VeriSign, which currently has the contract to run the master .com and .net databases, broadly endorses the 75-cent fee. Tom Galvin, a VeriSign vice president, said his company is "supportive of the idea of a development fund" of the sort that ICANN wants to create through domain name levies.
It could "better the Internet either by improving the stability and security of the Internet or helping with best practices or helping to move Internet development into other regions", Galvin said. "There are a lot of ways to do that. The fee is one of them."
According to the limited information that ICANN has made available, the fund in part will effectively transfer money from people in developed countries that use .net and similar domains to less-developed countries in Africa and South America. The fund will "enable further participation in the ICANN mission by developing country stakeholders", ICANN says, perhaps by paying travel costs so representatives from those nations can attend ICANN meetings.
The Commerce Department, which has some oversight authority over ICANN, said that the 75-cent fee "appears to be consistent" with the Bush administration's earlier request that ICANN broaden its funding base. That request says that ICANN should "secure the necessary financial and personnel resources critical to long-term sustainability of the organisation."
In 1999, when ICANN had proposed a $1 annual fee for each domain name, the Clinton administration shot it down. Andrew Pincus, general counsel for the Commerce Department at the time, wrote: "ICANN should eliminate the $1 per-year per domain name registration user fee."
"The world was very different five or more years ago," said Clyde Ensslin, a spokesman for the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration.
Tim Ruiz, vice-president for domain services at GoDaddy, said: "We don't really have a position" on the 75-cent annual fee for .net. GoDaddy says its customers have registered more than 5.3 million domains.
Ruiz said he would be concerned if the fee were extended to other domains and ICANN's budget continued to balloon unchecked. It nearly doubled, from $8.3m to $15.8m, for the fiscal year ending in June 2005. "But that's making a lot of assumptions," Ruiz said.
