On 08/14/2009 09:18 AM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
Karl Auerbach wrote:
Rather, I was suggesting that the tasting issue provided yet another chunk of evidence that the registry fees are completely out-of-line with the actual cost of providing the registry services. And the cost of Coca Cola is totally out of line with the price of sugar and water. But that's not the point.
And, unlike those 80,000,000 people locked into .com, Coca Cola is subject to competitive pressures.
ICANN, its wisdom, has made the philosophical call that domain names are to be treated as commodities rather than identities, and as such are subject the the whims of the market. The price of a domain is related simply to what others are willing to pay for it, not the cost to deliver. Verisign's shareholders should expect no less.
As I mentioned in my prior email, the notion that a person or company can free simply pick up its domain name identity and move to a new one is a notion that ignores the massive switching costs (most of which are intangibles, such as identity, "goodwill", and newer things like the accumulation of search engine links to the old name.) And ICANN has never "made the philosophical call" - there is no concrete resolution that says that registries are free to charge what the market will bear. Indeed ICANN's practice from the outset has been to the contrary. If one were to accept your premise that ICANN has made a "philosophical call" that registries are in competition with one another, then ICANN would have released the caps it has imposed on registry fees. Things might be different if ICANN were allowing new TLDs. But ICANN has not, and it appears that it may be yet another decade before that happens. .com is a very special TLD - for a very long time it was the only place that many of us were allowed to put our internet roots. When I registered many of my names I simply was not permitted to go into .org, .net, or .edu. Millions of us are locked into .com for better or worse; and ICANN has sold our internet souls to Verisign to bleed $7 per year per name, year in and year out.
Having chosen the commodity path, it's up to ICANN to ensure healthy competition and protection from abuse. Beyond that, I am dubious about artificial price controls.
Once a person has established an identity and built-up that identity in a TLD, as a practical matter there longer exists a competitive opportunity to change. TLDs compete with one another only for newcomers. There is no real competitive marketplace for those who have already settled into a TLD. We saw a similar situation here in the US in the mobile phone markets. Before phone number portability came into effect those who wanted to jump to another mobile phone provider had to measure the sometimes substantial costs of changing their phone number. That put a substantial damper on the competition between mobile phone providers. But once number portability came into play that cost vanished and competitive forces became much stronger.
If people think they're getting gouged,
To borrow a paraphrase from Hamlet: Seems, .. nay it is. We *are* getting gouged. With ICANN's help. To the tune of the better part of $1,000,000,000 (USD) per year. let's give them some
alternatives.
For those already locked in new TLDs is, at best, a faint hope. I think that this is why most folks in At-Large support
new gTLDs and a diversity of registry operators -- the more the merrier,
I agree with that one and have for years (See http://www.cavebear.com/archive/icann-board/platform.htm#dnspol-tldpol ). In fact I have my own TLD - .ewe at http://www.cavebear.com/eweregistry [URL change coming soon, if I ever get a chance to finish the registry code to make it a real working system.] But having new TLDs does not redress the fact that ICANN is allowing Verisign and others to bleed their captive customers.
Despite the obvious good intentions, I am extremely wary of injecting dubious price-policing into a free market. If it's not a free market, then let's address *that*.
If you really are in favor of what you say, then I would suspect that you advocate the dropping of the registry fee caps that are in ICANN's contracts and in its legal settlement with Verisign. --karl--