Danny Younger wrote:
Boy, you sure have a way of twisting words.
No one is justifying a 31% increase, instead the reality of markups has been pointed out to you -- something you should have taken into account when you caved in to VeriSign and granted their price increase.
OK, so I misunderstood, you do not justify the 31% increase. Which means that you consider it unjustified. So we agree. I had a (more serious) discussion on this topic in Puerto Rico with Elliot Noss. When I first started being involved in domain name issues a domain name (without added services like web hosting or other, just the pure simple .com, .org, .net domain name) costed US$ 50. That was not the maximum price, it was *the* price established by the monopoly supplier, who was at the same time registry and registrar (I am mentioning this for those who were not following these discussions ten years ago). In reality the price was US$ 35 to Network Solutions, and US$ 15 to US Government, as domain name tax. Thanks to ICANN, you can have domain names at the price as low as US$ 6, which is a substantial reduction. Surely more substantial than the 7% increase we are facing. However, only a timy fraction of the ink (or the bits) spent to complain about the increase has been spent to felicitate about the decrease. Anyway, back to the discussion with Elliot. The registrar market is very diversified. He did anticipate that there would have been registrars who would have taken the chance to raise the prices abnormally (as the case you quote). However, in a competitive (at the registrar level) market, one is free to switch registrar and move to a lower cost one. How many people will do that, has to be verified (this was one of the things that I had in mind intervening in the public forum talking about a check of what market dynamics would have been triggered by the change in price). Incidentally, I would bet that there are also registrars who would absorbe the cost, in particular if their business model is to sell a service not the plain name. And those are a substantial part of the registrars servicing the individual user community. As for Michael's question: "What is the real justification of 7% "raw material pricing" increase? Does it make sense in this context?" although Vittorio has already answered, let me confirm that the real justification is not an increase in the "production cost", and to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever claimed this. It has been one of the points of a global agreement that was settling several issues, including the definition of registry services, which means that situations like the wildcard in .com would not happen in the future. As for every agreement, any point can be singled out and criticized in isolation, but this does not, IMHO, bring any added value. I would invite who has joined recently to go and read the full documentation on the .com agreement. See http://www.icann.org/minutes/index-2006.html, the meeting was held on 2006-02-28. From the transcript and the different statements you can appreciate how controversial has been the decision. However, as one of the Directors that was against the agreement has said after the vote: "Now this is a decision of the Board, we stop arguing and we support the decision". IMHO, it is very important to be able to look ahead instead of biching on what could have happened if... Cheers, Roberto [not subscribed to NA-Discuss]