Domain Name Statistics

This is an excellent site on domain name statistics. Looking at the pie makes you realise how delicious it is for Verisign at $6 per domain and a new 7% allowable annual increase. Hop255 wonders how that impacts of firms like GoDaddy who have taken registrations for 10 years at a fixed price. Do they have a like deal with Verisign? We assume not as until now Verisign could not guarantee it would be the registry. That raises the question as to whether the registry fee could be higher than the retail price paid by the GoDaddy customer who has signed up for 10 years. More generally a good deal for Verisign and probbaly for ICANN but who was looking out for users? A competitive and transparent process should have been used to decide the registry operator.