The Ministry of Finance (MOF) has lowered the fee for registering and using the national domain name ‘.vn’ in order to become more competitive with international domain name ‘.com’.

MOF, in Circular 208/2016, stipulates many changes in the fees for registering and using the ‘.vn’ domain name, to be applied early next year.

Under current regulations, registration agents must not collect higher fees than stipulated in the MOF fee frame. The money collected must be transferred to VNNIC and agents will receive commissions of no more than 30 percent.

But from January 1, 2017, the fees will be different. Registration agents won’t receive commissions, but can set up domain registration and maintenance fees higher than stipulated to cover expenses and make profits. However, the fees must not be higher than the ceiling levels.

According to Do Quang Trung, head of VNNIC’s HCMC Branch, the policy will create competition in prices among registration agencies and eliminate price gaps between national domain name ‘.vn’ and international domain names.

The fees for ‘.vn’ domain name stipulated in Circular 208 are close to, or even lower, than the fees for international domain names such as ‘.com’ or ‘.net’.

The floor fee level set by MOF for someone to register the ‘.vn’ domain name is VND200,000, while the annual maintenance fee is VND350,000.

The third-level domain names under second-level such as edu.vn, gov.vn and info.vn have registration and maintenance fees of VND120,000 and VND150,000, respectively. The third-level domain name – ‘name.vn’ has very low fee of VND30,000.

The current fees for registering and using ‘.vn’ domain name for the first year offered by some biggest registration agents is VND830,000. The fee for maintaining the domain name in the next years is over VND400,000.

Meanwhile, the registration fees for international domain names are very low, just VND280,000 for the first year and VND300,000 for the next years. Meanwhile, ‘.com’ and ‘.net’ now can be registered at VND99,000 and VND79,000 in promotion campaigns.

Huynh Ngoc Duy, CEO of Mat Bao, a domain name registration agent, said the policy will help lower the ‘.vn’ domain name price, but will not affect market demand.

“I think the number of registrations for ‘.vn’ would be increasing thanks to lower fees, but the increase won’t be sharp,” he said. ‘Users target many things when registering domain names, including the popularity of domain names, while the registration fee is not the only factor for them to consider.”

“Users will still favor international domain names,” he commented.