On 02/11/2018 20:43, Greg Shatan wrote:
This
post is actually taking aim primarily at REGISTRARS who buy huge
numbers of .com domains at wholesale ($7.85 per domain) and then
hold them, in order to try and sell them later for a premium
price. That’s not really dissing domainers in the general sense,
just these registrar-domainers.
[...snip...]
While this is not “insider trading,” it is really a form of
diversion based on insider access — the registrars abuse their
privileged position to buy cheap and to buy before any “regular”
registrant (even a domainer) can, and then they hold this
portfolio and charge secondary-market prices for domains that are
not really in the secondary market. Registrars’ unique ability to
buy domain names directly from the registries was never meant to
produce this result. This is a bug, not a feature. The end user
domainers should really be pissed off at the registrar-domainers,
not at Verisign. (Of course, they are permanently pissed off at
Verisign, especially with a price increase in their “commodity.”)
As a coincidence, I had a discussion about that very problem with a
domainer I was speaking to in Barcelona (yes, I speak to domainers
too :-). He was furious about having several dozen domains being
picked up and re-registered by the registrar he had bought them
from, whom he qualified as stealing these domain names from him. I
wonder whether he shared his story with the blog's author. When I
asked him why he did not transfer his portfolio to another registrar
his response was that moving several thousand domains from one
registrar to another was complex and costly especially since some
included other packages.
Kindest regards,
Olivier