Greed strikes the domain market.  As I predicted a few months ago, the price of domains is going up.  VeriSign, who has the exclusive rights to the .com and .net market has announced that they are raising the wholesale cost of domains by 7%, effective October 15th.

Since their contract with ICANN allows them to, we can expect wholesale domain prices to go up 7% every year for at least the next six years.

What can/should you do?  If you already have a domain name, renew it now for the maximum amount of time you can.  Since most registrars will be passing the new cost on to you, by renewing now you can avoid the increases.

Verisign is expected to make an additional $23,000,000 in the first year of the price increase, without having to provide any additional service.