It seems to me that running an NIC for a major TLD almost has zero marginal cost: for each domain, you automatically interface with ICANN once in a while to update registration info, then serve some NS and associated A/AAAA records. So it’s kind of surprising to me that $10/yr is already a non-profit price. Am I missing something?
The $10 a year includes the markup of a profit making domain registrar which has marketing and support costs.
This article suggests Public Interest Registry's costs for third party technical services were about half their revenue, with the beneficiary of the rest of the funds being the Internet Society
https://domainnamewire.com/2019/10/28/pir-org-slashes-regist...
Still, you can see why those kind of margins and the ability to raise prices were an attractive combination to private equity
> The $10 a year includes the markup of a profit making domain registrar which has marketing and support costs.
I use Cloudflare Registrar these days for .com and .org. They claim to offer wholesale prices. My last .org bill was $9.90 + ICANN fee. And according to [1], Cloudflare directly work with PIR to offer .org, so unless they're lying, they are actually charged $9.90 per domain per year by PIR. Now, the article you linked to claims that PIR paid less than $2 per domain to the for-profit contractor who did everything technical for them (what's left? PR?). I wonder where the remaining $7.90 went...
