Jay Westerdal from Name Intelligence, Inc. recently had an interview with the former ICANN board member Karl Auerbach. Auerbach told Jay that VeriSign spends only $0.14 to maintain a .com domain. Nevertheless, VeriSign will raise the fee for .com domains by 42 cents per domain, which is three times the actual cost on their side! There is also an interesting graph in the post showing that domain tasting is huge nowadays: only 2.4% of all domain registrations are kept for longer than five days.

ex-ICANN Board member says .COM costs $0.14