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Meishin:

Every domain requires a small fee to ICANN as well, yes domains are not free even if you are the registry

Yup. That’s the killer. IIRC it can be as little as $0.10 per domain per year or so… when you already have 50k+ registered domains. By which time you’re probably tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars lighter in ICANN fees alone.

TiffanyLynch:

Not even .free tld is actually free. What an irony /jk

There was actually a plan to obtain the .free extension and offer it for free. But it didn’t end up going anywhere. Not sure if it was due to lack of effort, funding or ICANN just not being convinced about the business case.