Thanks for this John. Always learn a thing or two from your work. Carlton ============================== *Carlton A Samuels* *Mobile: 876-818-1799Strategy, Process, Governance, Assessment & Turnaround* ============================= On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 at 13:35, John McCormac via CPWG <cpwg@icann.org> wrote:
On 13/08/2024 18:21, mike palage.com via CPWG wrote:
Hello All,
While not seeking to rehash previous discussions about what is and what is not within the scope of ALAC, I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention recent communications between NTIA and Verisign involving .COM and the Cooperative Agreement, see https://www.ntia.gov/other- publication/2024/ntia-letter-verisign <https://www.ntia.gov/other- publication/2024/ntia-letter-verisign>
The .US/.COM comparison misses a greater point, Michael, The .COM is the de facto US "country code" TLD in terms of registration volume and it isn't fair to compare the .US with .COM in the US market in the same way that .COM is compared with ccTLDS outside the US in their local markets.
What has been happening since the mid-2000s in many countries with a strong ccTLD is a shift away from .COM as the first choice TLD for registrants. This currently has little to do with Verisign. It can be summed up in a simple phrase: more business is local. The most common registration pair for registrants is still .COM/.cCTLD. Brand protection registrations are a large part of .COM registrations.
Once people start selling and trading locally on the Web, they are more likely to use a ccTLD (if it is dominant). This is why many European ccTLDs have a greater share of their local markets than the gTLDs. One of the spreadsheets in the monthly HosterStats Registrars and Resellers report shows the gTLD breakdowns by country of hoster and it would not be difficult to compare with ccTLD counts where available.
In terms of registration volume, the .COM is not the only TLD seeing reduced or negative net registrations. In terms of renewals, some countries are quite good but the first year renewal rate for .COM is quite different to that of .ORG (which has some of the characteristics of a ccTLD). For the .COM gTLD as a whole, it is running around 50%. The problem is that the .COM isn't simply a single global market. It is a set of country-level markets with a smaller global market. In that respect, the demand and renewal rates are closely linked to those individual markets. This is why it is not unusual to see some registrars and resellers with over 70% first renewals and others with less than 50%.
As many may recall, as part of the .NET public comment consultation process last year, I advocated for the inclusion of a standard contractual provision that would require Verisign to participate in any ICANN economic studies. Sadly, ICANN and Verisign opted not to include that provision in the finalized .NET RA.
I remember that wonderful ICANN economic report on the new gTLDs. It had many economic insights and explanations. It was academically impressive. I tend to be somewhat cynical about such reports because the domain name market is a fast moving one and it will have changed between the time that such a report is commissioned and by the time it is delivered.
The other important point on such reports is that the domain name market largely operates on a yearly basis. This means that The bulk of activity in today's activity (renewals and deletions) is larger than the number of new registrations and therefore relates more to last year's and previous year's registration decisions. The business that registered a domain name last year, or before that, may have disappeared long before the domain name comes up for renewal. (There's a particular category in web usage surveys that can track it (the rate of abandonment) as development and updates on a website that had been previously updated frequently cease.)
An economic report on the entire DNS market would be a major undertaking and would be interesting. I've spent the last few weeks working on breaking down the website hosting of all gTLD websites by webhoster and have currently identified 93% of the gTLD webhosters (Approximately 21% of the gTLD DNS market is off-registrar resellers.) The web hosting side of the business is part of the DNS business but they can have some different players that will not show up in a purely DNS-based (domain names/registrars/resellers) approach. Some businesses exist purely in the Cloud in that their web hosting is in the cloud and their DNS is handled in the Cloud. They don't exist as a distinct business in terms of DNS with theor own nameservers or as a registrar. This kind of complexity is not unusual and may complicate matters for an economic report. However, limiting it to domain name registrations, registrars and resellers is more doable (the raw data for registration transactions and registrars is in the monthly ICANN registry reports). Even with the data, it is not a simple market to analyse and for people outside the domain name business, it would be extremely difficult to understand.
One of the attractive aspects of .COM is its global credibility as *the* global TLD. Price stability was a part of that because registration costs in developing markets are important.The importance of the gTLD in the US market probably outweighs that in terms of registration volume.
That graph in the letter makes sense in monetary terms but the TLDs being compared have very different characteristics in terms of usage and market. The data used is over five years old and has missed some of the recent market trends (The Covid Bubble).
It might be a bit of an outlier but the .IE ccTLD registration cost is around $25. In terms of the Irish hosting market, the .IE has approximately twice the footprint of .COM. Some ccTLD registration costs are cheaper than .COM but the difference in registration volumes in those markets are not purely based on domain name prices. Outside the US and the developing markets, the .COM has shifting from being a first choice TLD for most registants.
Regards...jmcc -- ********************************************************** John McCormac * e-mail: jmcc@hosterstats.com MC2 * web: http://www.hosterstats.com/ 22 Viewmount * Domain Registrations Statistics Waterford * Domnomics - the business of domain names Ireland * https://amzn.to/2OPtEIO IE * Skype: hosterstats.com **********************************************************
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