"ICANN hopes to extend (the fee) to all generic top-level domains when they come up for renewal in years to come," Crawford said. "ICANN has enormous power at exactly these moments. It's nonnegotiable."
VeriSign's contract to operate the master database for .com expires in November 2007, which offers ICANN an opportunity to try to insert the requirement during the renewal process. ICANN's Pritz declined to comment, saying "it's not appropriate at this stage of the game to speculate about the .com [process]."
Shifting sources of revenue
Under its existing agreement with ICANN, VeriSign is permitted to charge resellers $6 for each .com or .net name, a condition that effectively imposes a price floor for each domain. GoDaddy charges $8.95 for a .com or .net domain, for example, while Yahoo Domains will sell the first domain a customer purchases for $4.98 and the remainder for $9.95. Other suffixes with lower price floors are cheaper: The market price for a .biz domain is around $5.
When the bidding to run .net is complete a few months from now, the winning bidder is expected to come up with an annual per-domain charge that's under $6. Even with the additional 75-cent fee imposed, ICANN estimates, consumers will pay less than they do today -- though critics argue that domain name owners would save even more money if ICANN didn't levy a new tax.
"The way they're going about implementing this tax is sneaky," said Arrison of the Pacific Research Institute. "But it's more than that. It's devious. People won't necessarily notice because if the price goes down, who will complain? It's cause for worry that it's being done in such a careful way."
Crawford, the Cardoza law professor, says the problem stems from unaccountability. "The US Department of Commerce doesn't want to appear to be delegating ICANN any power, so as a result it's not exercising any oversight authority. So ICANN is effectively responsible to no one."
