GoDaddy.com, an ICANN accredited registrar, today voiced its strong disapproval of a pending agreement between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and VeriSign.

The proposed ICANN-VeriSign settlement agreement would allow VeriSign to raise registration fees by 7% annually in four of the next six years. It also would give VeriSign control of the .com registry indefinitely, as it extends VeriSign's 'presumptive renewal' right when this proposed settlement agreement ends in 2012.

Go Daddy says that industry research verifies that costs involved in the technology critical to the domain name registration infrastructure are continually decreasing. Additionally, server, bandwidth and storage costs have declined and these downward trends do not appear to be slowing.

"Under no circumstances should VeriSign be allowed to raise .com prices without cost-based justification," said Bob Parsons, CEO and Founder of GoDaddy.com. "If VeriSign does request an increase, it needs to result in competitive bidding for the registry contract. This would certainly create lower prices, not higher, just as it did for the .net registry."

".com domain names still account for more than 80% of net new registrations. If there is any automatic change in pricing in the agreement, it should be for an annual decrease resulting from economies of scale and efficiencies that naturally occur in our industry," Parsons said.