When Verisign recently increased the price of a .com domain by 67 cents, people were furious.

Verisign has been ridiculed for increasing the price of .com domains every year it can and by the maximum amount it is allowed to. Verisign seems to not understand the 7% price hike per year is a maximum, not a minimum.

But I digress. It's understandable that people would be upset that TLD owners have this much power over us.

It's not about the amount Verisign increased .com domains by. 67 cents probably won't hurt many people. The problem is that you, as owner of a .com website, can't do anything.

There's no Verisign competitor that you can go to if you don't like the price hikes. Verisign quite literally owns (at least for now) the .com TLD. You can't go anywhere else.

With any other subscription payment in life, there are alternatives. With web hosting, for example, if you don't like your hosting company, there are countless others you can switch to.

So if you run a website and your host ups the prices, you can switch hosts, because there is competition. And it's like this for all other subscription purchases. But not domains.

Let's assume we're in some dystopian world where Verisign still owns .com and there are no more rules regarding how much they're allowed to up the price:

So you buy MyCoolWebsite.com for a price you're cool with and publish loads of articles. Then out of nowhere, Verisign ups the price to an amount you can no longer pay.

Okay. One might think. Let's just buy MyCoolWebsite.org and move all the content there. Well, you have a couple problems:

1. Search engines won't automatically transfer your old SEO ranking to your new domain
2. Old links won't automatically redirect to your new domain

The first problem can be solved by having all your old .com links 301 redirect to your new .org domain. And after enough time has passed, eventually search engines should have transferred most of your SEO rankings to your new domain.

The real issue is with the second problem. Let's say you buy MyCoolWebsite.org, purchase MyCoolWebsite.com for another year, and 301 it to give search engines enough time to recognize your new domain. Then you get rid of MyCoolWebsite.com.

Maybe your SEO rankings are fine. But any link ever shared before switching the domains will now never work.

And to make things worse, a bad actor could then buy up MyCoolWebsite.com and put some bad stuff there. Which means your users could end up there if they use old links they have saved. Which would be bad.

It is for this reason I treat every purchase of a domain as an eternal hole in my wallet. Even if I switch domains, I have to keep paying for the old one in order for old links to stay safe.

If you want to keep your old links safe, you can never cancel your subscription. This gives TLD owners a lot of leverage. They can massively hike their prices and you just have to pay it in order to protect your users.

Actually, not only to protect your users. But sometimes to protect yourself:

• You post about MyCoolWebsite.com on your Facebook
• You eventually get rid of the MyCoolWebsite.com domain
• A bad actor buys MyCoolWebsite.com, fills it with naughty content, and reports your Facebook account for sharing inappropriate links.
• Your Facebook account gets terminated

Obviously, this is worst case scenario stuff. But the fact that this is theoretically possible highlights a major flaw with the system.

I would love some utopian future where there is a governing body that manages domain names and enforces rules that put limits on how much TLD owners are allowed to up their prices in order to protect consumers. Wait...there is?

ICANN is here to save the day for older TLDs like .com and .net. This is why Verisign is only allowed 7% price hikes on .com domains each year.

But ICANN has no influence over newer TLDs like .shop, .news, and .live.

As owner of a .live domain, I have not been happy with the number of price increase notices I've been receiving.

So, if you want to avoid the monopolistic tendencies of some TLD owners, here are some things you can do:

• Use older TLDs like .com, .net, or .org.
• Avoid country (two letter) TLDs, especially when considering what is happening to .io domains right now.
• Buy more years for your domain. Most people buy domains for one year intervals, but you can buy up to 10 years at once at some registrars.

So, while I would much prefer Verisign hold off on hiking the price of .com domains, I think I would rather stick with .com than something new like .live. At least for now.

I would still like to see a competitive bidding for another company to take over .com TLD ownership. But that is looking ever less likely.