VeriSign May Be Able to Continue Hiking .Net Prices 10% Per Year

Proposed contract renewal allows for huge price increases on .net domain registrations.

ICANN’s contract with VeriSign for running the .net domain name registry expires at the end of June.

Thanks to a “presumptive renewal” clause, the contract won’t be put out for bidding. VeriSign also gets to pick up any goodies that rival registries have managed to get in their contracts.

ICANN just posted the proposed renewal agreement for .net. It gives VeriSign the ability to keep hiking the .net registration fee by 10% per year.

The proposed contract would also give VeriSign more flexibility for collecting data — including non-existent domain data — and using this to market domain names.

A comment period for the contract runs through May 10.