Under the terms of the contract with ICANN, VeriSign can raise the wholesale price for .com urls by as much as 7 percent per year with six months notice. That could mean a $.42 increase to $6.42 per year for each url.
“As it relates to .com, I think our expectation is that we’ll have some action here in the first half of the year,” Sclavos said told investors during the company’s quarterly conference call after an analyst asked about a possible price hike.
The Commerce Department would need to give final approval to any proposed rate change.
In December, VeriSign renewed its contract with ICANN for .com through 2012. The contract gives the company the right to raise .com prices during four of the six years covered in the agreement.
The .com TLD is by far the most popular on the Internet. There currently are 59 million domains registered which use the suffix.
Whether domain registrars choose to raise the retail price for .com domains will be a matter for each retail seller. But many analysts expect domain registrars to pass the price increase along to consumers.
Sclavos also said VeriSign, which administers the .net TLD, would likely raise prices by as much as 10 percent this year.