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ICANN Confirms: Tiered Pricing Not Forbidden in New .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG Contracts
by Decius at 10:37 am EDT, Aug 25, 2006 |
Looks like they've found a new way to squeeze money out of artificial domain name scarcity. I finally got the “official” word from Vint Cerf of ICANN, “on the record”, who confirmed that my interpretation is correct, that differential/tiered pricing on a domain-by-domain basis would not be forbidden under the .biz/info/org proposed contracts. This means that the registries could charge $100,000/yr for sex.biz, $25,000/yr for movies.org, etc.
As there is no competition for registries, if your domain fees go up neither you nor your registrar can do anything about it. This means that domains will go up until the registry finds the equilibrium point between revenue generated per domain and the reduction in the total number of registered domains. Vint said it would be “suicide” for a registry to do it, because there’d be the 6-month notice period to raise prices and the ability for registrants to renew for up to 10 years at “old prices”, that supposedly “protects” registrants.
Most businesses are looking at a longer timeframe then 10 years and most individuals can't afford 10 years of registration, so this helps who? This will cause broad reorganization of DNS. |
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RE: ICANN Confirms: Tiered Pricing Not Forbidden in New .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG Contracts
by Catonic at 10:41 am EDT, Aug 25, 2006 |
Decius wrote:
This will cause broad reorganization of DNS.
That's kinda what I was thinking, but I can't decide if this is a good thing, a bad thing, or something to ignore. Certainly, when it involves TLDs, it's something to think about, but tiny actions on the part of ICANN have large ripples. |
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RE: ICANN Confirms: Tiered Pricing Not Forbidden in New .BIZ, .INFO and .ORG Contracts
by Decius at 2:37 pm EDT, Aug 25, 2006 |
Catonic wrote: Decius wrote:
This will cause broad reorganization of DNS.
That's kinda what I was thinking, but I can't decide if this is a good thing, a bad thing, or something to ignore. Certainly, when it involves TLDs, it's something to think about, but tiny actions on the part of ICANN have large ripples.
I'd say its bad. Its bad because it enables registry censorship. Its bad because it will hurt successful online businesses. Its bad because it will hurt not for profit use of dns. Its bad because it is the conversion of scarcity which only exists as a matter of policy and not as a matter of nature into an economic engine, which ultimately makes the economy less efficient at solving real problems. |
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ICANN oks Tiered Pricing for .biz/.info/.org
by Catonic at 10:29 am EDT, Aug 25, 2006 |
Vint Cerf/ICANN confirm my interpretation of .biz/info/org proposed contracts—tiered/differential domain pricing would not be forbidden I finally got the “official” word from Vint Cerf of ICANN, “on the record”, who confirmed that my interpretation is correct, that differential/tiered pricing on a domain-by-domain basis would not be forbidden under the .biz/info/org proposed contracts. This means that the registries could charge $100,000/yr for sex.biz, $25,000/yr for movies.org, etc. if they wanted to—it would not be forbidden the way the proposed contracts are currently written. This would represent a powerful pricing weapon for registries, and a fundamental shift in possible domain name pricing, that could lead them to emulate .tv-style price schedules. It doesn’t mean they will necessarily do it, but it’s not forbidden. When a contract doesn’t forbid something bad, it implicitly allows it.
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