Member
Has anyone actually read those PDFs? I tried once and gave up after 80 pages of "stakeholder engagement" budget
The pass-through explanation makes sense but it still feels like a tax we can't vote on
This is my working theory tbh
Seven days and nobody's going to touch Jane's offer to audit an invoice? That's the real tragedy here.
Having sat through a few of those ICANN public forums, I can confirm the coffee is mediocre and the slides are endless. Whether that explains the budget line is between them and their auditors.
The $0.18 itself is contractually pass-through for gTLDs, so Contabo's not padding it. Whether the fee *should* exist is a different argument, and one that requires caring about ICANN policy development. Most people would rather watch paint dry.
If someone actually wants to chase this, the FY financials are in their annual report. Good luck with the PDF.
Still thinking about this 9 days later.
Honestly the IANA functions line item is what gets me. HostHatch broke out their pass-through fees last year and it was still opaque as hell.
Has anyone actually filed a FOIA-adjacent request for ICANN contractor rates or is that a waste of time
Yeah that's like forty bucks a year for you just in fees. For nothing you can point at.
Jane thanks for confirming the pass-through, but "at cost" just moves the question one room over. Someone's still cashing the check.
I keep coming back to YuriDavid's tier 2 theory. Geneva isn't cheap.
Member
21 days and nobody wants to defend the yacht theory
That's $3.60 a year in pure ICANN tribute
For a text file that was working fine in 1985
Still waiting on someone to post the PDF breakdown
My will to live is not high enough to do it myself
Member
Small correction to my earlier post — ccTLDs aren't strictly "set their own fee structures" across the board, some still flow through similar arrangements depending on the registry. Should have been clearer there
Has anyone actually dug through those PDFs and found a satisfying breakdown? Genuinely curious if the trail goes somewhere concrete or just dissolves into "operational overhead"
54 days but I keep thinking about this
The new TLDs that did launch are mostly just more expensive real estate with worse SEO, so if there was a black budget they did a terrible job
I looked at my last CloudCone invoice and they listed it as "regulatory recovery fee" instead of ICANN fee, same eighteen cents
Makes me wonder how many people never notice because the label keeps changing
Anyone ever actually read one of those ICANN PDFs or are we all just assuming someone else did
65 days but this still bugs me.
Anyone else notice the label change or did I just miss a memo
84 days and nobody mentioned the obvious — this isn't even Contabo's call, they just collect it
Yeah no shade to Jane but the real question is why every registrar frames it like a service fee instead of "mandatory ICANN tax"
I moved a batch to OVHcloud last year, same line item, same 18 cents
At 20+ domains Doug you're basically buying ICANN a nice dinner every year
Did anyone ever actually read those PDFs YuriDavid mentioned or are we all just accepting the black budget theory
87 days but this still bugs me
I used to work near one of those ICANN meeting hotels, the amount of catered coffee alone could fund a small datacenter
The real question is why registrars treat it as a separate line item at all — OVHcloud and Vultr both bury it in the headline price and nobody complains
Makes you wonder if the transparency is actually just marketing
