So the Finnish communications agency wants to introduce a 33% price hike for .fi domains (fine, 9€ -> 12€) but also a 400€ annual fee for operating as a domain registrar for the .fi registry. (Proposal open to public comment.) That would make it a purely commercial endeavor and force all private persons to instead use other commercial registrars. Sure it's quite exceptional that it was possible in the first place but would be very sad to lose that.

The justification provided is the cost of providing services to said registrars which is increasing due to dropcatchers. But that's a ridiculous way to fix it, what I need as a private individual operating a few domains is super simple, but the automation APIs and payment interconnects that the big registrars and dropcatchers need sure are ridiculously complex. So why not just charge for the use of those APIs instead? Smells like political bias of "private persons need not apply, have you tried being a company instead."

Also the expected extra yield is 700k€ from registrars and about 2M€ from the domain hike itself. Peanuts for them and any company but prohibitively expensive for the little people who want to be independent from commercial registrars.

The proposal and call for comments (in Finnish): https://www.lausuntopalvelu.fi/FI/Proposal/Participation?proposalId=bb3cd297-6c3b-456e-b647-e434208148ef

#fipol #trafi

Nu va, patyzinsiu bišken.

Naujas #trafi. Coming #soon