[NA-Discuss] About prices [Was: Budget provisions relating to DomainTasting]

[Danny Younger]

As Roberto is not subscribed to NA-Discuss, I am
forwarding his comments:

--- Roberto Gaetano <roberto at icann.org> wrote:

> 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]
> 
> 



       
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