANN’s action here, and taxation in general on the Internet. While I highly doubt that a 75 cent annual fee would be considered burdensome on any domain name owner, this of course is a mere starting point. For those of us who pay phone bills and cable bills, we all know how “”new charges”" that aren’t taxes tend to pile up rather quick, and ICANN has far, far less regulatory oversight than any of our phone and cable operators…
